On Christmas Day 2024, Angela Della Valle was at the Saint Thomas airport with her husband Carlos and their son Alessandro, waiting for the flight back to Pennsylvania after a few days of vacation. At some 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 regularizing his immigration status, despite his more than 20 years of marriage to Angela, who was born in the United States.
According to her account, seven hours after the detention, an officer came out to find her to inform her that Carlos had a deportation order since 1997 and that he was going to spend the night in jail. That time they managed to get him released on bail. But in August 2025 he was arrested again during an immigration hearing.
What followed were more than 250 days of detention in a dozen centers in various 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 center where they sent him was Winn, in Louisiana, one of the largest in that state. Angela moved in with a friend 40 minutes away just to visit him one hour a day, five days a week.
“I received a call from Winn. They told me Carlos was going to be released and that I should go 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 for an earache he had been complaining about for days. Since then he has been free, but no one 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 staying in the country irregularly.
According to the legislation, anyone who has stayed in the country without legal status for more than 180 days, once they leave, is prohibited from returning for three years. If they stayed for more than a year, they cannot return for another ten. However, to try to regularize their status through marriage to a citizen, the person has to leave the country to do their consular process, which activates the penalty.
For lawyer Marielena Hincapié, also a researcher at the immigration law program at Cornell University (New York), Angela and Carlos’s case shows that the IIRIRA has made the marriage bond between a citizen and an immigrant “irrelevant,” because it is not enough to regularize their status.
In 1997, when Carlos was 20 years old, the authorities gave him a deportation order and took him to the border. He returned without authorization and stayed for more than a year, so he had to leave again and remain outside the country for at least ten years to be able to legalize himself. That is the rule. It doesn’t matter how long the marriage has lasted, if they have a child in college, or if they have worked for 20 years as a plant manager at a factory. Nor does it matter how clean their criminal record is.
“Since 1996 Congress created a dead end. Leaving the country activates the penalty, but staying also doesn’t allow you to fix your papers,” Hincapié points out.
Austin Kocher, a researcher on immigration issues and professor at Syracuse University, notes that Carlos’s deportation order is from 1997, the same year IIRIRA went into effect. “He was just a few months away from being a case under the previous system, where judges had discretion to consider family ties before ordering a deportation,” he says.
Read more The right doubles down on chaos to defeat Cepeda
If Carlos had arrived by plane, with a tourist visa, and then married Angela, he would probably already be a citizen. But he crossed the border illegally. “The determining factor is how you entered the country,” confirms Hincapié. “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 considers. “Illegal border crossing was something Mexicans and Central Americans did. Staying longer than the visa allowed was something people who could afford that process and came from countries where it was possible to get a visa did. It is a class and race distinction that was inscribed in the law.”
According to Angela, at the trial last August, Carlos faced federal charges for his illegal reentry after deportation. About 20 of his friends and neighbors attended the courtroom. He was found innocent. In the hallway, an ICE agent warned him that he still had to report because he remained without status. Carlos surrendered on August 13.
In the centers where he was, she recalls, the lights never fully went out. The detainees didn’t know if they would have a court date in weeks or months. “The hardest thing is not having information,” she said at a press conference hours after being released. “No matter what number you call. No one knows anything.”
“I cried more in these months than in my entire previous life,” she added. “And I almost never cried for my situation. I cried for others, for the young people who came as children and are deported to a country they don’t know. They are Americans. The only thing they don’t have is a paper that says they are Americans.”
Political pressure
Carlos got home thanks to pressure started by Angela that 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 María Elvira Salazar, one of the main promoters of the so-called Dignity Act, which would reform the IIRIRA clauses. This legislation seeks to establish a legal path for migrants who have lived and worked in the United States for years without a criminal record, so they can stay with their families without risk of deportation.
American Families United, an organization that groups mixed-status families and has accompanied Angela during these months, estimates that since 1997, about 270,000 spouses of American citizens have been deported. “It’s not a failure of the Trump Administration,” says lawyer 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 has seen more than 40 lawyers in all that time and none of them has given her hope. “We want this country,” she assures. “That’s what we fight so hard for.”
When Carlos found out he was going to be released, he started hugging all the people who stayed in the detention center. He says he left happy and guilty at the same time, for the thousands of people who have not had and do not have the same luck. He left with an ankle monitor and has an immigration appointment next week. “It’s not any change in the case yet,” explains Hincapié. “It was because of political pressure. But the case has to go on. The law that brought him here hasn’t changed.”
