Years after death, he faced deportation

Homeland Security's push is dragging in the dead and unnerving immigrant families.

- BY RACHEL URANGA

MYUNG J. CHUN Los Angeles Times JOSE MARIO Rodriguez Grimaldi died in 2022 at 88 but received two letters for deportation this year.

Jose Mario Rodriguez Grimaldi was weak and unable to eat in his final days after contracting COVID. He died peacefully in his daughter's Winnetka home at age 88.

Three years after his death, he was facing deportation proceedings.

In August, his daughter received a notice addressed to him from the Department of Homeland Security: “It is charged that you are subject to removal from the United States.”

Homeland Security ordered Rodriguez Grimaldi to appear before a judge in December. Then a few weeks later came another notice to appear for a hearing in September. If the feeble man were still alive, his fate might have been clear.

The department has been aggressively seeking to deport unauthorized immigrants, scanning records for expired visas and reviving cases once administratively closed for deportation, sometimes a decade ago.

But in the case of Rodriguez Grimaldi and several others confirmed by The Times, they died before officials could go after them. Some of the immigrants were in their late 80s. Some had legal status. But the intense push to ramp up deportations is dragging in even the dead, unnerving immigrant households, cramming court calendars and sapping stretched immigration attorneys’ time.

The letter panicked his daughter, Lorena, a naturalized citizen. For weeks, she had been anxiously watching the Trump administration’s crackdown play out on television with images of immigration officers throwing people to the ground, grabbing them out of cars and violently taking them from homes. And she feared that she would be targeted.