MIAMI — José Díaz, 85, had never asked his grand-nephew for a single thing.But late last year, he noticed the baseball cap Arístides Fernandez-Garcia was wearing on his visit to New Jersey.He liked it.Fernandez-Garcia promised himself that he'd give his great-uncle the cap after returning from a Miami hearing in his pending asylum case.He never got the chance.On Jan.
6 Fernandez-Garcia, a Cuban immigrant, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a targeted operation at the courthouse in Miami.He told NPR that as he moved through a maze of detention centers across the U.S., losing 60 pounds and witnessing shocking violence, he held hard onto his promise.When his great-uncle got sick, Fernandez-Garcia called him from detention."I would tell him: 'Stay strong, because I have to give you the hat,'" Fernandez-Garcia recalled.
The old man would laugh.Eight months later, Fernandez-Garcia sits in the living room of an apartment in the Central African Republic.He feels torn: guilty for giving Díaz hope, but resolved, nevertheless, to keep his promise."That is something I have to do in life before anything else happens to him," he says about his great-uncle.
"I have to give him that hat."Credit: Reshma Kirpalani for NPRFernandez-Garcia is among the more than 25,000 people the Trump administration says it has deported to countries to which they have no ties.On Sept.
18, a federal appeals court ruled this "third country deportation" policy violates due process.The court said migrants weren't given enough notice or a meaningful chance to say they were afraid to be sent to another country.
On Sept.24, the Trump administration appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court.In a statement to NPR, the Department of Homeland Security said "Third country removals are an essential public safety tool that remove the most dangerous criminal illegal aliens from our streets."But NPR found no record of criminal charges in Florida against either Fernandez-Garcia or his ...