It’s rare for Tania Portillo’s family to gather together on a weekday night, but everyone’s schedule worked March 9. They got together in their Bixby home to chat about their dad’s upcoming 50th birthday.
No one expected their father, Wulfrano Portillo, a long-time pastor at east Tulsa’s La Hermosa Church, to be detained at his routine immigration check-in appointment in Oklahoma City and deported to Mexico the following morning.
“It’s not easy, so you know we’re going to have to start spending birthdays and holidays without each other,” Tania, his eldest daughter, said. “Our family is broken.”
Now, Portillo’s family and church community are grappling with an absence they say can never be refilled.
A family left broken
On March 10, Wulfrano Portillo and his wife made their way from Tulsa to Oklahoma City for a routine immigration check-in around 5 a.m.
Tania Portillo said her dad had a busy day coming up and wanted to get there as early as possible so he could make it back home to work.
The parents were there around 7:20 a.m. Their phones were taken away during the appointment, their daughters said.
“We usually accompany them, but I think we really put our guard down this time just because they had been going these previous months and they had returned,” Tania Portillo said. “And we were like, you know, it’s fine like, ‘Guess you’re going to your appointment. We’ll see you guys later today.’”
Betsabe Bojorquez said she was at work when she and her siblings couldn’t reach their parents after a few hours. Their siblings gave it some time — they didn’t want to panic.
It was around 10:30 a.m. when they decided it was likely that both parents were detained, so they started looking for their parents’ spare keys to pick up the car. Their mother called: Her husband had been detained.
“I was trying to keep it together, ‘cause I didn’t want people to know,” Bojorquez said. “You just don’t know what people’s judgments are, and if they’re actually gonna feel sorry for you, so you don’t want to expose your feelings and be vulnerable.”
Kelsy Landaverde, another daughter, said she’s been the cry baby over the last week. She gets sad when she’s alone, and her husband, Abraham Landaverde, reminds her to have faith.
“It’s going to be really hard because my dad is my best friend,” she said. “We talk like three to five times a day and I was telling my sister, sometimes I complained how much he called me. And now I just wish he called me.”
Fighting to become a U.S. citizen
According to the family, the authorities did not give their mother a reason why their father was the only one deported. Both parents are living in the country illegally and had a deportation removal order issued in 2007 — a government decision they’ve been fighting ever since.
In June 2007, the family was tending to a blown tire on a highway near Locust Grove, roughly 40 minutes from Tulsa, when an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper stopped, according to reporting from the Tulsa World. OHP reported the Portillo family to immigration officials.
The daughters say they remember being separated from their parents and placed in police cars. Tania Portillo said she remembers the trooper accusing her dad of smuggling immigrants, which wasn’t the case. It was only her siblings in the car, she said, and they’re all U.S. citizens.
Tania was 11 at the time. A decade later, she helped her parents file a petition for U.S. citizenship.
The immigration system is bureaucratic. They couldn’t file a citizenship petition for their dad until their mother got approved for a green card, a marker of permanent residency in the U.S., she said.
Wulfrano Portillo had been in the U.S. since he was 16 years old, serving as a pastor and spiritual leader to church members at La Hermosa for the past 24 years. His daughters said he did everything for them and spoiled them. He taught them to be kind to everyone — offering advice to anyone who needed it.
He has a pending U Visa application, which is a nonimmigrant status for victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement in investigating or prosecuting criminal activity.
They submitted the application in March 2018, according to the family. Since then, they’ve been waiting for their cases to make it through the system. The parents’ deportations were on hold until their cases were resolved.
Until the morning of March 10.
Old wounds opening
Daughter Adabeth Franco said her father’s recent deportation opens up the wounds from the 2007 incident. She remembers being in the car when the Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper arrived.
Franco is processing everything differently than her sisters. She hasn’t allowed herself to cry because she has little ones depending on her. She’s felt numb for the last week.
“I feel like when I see my mom or my sisters crying or, you know, hyperventilating a little bit, I feel like I have to maintain my cool,” she said.
Franco said this experience made her realize that her dad didn’t give up his life in Mexico for himself.
“I realized my dad going through this, he really gave up his life for mine … The fact that he came to America allowed me to have the life that I have now,” she said. “I came to understand that once he was detained, that he had to suffer for me.”
They’ve been in touch with Wulfrano, who is on a bus to his sister’s home in Mexico from the border cities of Del Rio, Texas, and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.
How a church community heals
The family joined other worshipers March 18 for La Hermosa Church’s weekly Wednesday service. His deportation was still fresh as they prepared for the community to come into the church.
Wulfrano’s wife has had to take on her husband’s responsibilities: Leading the church, gathering the remaining pastors and taking care of their 11- and 12-year-old daughters alone.
“I have two minor little sisters who are going through their pre-teen years and they just don’t understand how the only country they’ve known is now betraying them this way,” Tania Portillo said.
During the worship service, her mom stood on the front rows off the side of the stage, alongside her daughters, singing words of God.
“Creamos en tu poder (We believe in your strength)”
“Yo soy libre (I am free)”
She screamed the words.
This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma.
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
