My name is Laura. I was born in Ecuador and came to the States when I was just 2 years old. Married at a young age, I had to face the biggest of fears. We had just celebrated our son's 10th birthday and we were looking forward to go on a hiking trip the following weekend. But that all changed on the night of February 8th, 2010. That night, like every night I was waiting for my husband to come home from work so that we could have dinner together. What I didn't know was that this night my world and that of my family would completely change. It was past midnight and he hadn't come home nor did he answer my calls, which was very unusual of him. I finally called his job and they informed me that he had left an hour before. I thought of the worst scenarios, a car accident, someone hurting him, his car breaking down. I was terrified by the thought that something might have happened to him so I decided to drive down the road that he usually took in hopes of finding him but I could not. As I was driving back home I remembered watching the news that morning about the large number of deportations in the state of Georgia. Fear rendered through my body of the possibility that this could have happened to MY husband. Shaking and crying I hoped that this wasn't the case, I looked up his name through the Gwinnett Co. Police department and indeed he had been detained because one of his headlights was out and he was driving without a driver's license. They were asking for a $1,000 bond. I gathered the money to pay his bond but it was too late, as they had already put an immigration hold on him. This was only the start to what turned out to be the worst experience of my life.
My next step was to hire a good yet economical immigration attorney that could help me with my case, a decision that I would later regret. I had heard of a "good attorney" on the radio and made an appointment. Unfortunately, I did not know how to choose the right attorney. I spent thousands of dollars on an attorney who did absolutely NOTHING. The "good economical immigration attorney" ended up getting thousands of dollars from me and my husband was eventually deported back to Ecuador. One would think that a hard working father of three children that worked doubles, paid taxes and had no criminal background would be granted the opportunity to stay with his family, but unfortunately this was not the case and my family was torn apart by a broken immigration system. Feeling betrayed and deceived by my attorney and the immigration court systems I took it upon myself to research the options that I had to bring my husband back home. Although it took a little over 3 years to bring him home to us, I learned so much during the process. I learned to be strong, to never lose hope and to help many families that were going through the same situation as me. I marched for immigration reform on October of 2013, signed many petitions, made calls to senators demanding the liberation of many fathers and mothers that were detained in immigration detention centers and eventually brought my husband back to his family with a green card. Click here for pictures of Laura and her family.