Cyndi Loza

Every time Jose Mejia was about to come home from work, he’d call his wife and she’d wait outside for him.

“I didn’t know I’d see him taken away in handcuffs by all these people,” said Sparks resident Berta Hernandez in Spanish as she smiled weakly with tears in her eyes.

Her husband, 43-year-old Jose Mejia, was legally in the United States until last year, but he missed an immigration hearing in September and a judge issued a deportation order, records show.

Hernandez was pregnant at the time of the arrest but had a miscarriage in September.

“I felt my whole stomach move all over,” she said of seeing Mejia arrested.

Their child would have been a girl, she said.

“It’s a moment that would be permanently etched inside anyone and, when it comes to mind, all you feel is confusion,” said Hernandez, who was left alone for nearly two months while Mejia was incarcerated.

Mejia said he’d never forget his arrest, too.

“I felt agitated and angry, but at the same time I felt like nothing, like I didn’t mean anything to them,” Mejia said.

Mejia said he calmed himself down because he knew he wasn’t a criminal. He had a conviction for robbery in 1982, when he was 17, but that was more than 25 years ago, he said.

He served four years in a Texas prison, has been back in the United States twice since then and had no subsequent criminal record, his government file showed.

He obtained a work permit since his arrest and faces a deportation hearing in Reno on Jan. 13.

“What I can’t forget was when I asked the driver if he could loosen up the handcuffs in Spanish,” Mejia said. “He (told me) to shut up and said he couldn’t understand me and if I wanted to say something I should speak in English. … I understood that as some kind of discrimination.”