SOME TRUMP VOTERS HAVING "BUYER'S REMORSE"

…The Beristain’s family. Soon to be missing a Dad

 

Mrs. Beristain voted for Trump, now says, “I wish I didn’t vote at all”.

 

Well, the “Buyer’s remorse” for buying into Trump’s campaign lies is really starting to come full circle for a lot of those that had voted for Donald J. Trump.

 

 

When Helen Beristain told her husband Roberto she was voting for Donald Trump last year, he warned her that the Republican nominee planned to “get rid of the Mexicans.”

 

Of course, her response back then was that Trump had said, “He would only kick the ‘bad hombres’ out of the country.”

 

Well, after Trump won, some months later, Mr. Roberto Beristain, ran into some serious trouble.  This is even though he is a father of three American-born children and a successful businessman and a respected member of his small Indiana town. 

 

However, today Roberto is stuck in a detention facility with a bunch of hardened criminals.  Roberto is currently waiting for his deportation back to Mexico.  That is the country he left in 1998 when he entered the United States illegally.

 

“I wish I didn’t vote at all,” Helen Beristain told the local South Bend Tribune newspaper. “I did it for the economy. We needed a change.”

 

Critics on the right have since overwhelmed the family with multiple racist threats and they have attacked Ms. Beristain for giving refuge to the love of her life, a man they consider illegal.

 

Roberto Beristain is only one of many individuals that had come to America, just to find work and eventually built a successful life while dealing with the legal limbo of being an illegal immigrant.  This man’s friends and neighbors say this 43-year-old Hispanic has never broken any US law and he doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket on his record.

 

The mayor of South Bend from the conservative community that the Beristains call home, called him “one of its model residents.”  But Roberto Beristain’s squeaky-clean record didn’t stop US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from arresting him when he showed up for his annual meeting with the agency in February.

 

Beristain has been paying into US Social Security, (Yes, he has a Social Security card, and a work permit and a driver’s license), and he was expecting to return home to his family and business after meeting with the agency.  

 

But instead, he was taken into custody, which set off a last-ditch effort by his family members and his lawyer to free him. Thus far, those efforts have been total failures, mainly due to the new president’s rules about “getting rid of the Mexicans”.  Family members told the Tribune that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had informed them that Mr. Beristain would be deported by the end of the week.

 

Roberto’s story is like most of those that came here and became productive individuals that deserve an opportunity to make things right.

 

He came to the United States on a visitor’s Visa, just to visit an aunt in California.  But then he decided not to return to Mexico.  He would then work here and eventually marry, start a family and he began to put down his roots in Indiana.  Today, he is the owner of a popular restaurant called Eddie’s Steak Shed, which employs 20 American citizens.   The Washington Post wrote that he worked at the restaurant for eight years before he bought it from his sister-in-law, just this last January.

 

It is pretty bizarre the way the rules work within the ICE organization. In 2000, according to the ICE spokeswoman, a federal immigration judge had granted Roberto a “voluntary departure” for 60-days. But because he didn’t leave the United States during that period, the “voluntary departure order became a final order of removal”.

 

What is so bizarre is that formerly by cooperating with ICE officials, Beristain was able to lead a normal life in plain view.  It was a life that included the work permit and the driver’s license and a Social Security card that says “Valid only with Department of Homeland Security authorization”.  This was the phrase the finally got him detained, and now deported

 

An Indianapolis lawyer working on Beristain’s case said that, under his previous agreement with DHS, Beristain had an “order of supervision”.  This order allows immigrants with a removal order to remain in the country for a humanitarian reason, such as having sole custody of children or taking care of family members.  The lawyer basically said that “they’re saying you’re not bad enough to be deported.” 

 

But then along came Donald J. Trump and all the new rules that followed.

 

 

The family’s spokesman, a Chicago lawyer, told The Post that Mexican consular officials had told him that Beristain would be moved from his current location inside a county jail in Kenosha, Wis., to New Orleans, where he’ll be held anywhere from one day to another two weeks before being deported to Mexico.  The lawyer added, “The situation is very fluid and accurate information is often hard to come by, But what is very clear, is that the entire process since his arrest had been inhumane and that the family is highly distraught.”

 

Ya think…?

 

The lawyer continued: “How do you explain this to children,” noting that the couple’s kids are 15, 14 and 8. “Trying to explain this to children from the immigrant community has been really hard. You’re telling them that their loved one is in jail, not because they did something wrong, but because of their country of origin and what they look like.”

 

“This is hurting the entire community, and people are scared,” he added.

 

Reached by email, an ICE spokeswoman said Beristain “remains in ICE custody pending his removal to Mexico.  For operational security reasons, ICE does not release information regarding upcoming removals,” she added.

 

The 43 year old "Model Citizen" that is being deported to Mexico

 

 

So, because of all this, what do those that had voted for President Trump do?

 

They set up a Twitter account called “Trump Regrets”.

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The account has already amassed nearly 260,000 followers by retweeting statements by disappointed and angry Trump voters.

 

And since November 8^th, 2016, the stories of law-abiding parents being deported because of their immigration status, these have inundated the news media in recent months.  They have been forced to either take their legal children with them or to leave their legal children behind with family and friends. 

 

And how do you think those children are going to feel about their government?

 

Historically, many of those children that are left behind end up becoming some of those “bad hombres” that Helen Beristain had said was the reason she voted for Trump.

 

The Post reported last month, “…the Obama administration prioritized the deportation of people who were violent offenders or had ties to criminal gangs. Trump’s executive order on Jan. 25 expanded priorities to include any undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of a criminal offense.”

 

The Post wrote that the president should be giving Mr. Beristain a handshake.  Either Trump was lying when he said we were “only deporting bad guys”, or Trump’s view of bad guys is so expansive it literally includes every single immigrant.

 

Days after Beristain’s arrest, his lawyer had filed a “stay of removal” to prevent the deportation, but it was rejected by the middle of March.

 

“Once the case is finalized and done, there’s really no reason to keep him around in their eyes,” said the lawyer in reference to ICE. “They think, ‘Why take up jail space for no reason if all the legal options have been exhausted?’’  He said the decision to deport Beristain is a “wildly disproportionate” response when measured against the law he broke nearly two decades ago.  “If you asked 100 people to paint you a picture of a bad guy, no one would draw anyone remotely resembling Roberto,” he said.

 

Mrs. Beristain told the Tribune that, in their effort to get her husband US citizenship, the couple has attempted to use 10 attorneys over the past 18 years. Many of those attorneys, she said, told them that they had no choice but to wait for the immigration laws to change.

 

But instead of changing in this couple’s favor, the laws have evolved to make her husband more vulnerable to deportation.  She told the Tribune that Trump’s deportation measures, the one’s she thought her family would be exempt from, are harming “regular people”.  “I understand when you’re a criminal and you do bad things, you shouldn’t be in the country,” Helen told the CBS TV, “But when you’re a good citizen and you support and you help and you pay taxes and you give jobs to people, you should be able to stay.”

 

“We were for Mr. Trump,” she added. “We were very happy he became the president.”

 

But like she later told the South Bend Tribune: “I wish I didn’t vote at all.”

 

Hear, hear.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017