Tucson siblings to reunite with mom after 14-year separation

A Tucson family torn apart due to the complexities of U.S. immigration law will reunite in Nogales, Arizona next Saturday.

After 14 years in Nogales, Sonora, separated from her four U.S.-born children, Gloria Arellano de la Rosa was finally granted a green card this month. In 2009, on the advice of an attorney, she’d traveled to Mexico to regularize her undocumented status and instead discovered she was subject to a 10-year ban on re-entry.

“We’re all just relieved,” her son, Bill de la Rosa, said on Friday. He was 15 when his mother learned she couldn’t return to her husband, a U.S. citizen, and young children in Tucson.

But the celebration will be bittersweet, said Bill, now 30 and a student at Yale Law School in Connecticut. He’ll fly to Arizona next week to meet his mother at the Nogales port of entry.

“Those are 14 years that just cannot be recovered. That’s a huge part of our lives that we cannot get back,” he said. “And for what? Because my mom, back in 2009, tried to do things the right way, hired an attorney, paid the necessary fees and was wrongly counseled by her lawyer to go to Mexico.”

The de la Rosa family was the subject of a 2015 joint project by the Arizona Daily Star and Arizona Public Media called “Divided By Law,” which detailed the family’s painful separation and the impact on Gloria’s four children.

As a teenager, Bill had to become a caregiver to his elderly father Arsenio, who had a stroke in 2011, and help raise his younger siblings, while dedicating himself to advocating for his mother’s return.

On Jan. 9, when Bill told his mom her visa was in the mail, “she was just in disbelief,” he said. “She wanted to cry. … She kept saying, ‘It’s because you’re stubborn, hijo. It’s because you don’t give up.’”

The family’s separation began in 2009 when Gloria traveled to Juarez, Mexico, to apply for a permanent resident card, called a “green card,” following years of living undocumented in the U.S., after her visa expired. With a U.S. citizen husband sponsoring her, four American children and the help of her attorney, it seemed the process would be straightforward.

But Gloria’s leaving the U.S. had triggered a ban, under a 1996 law, to penalize those living in the U.S. illegally, the Star reported.

Gloria’s youngest son, Bobby, was just 4 when she was banned from returning. Her daughter Naomi was 9, and her eldest son Jim, who was 17, joined the U.S. Marines to provide a steady income for his younger brothers and sister.

Much of the siblings’ lives have been defined by the hole left by their mother’s absence, Bill said.

“I can’t tell you the number of times I’d awake in the middle of the night because Bobby was crying, because he missed his mom,” he said.

In 2019, after her 10-year ban expired, Gloria began the process of applying for a green card but it took more than four years, in part due to a backlog exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Bill said.

More delays happened at the end of 2023, when the family learned their lawyer hadn’t filed a necessary form early enough to secure U.S. government permission for Gloria’s green-card application, which should have been finalized before her visa interview took place, Bill said.

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The mistake could have cost them another year. But as the de la Rosas scrambled to rectify the misstep, U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva’s office was instrumental in advocating for quick relief for the family, Bill said.

Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat, also advocated for Gloria to receive 30-day humanitarian pass to visit her then 85-year-old husband in 2018, after he had a second stroke and doctors said he had weeks to live.

In an emailed statement, Grijalva said on Friday, “Gloria’s upcoming reunification is the result of shared work with the de la Rosa family and our office to navigate the complexities and brokenness of the federal immigration system. After 14 years, we look forward to welcoming her home and sharing her story.”

Bill's younger siblings are still hesitant to fully celebrate their mother’s return, he said.

“They don’t want to believe until they see it,” he said. “They’re anxiously waiting for her to cross the border and be in the U.S.”

And despite the good news, Bill said Gloria will be returning to Tucson with “a huge void in her heart.”

Her husband has died, and her children are grown. Bobby is now a freshman at the University of Arizona, Jim works full-time in Tucson, and Naomi, having graduated from the UA, is working in Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva’s office.

“My mom is coming back, and it’s incredible,” Bill said. “But she’s not coming back to the same Tucson, the same household that she left.”

Bill, now a first-year law student, said he’s spent half his life navigating the U.S. immigration system on behalf of his mom and is training to become an immigration attorney. His dissertation, which will complete a doctoral degree from Oxford University, is focused on the punitive nature of the U.S. immigration system, which he said has caused his family so much pointless suffering.

“What did it accomplish? Absolutely nothing,” he said of the family’s separation. “I knew that what had happened to my family was an injustice, that there was something fundamentally wrong with our country and our country’s immigration system. I knew I didn’t want other people to suffer the same way.”

For now, the de la Rosas are eager to make up for lost time, and missed milestones.

Bill got engaged last summer and on the first day his mother is back in Arizona, he wants to take her to a chapel that he’s considering as a wedding venue.

“We will never recover those years we lost,” he said, his voice cracking. “But we’re trying to make up for them.”