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“She’s my best friend, she’s the love of my life, she’s my rock,” Jason said. “She’s a million times more than what I could have hoped for in a partner.”

The couple has spent the 17 years since then trying to find a way to obtain legal status for Celia, now 41. They asked the ����Ӱ��AV to only use their first names because they fear Celia could be targeted for deportation.

Born in Sonora, Mexico, Celia said she entered the U.S. without permission at age 18, carrying her infant daughter and pregnant with her second, to join family in Tucson as she sought a better life.

But like many long-time undocumented residents who want to regularize their immigration status, Celia faced the possibility of a 10-year bar on re-entry if she returned to Mexico to begin the process of obtaining a permanent resident card, known as a “green card,” with her husband as her sponsor.

When the Biden administration announced a new parole program in June to allow qualifying spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens to adjust their status without having to leave the U.S., Jason and Celia say they were tentatively hopeful.

But within months, a lawsuit filed by Texas and other Republican-led states paused the program, before it was struck down last month by a federal judge appointed by President-elect Donald Trump in his first term.

Tucson attorneys say the “Keeping Families Together” parole program would have been a lifeline for thousands who already qualify for a green card, and have no disqualifying criminal record, but who risk separation from their families if they petition for legal status.

It would have also provided work authorization during the process and streamlined the years-long application process, reducing the administrative burden on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, said Tempe immigration attorney Celeste Roman.

“By taking this program away, you’re creating more of a burden on the government to continue these long, five- to six-year processes for people to be able to regularize their immigration status,’” she said. “These individuals are already trying to obtain lawful status but they’re stuck in a system that takes years.”

Nationwide, 500,000 noncitizen spouses could have been eligible for relief under the program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates.

In Arizona, more than 15,000 undocumented people married to U.S. citizen spouses could have been eligible, U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva said in an August in support of the program.

In the lawsuit against the parole program, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued it violated U.S. immigration law.

“Once again we have stopped the Biden-Harris Administration’s radical attempts to destroy America’s borders and undermine the rule of law,” Paxton said in a November after the ruling striking down the program.

American Immigration Lawyers Association, or AILA, disputed the basis of the decision.

“This ruling is simply wrong on the law,” AILA President Kelli Stump said in a statement. “The administration was using its congressionally enacted authority as a sensible solution for hundreds of thousands of American families facing uncertainty and fear due to our broken immigration system. To be clear, these applicants were already eligible for adjustment of status, the only thing the parole did was ensure they wouldn’t be separated while the bureaucratic process was underway.”

Disincentive to regularize

Immigrants who marry U.S. citizens can be eligible for a green card, but immigration law requires those who entered the U.S. unauthorized to first leave the country and apply to re-enter legally. But leaving the country can trigger a three- or 10-year ban on re-entry under a 1996 law signed by then-President Bill Clinton.

Green card applicants who already entered the U.S. without authorization must apply for a waiver — proving “extreme hardship” for a qualifying U.S. citizen relative if the applicant doesn’t return to the U.S. — to be considered for legal entry to the U.S. If that waiver is denied, the applicant is stuck outside the U.S.

A “provisional waiver” program implemented by President Barack Obama in 2013 allows people to apply for that waiver on a provisional basis while remaining in the U.S., but they still have to return to their home country for an interview at their U.S. consulate, which always comes with some level of risk, Roman said.

While the law creating the 10-year ban was intended to discourage unlawful entry into the U.S., in practice it discourages people from regularizing their status, said Mo Goldman, a Tucson immigration attorney.

“It actually serves more like an incentive for people to stay here without legal status,” Goldman said. The Keeping Families Together program “was a smart solution to a huge problem, and a humane way to deal with it,” he said.

For Jason and Celia, the cancelation of the Keeping Families Together program was the latest in a string of disappointments.

“Every time something like this comes up, my heart skips a beat,” Jason said. “There’s still that false narrative of, ‘You married a U.S. citizen, you should have your citizenship now.’ We really wish it was that easy, but it’s not.”

De La Rosa family

The Keeping Families Together program would have also prevented the kind of extended separation experienced by the De La Rosa family, who were the subject of a 2015 joint project by the ����Ӱ��AV and Arizona Public Media called “.” The project detailed the family’s painful separation and its impact on the four De La Rosa children.

In 2009, Gloria Arellano De La Rosa, who was undocumented and married to a U.S. citizen, traveled to Mexico on the advice of her attorney to regularize her undocumented status. She instead discovered she was subject to a 10-year ban on re-entry under the 1996 law. She had to wait for 10 years in Mexico before applying for her green card, which took an additional four years to process.

Gloria finally returned to Arizona in January, in a long-awaited reunion that was nevertheless “bittersweet,” after so many lost years that can never be recovered, said her son Bill De La Rosa. He was 15 when Gloria was barred from re-entering the U.S.

Now 31 and studying immigration law at Yale Law School, Bill De La Rosa said he was thrilled when he first heard about the Keeping Families Together program.

“Having experienced what my family went though, I knew exactly what this would have meant for families,” he said. But those families now remain in limbo, and vulnerable to Trump’s promised mass deportations, he said.

“That’s the saddest part of it all,” he said. “Now the Trump administration is going to come in and everyone who would have been protected is now exposed and in line of sight basically.”

That’s the case for Rebecca and her husband of 16 years, Ismael, who is undocumented. The couple met in 2008 when Ismael was a landscaper at the Tucson retirement community where Rebecca worked. She loved his friendliness and how eager he was to spend time with her family when they started dating.

“We could talk about anything,” she said. “He’s a family guy. He was like, ‘Let’s go hang out with your mom and your tios.’�ĝ

Rebecca, who asked that the Star only use her middle name to protect her husband’s identity, said until they were married, they didn’t fully understand the barriers to Ismael gaining legal status.

They’ve built a life together, including buying a home and raising their four children, ages 5, 11, 12 and 14, Rebecca said. But Ismael’s undocumented status has led to some heartbreaks, including missing the death of his father and brother in Mexico.

“He wasn’t able to say goodbye,” Rebecca said.

When they heard about the Keeping Families Together program, they paid the $580 application fee to USCIS, as well as thousands in attorneys’ fees, she said.

The program’s cancellation has been hard to accept, and the family is now planning for what would happen if Ismael were to be deported under Trump’s mass deportation campaign, Rebecca said.

The legal challenge to Keeping Families Together argued it would burden government resources and harm Texas economically, but Rebecca said she believes the opposite is true.

If Ismael were to be deported, Rebecca, who is a teacher for Head Start, would likely have to seek out government assistance for the first time in order to pay the mortgage on their Catalina home and to support their kids.

Today, with two incomes, “we don’t have to have any benefits from the government. We don’t get food stamps,” she said. “But if he gets deported, there’s a chance I’m gonna have to get all that now. And I’m sure that’s the case for a lot of people.”

Life ‘on pause’

Jason, Celia and their three girls now live in Los Angeles, where they say they feel safer as a mixed-status family than they did in Arizona. But they hope to return to Tucson one day, where much of their family lives, Jason said.

The parole program’s cancelation seems pointless and “heartbreaking,” Jason said.

“It would have made life better, not just for my family, but for how many countless other families,” he said. “How many countless other people that could come out of the shadows and realize themselves, who could validate their existence here in this country, validate their work and the love they have for this place?”

Jason was overcome with emotion when talking about how Celia longs to visit her family in Mexico. She wasn’t able to see her grandmother before she died, and now her mother is aging and her sister is ill, he said.

“She’s so afraid of that repeating again,” he said, fighting back tears. “It still weighs on her so much.”

Celia said now that their children are adults, she’s considering risking a long-term separation to pursue her green card from Mexico, though her family doesn’t want her to. But Celia said she’s desperate to stop waiting.

“My girls, I know they will always need me, but I’m very tired of being on pause,” she said. “It has been 17 years. It’s been too long.”

Jason said he’d join his wife in Mexico if it came down to it.

“What good is a life without your significant other?” he said.