The husband of a US soldier killed in Afghanistan was deported to Mexico last week, leaving the couple's 12-year-old daughter behind, before ICE reversed itself and brought the man back to Phoenix. Officers arrested Jose Gonzalez Carranza, 30, on his way to his construction job last week and deported him to Nogales, a city he's unfamiliar with, the Arizona Republic reports. While he was there, his lawyer sent a news release to the media about the case. Gonzalez Carranza said he was staying in a shelter for deported migrants in Nogales and worried about his daughter, a US citizen who lives with her grandparents—the parents of his late wife. Gonzalez Carranza shares custody with them, per KPNX. His wife, Army Pfc. Barbara Vieyra, was killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2010. She was 22.
ICE hasn't explained its reversal yet. Gonzalez Carranza said he came here illegally as a teenager, per the Republic. He was granted parole-in-place status, allowing him to stay, after his wife's death, and a judge ended deportation proceedings, his lawyer said. But ICE refiled the deportation case in 2018, and he was ordered deported last December when he didn't show up for the hearing. His lawyer says the notice had been sent to the wrong address. On Monday, Gonzalez Carranza was allowed to reenter the US at the Arizona border. An ACLU official said he shouldn't have been deported in the first place: “It's the height of cruelty for ICE to deport the father of a child whose mother died while serving in the US army in Afghanistan," she said. (More Immigration and Customs Enforcement stories.)