The disillusionment continues to grow among certain immigrant supporters of Donald Trump.
The family of a long-time Canadian resident in the United States feels betrayed after she was arrested by U.S. immigration services while attending an interview for her green card. Ironically, she and her husband supported Donald Trump and his promises of mass deportations.
“We feel completely blindsided,” Francisco Olivera, an American citizen and Trump voter, told California’s KGTV. “I want my vote back.”
His wife, Cynthia Olivera, 45, a mother of three U.S.-born children, was arrested on June 13 in Chatsworth, California, by immigration agents while trying to regularize her status. She is now being held in an ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas, awaiting deportation to Canada.
Cynthia arrived in the United States at age 10, brought illegally by her parents from Toronto. In 1999, at age 19, she received an expedited removal order at the Buffalo border. However, a few months later, she quietly re-entered by crossing the border from Mexico to San Diego. “They didn’t ask me anything. They just waved me through,” she told KGTV.
Since then, she has lived in Los Angeles, worked, paid taxes, and raised her children. No criminal record was found under her name, according to a KGTV investigation of federal and California judicial databases. In 2024, she had even obtained a temporary work permit issued under the Biden administration.
But despite these efforts, neither Cynthia nor her husband anticipated that President Trump’s anti-immigration policies – which they had supported – would affect their own family. “We thought they would only target violent criminals,” Francisco Olivera said. He added that Trump’s promises had appealed to both him and his wife, despite President Trump’s own criminal conviction in May 2024 for falsifying business records, according to KGTV.
Cynthia expresses her distress through video conference from her Texas cell: “The United States is my country. This is where I met my husband, went to school, and had my children.”
However, the Trump administration has remained unyielding. “Mrs. Olivera is an undocumented alien from Canada,” an ICE spokesperson stated in a release to Newsweek. “She was previously deported and chose to disregard our laws by returning illegally.” The spokesperson emphasized that this re-entry constitutes a deportable offense, and Mrs. Olivera would remain in custody “until her removal to Canada.”
The Canadian government informed KGTV that while they were aware of their citizen’s detention, they couldn’t intervene: “Each country determines who can enter or leave its territory.”
Cynthia hopes to voluntarily return to Mississauga, Ontario, to stay with a cousin, at her family’s expense. However, no departure date has been set yet.
Through tears, she confessed: “The only crime I’ve committed is loving this country, working hard, and providing for my children.”
Source: KGTV
