The Press Enterprise - Immigration: Pete Aguilar Visits Family with Mix of Legal Statuses

News Article

by David Olson

Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Redlands, Tuesday met with a Redlands family that, like many immigrant families, contains members who are U.S. citizens and others who are living in the country illegally.

The meeting was the first congressional visit of a number planned by the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which is seeking to highlight the difficulties faced by mixed-immigration-status families.

Meetings between other mixed-immigration-status families and California members of Congress are expected in the coming weeks, said CHIRLA spokesman Jorge-Mario Cabrera.

Aguilar visited the home of Ernesto and Dina Gudiño, who immigrated from Mexico 18 years ago and are undocumented. All three of their children are U.S.-born citizens: Victoria, 5, Isaac, 10 and Alondra, 12.

"I'm grateful to Ernesto and Dina for welcoming me into their home to share their story," Aguilar said in a statement Wednesday. "It's important that we have these personal conversations and understand the devastating impact our broken immigration system has on families in our community. The Gudiños have lived here for eighteen years, raised their three children in Redlands, and now they are threatened with being torn away from the only home and family they have. That's unacceptable."

Aguilar supports a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The Senate passed such a measure in 2013, but House Speaker John Boehner has prevented a vote on a similar bill in the House.

"This is about showing compassion and keeping families together, and also bringing hard-working men and women like Ernesto and Dina into the fold of the Inland Empire's economy," Aguilar said.

Ernesto Gudiño, 38, was impressed by his meeting with Aguilar.

"He understands the problems people have and sees the needs that they have," Gudiño, who works as a landscaper, said in Spanish. "He's of Latino ancestry also."

He and Dina, 38, a housecleaner, have thought about what it would like to be deported, but he said they don't dwell on it.

The family has not visited Mexico since before the kids were born, because of the difficulty the parents would have re-entering the country, he said.

"They're from here," he said of his children.

Gudiño said the couple plans to apply for protection from deportation and work permits under executive actions on immigration that President Barack Obama announced in November. Twenty-six states sued to stop the executive actions, and in February a federal judge in Texas blocked them from going into effect. In a legal brief filed Monday, Aguilar and 180 other Democratic members of Congress urged an appeals court to allow the actions to take effect.

Gudiño said he and his wife should be allowed to stay in the United States.

"We work hard and we pay our taxes," he said. "We haven't done anything wrong."

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