Married to an American woman for 20 years, but without papers: Angela’s fight to prevent her husband Carlos from being deported

On Christmas Day 2024, Angela Della Valle was at the Saint Thomas airport with her husband Carlos and their son Alessandro, waiting for their flight back to Pennsylvania after a few days of vacation. At one point, she turned around and Carlos was gone. A Customs and Border Protection agent had detained him for being undocumented. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) had prevented Carlos from legalizing his immigration status, despite his more than 20 years of marriage to Angela, who was born in the United States.

According to her, seven hours after the arrest, an officer came to find her and informed her that Carlos had a deportation order dating back to 1997 and that he would be spending the night in jail. That time, they managed to get him released on bond. But in August 2025, he was arrested again during an immigration hearing.

What followed were more than 250 days of detention in a dozen facilities across several states and two attempts to deport him to Mexico, his native country. Angela, a high school teacher in Pennsylvania, put her life on hold and spent all that time following her husband from state to state, living in hotels and Airbnbs. The last facility where he was sent was the Winn Detention Center in Louisiana, one of the largest in the state. Angela moved in with a friend who lives 40 minutes away so she could visit him for an hour a day, five days a week.

“I received a call from Winn. They told me that Carlos was going to be released and that I should go and pick him up. They didn’t give me many explanations,” Angela told EL PAÍS last Tuesday, April 28, around 10 p.m.

The first thing they did the next morning was go to the doctor to treat Carlos’s earache, which he’d been complaining of for days. He’s been free since then, but nobody knows for how long.

A dead end

The IIRIRA was signed by President Bill Clinton in September 1996 and went into effect in April 1997. It was the first U.S. law to impose automatic penalties for remaining in the country illegally.

According to the law, anyone who has remained in the country for more than 180 days without legal status is prohibited from returning for three years after leaving. If they were in the U.S. for more than one year, they cannot return for another 10 years. However, to attempt to regularize their status through marriage to a U.S. citizen, the person must leave the U.S. to complete the consular process in their home country, which triggers the ban.

For the lawyer Marielena Hincapié, a researcher at the immigration law program at Cornell University (New York), the case of Angela and Carlos demonstrates that the IIRIRA has made the bond of marriage between a citizen and a migrant “irrelevant,” because it is not enough to regularize their status.

In 1997, when Carlos was 20, authorities issued him a deportation order and took him to the border. He returned without authorization and stayed for over a year, so he would have had to leave again and remain outside the country for at least 10 years to be eligible for legal status. That’s the rule. It doesn’t matter how long he’s been married, whether he has a child in college, or whether he’s been in the same job as a factory plant manager for 20 years. Nor does it matter how clean his criminal record is.

“Since 1996, Congress has created a dead end. Leaving the country triggers punishment, but staying doesn’t allow you to fix your papers either,” Hincapié points out.

Austin Kocher, a migration researcher and professor at Syracuse University, points out that Carlos’ deportation order dates back to 1997, the same year IIRIRA went into effect. “It was just months away from being a case under the previous system, where judges had discretion to consider family ties before ordering a deportation,” he says.

If Carlos had arrived by plane on a tourist visa and then married Angela, he would likely already be a citizen. But he crossed the border illegally. “The determining factor is how he entered the country,” Hincapié confirms. “If you entered with a visa, you can adjust your status by marrying a citizen. If you crossed the border without inspection, you are already subject to very different penalties.”

“It has to do with the racial history of immigration,” Kocher believes. “Illegal border crossings were something that Mexicans and Central Americans did. Overstaying their visas was something people who could afford it did, and they came from countries where it was possible to obtain a visa. It’s a class and racial distinction that became enshrined in law.”

According to Angela, at his trial last August, Carlos faced federal charges for illegally re-entering the country after his deportation. About 20 of his friends and neighbors attended the courtroom. He was found not guilty. In the hallway, an ICE agent warned him that he still had to report because he was still undocumented. Carlos turned himself in on August 13.

In the centers where he was held, he recalls, the lights were never completely turned off. Detainees didn’t know if they would have a court date in weeks or months. “The hardest part is not having any information,” he said at a press conference hours after his release. “It doesn’t matter what number you call. Nobody knows anything.”

“I’ve cried more in these past few months than in my entire life,” he added. “And I almost never cried about my own situation. I cried for others, for the young people who came here as children and are deported to a country they don’t know. They’re Americans. The only thing they don’t have is a piece of paper that says they’re American.”

Political pressure

Carlos arrived home thanks to pressure initiated by Angela, which reached the outskirts of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Last week, Angela participated in a demonstration in the capital to demand her husband’s release. “There is no legal path for a family like ours, not because we haven’t tried, but because Congress never created one,” she said during the event, which was supported by Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, a leading proponent of the Dignity Act, which would reform the provisions of IIRIRA. This legislation seeks to establish a legal pathway for immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States for years without a criminal record, so they can remain with their families without the risk of deportation.

American Families United, an organization that represents mixed-status families and has supported Angela during these months, estimates that since 1997, some 270,000 spouses of U.S. citizens have been deported. “This isn’t a failure of the Trump administration,” says attorney Hincapié. “It’s a direct result of how the law is structured. And the only way this can change is if Congress acts.”

Angela has been learning about this for 24 years. She says she’s seen more than 40 lawyers in all that time, and none of them have given her any hope. “We love this country,” she says. “That’s why we fight so hard for it.”

When Carlos learned he was going to be released, he began hugging everyone who remained at the detention center. He says he left feeling happy and guilty at the same time, for the thousands of people who haven’t had, and still don’t have, the same luck. He was released with an ankle monitor and has an immigration appointment next week. “It’s not a change in the case yet,” Hincapié explains. “It was due to political pressure. But the case still has to move forward. The law that brought him here hasn’t changed.”

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