Nine-month-old Ailany is clad in a Minnie Mouse shirt, a tiny pony tail with a pink bow and pink overalls. She gurgles when she spots her father, and he turns his head.
Sergio Ayala Mejia hasn’t always been able to watch over his daughter. Ayala Mejia spent six months away from Ailany, detained when she wasn’t quite three weeks old.
The 36-year-old asylum seeker was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while dropping off his sister to work at Market Basket last September. He was deported without a court hearing.
It’s been a long journey from the mountainside town in Guatemala, where he lived after deportation, to a chair a few feet away from Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.
On Monday afternoon, Pressley held a listening session with previously deported and detained immigrants in Chelsea where she commended “the courage of individuals with lived experience who decided that silence was not an option.”
Along with Ayala Mejia, speakers included immigrants who had been detained and the stepmother of a previously detained teenager and other immigrants afraid to live their lives as the Trump administration continues pursuing its mass deportation agenda.
“I look forward to a day where people do not have to relive their trauma in order to compel action from their government,” said Pressley. When people have spoken out, she said, “we better understand how systemic these injustices are.”
The event at Chelsea-based social services organization La Colaborativa was held days after President Trump signed a $70 billion immigration bill that funds ICE and Customs and Border Protection through the end of his administration. Pressley said the money will fund “rogue and violent operations with no accountability or reforms.”
Among other attendees were local immigration attorneys; state Rep. Judith Garcia, a sponsor of the PROTECT Act; Chelsea City Manager Fidel Maltez; and local councilors.
Gladys Vega, chief executive officer of La Colaborativa, spoke of the immigrants her group has worked with over the past year, and the stories she’s heard of immigrants detained on their way to work.
“They work with their tools to do the work that many Americans will not do,” she said.
In Ayala Mejia’s case, it was unusual for a deportation to proceed when a ruling on his appeal was imminent. He had come to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor, fleeing Guatemala because MS-13 gang members approached him several times when he was leaving school.
He stayed with an uncle that was abusive, who never told him he had a final immigration court date to go to after he went to two. Nearly 20 years later, the federal government said that missed court date was why he was detained.
He was ordered removed in absentia, or deportable, when he didn’t show up.
Ayala Mejia was sent to a detention center in New York, and then another in Louisiana, while his attorney Sara Nael filed an appeal in Boston, arguing that the circumstances warranted having his immigration case reopened.
But within days, as a judge was still considering his appeal, Ayala Mejia was deported to Guatemala, leaving behind a partner, an infant, a toddler and a daughter with autism. It was the same day an immigration judge granted his motion to reopen his case and rescinded his deportation order from 2007.
GBH News spoke to Ayala Mejia last fall while he was in Guatemala, struggling without his family. He was brought back to the U.S. on humanitarian parole on Dec. 5 and detained again in New York. On March 19 at a bond hearing, a judge ordered him released on $10,000 bond.
While Ayala Mejia says he’s glad to be home with his family, he’s afraid.
“I’m scared to drive,” he said. “Especially because sometimes I carry my son with me. I don’t want him to see me get detained again.”
He thinks of the impact on his children. Liam, the 3-year-old, would ask any men he encountered if they “could be his dad,” Ayala Meija said.
Ayala Mejia said that the United States is the “best country to live in,” in spite of his detention. “The only thing that is bad is the system right now, but I think we can make it to be a good country again,” he said.
Across the room, Julian Isaza, originally from Colombia, spoke of his arrest by ICE agents when exiting Dudley District Court last year. He was in court for driving without a license in 2018, and didn’t expect ICE agents to be waiting for him. Isaza was one of at least 614 people detained at a Massachusetts trial court last year.
He was detained for nearly four months, and was released in February.
“This impacted my household tremendously, especially my little son Liam, who has special needs,” he said.
Isaza was released with the help of Greater Boston Legal Services, and recently had his green card approved.
“I’m here giving my testimony because I know I’m not the only one with this case. I am the voice of thousands of cases like this out there,” he said in Spanish.
Vega said that the public needs to hear immigrants’ stories, and that despite the despair, and unrest, the work being done by Pressley’s staff and other advocates makes a difference.
“There’s hope,” she said simply.
