A wrenching decision for a family torn apart

In U.S for 33 years, he was deported after a raid. Would his wife and kids join him in Mexico?

- By Kate Linthicum

JESÚS CRUZ, who was detained in a car wash raid, hugs his wife, Noemi Ciau.

KINI, Mexico — On a hot June night Jesús Cruz at last returned to Kini, the small town in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula where he spent the first 17 years of his life.

His sister greeted him with tearful hugs. The next morning she took him to see their infirm mother, who whispered in his ear: “I didn’t think you'd ever come back.”

After decades away, Cruz was finally home.

Yet he was not home.

So much of what he loved was 3,000 miles away in Southern California, where he resided for 33 years until immigration agents swarmed the car wash where he worked and hauled him away in handcuffs.

Cruz missed his friends and Booka, his little white dog. His missed his house, his car, his job.

But most of all, he missed his wife, Noemi Ciau, and their four children. Ciau worked nights, so Cruz was in charge of getting the kids fed, clothed and to and from school and music lessons, a chaotic routine that he relished because he knew he was helping them get ahead.

"I want them to have a better life," he said. "Not the one I had."

Now that he was back in Mexico, living alone in an empty house that belonged to his in-laws, he and Ciau, who is a U.S. permanent resident, faced an impossible decision.

Should she and the children join Cruz in Mexico?

Or stay in Inglewood?

Cruz and Ciau both had families that had been broken by the border, and they didn’t want that for their kids. In the months since Cruz had been detained, his eldest daughter, 16-year-old Dhelainy, had barely slept and had stopped playing her beloved piano, and his youngest son, 5-year-old Gabriel, had started acting out. Esther, 14, and Angel, 10, were hurting too.