Biden Administration Looking to Reverse Thousands of Trump Deportations — Including This Trump Supporter’s Wife

(L) Doug Mills-Pool, Getty (R) Screenshot

President Joe Biden’s administration is implementing a plan to reverse thousands of deportations that occurred during the Trump era, and that plan could reunite a man who voted Donald Trump for president with the wife that the Trump administration deported.

A spokesperson for Biden’s Department of Homeland Security told Politico Magazine that the agency “is committed to reviewing the cases of individuals whose removals under the prior administration failed to live up to our highest values,” a review that could reverse “thousands” of Trump-era deportations — just for starters.

Beneficiaries of the review “would include military families and veterans — a few returns of military relatives have already been completed — and young immigrants who were excluded from protections under the program known as DACA as a result of Trump’s efforts to cancel it,” as well as at least one Trump voter whose loved one wound up being deported for his trouble.

Jason Rochester voted for Trump in 2016, and “says he liked Trump’s law-and-order message, and he never imagined that his wife, a stay-at-home mother with no criminal record, would be treated as one of the bad immigrants Trump vowed to remove.”

But after his wife voluntarily returned to Mexico expecting to return, she was denied re-entry — even after the couple’s son became gravely ill:

Six months after she departed in 2018, 5-year-old Ashton was diagnosed with cancer. He had a kidney removed and underwent 10 months of radiation and chemotherapy. González Carmona was stranded in Mérida, in southeastern Mexico. The family photos from that time are of Ashton, bone-thin and attached to a tangle of tubes in a hospital bed, with Rochester holding up a mobile tablet and his wife watching their son from afar.

She asked the Trump administration for an emergency permission, known as a humanitarian parole, to return to care for Ashton. On Aug. 31, 2018, an immigration official informed her in writing that there were no “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” to grant her request.

Now, Rochester and his wife are among the hundreds of thousands of Trump deportees and their families who may soon be able to plead their cases and have those deportations reversed.

You can read Politico Magazine’s deep dive into the program here.