MIDDLEBURG, Fla. — A married couple in Middleburg has been separated after immigration officials ordered the husband to return to India.
Just Thursday, we told you about Tapan Purohit and his wife Ashley, as they tried to find a way to keep him in the country.
She told Action News Jax that he was deported on Saturday, and it could be a decade before he’s allowed to return to her.
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“It’s horrible. This is not for show. This is not for fun. I lost my husband yesterday, and he’s not dead, but it feels worse,” said Ashley while fighting off tears.
Just over a year after getting married, Ashley Kennedy-Purohit said she’s now been left in a home she can’t afford, to raise two children without their father.
Action News Jax spoke with Tapan on Thursday, who was hoping for more time to get his residency approved.
“I cannot leave my kids and my wife here. I can’t.”
Purohit told us he originally came here on a K-1 visa in 2011. The visa expired in 2013.
After marrying Ashley last year, they filed for an I-130 marriage petition - which would let him regain his legal status. That petition is still working through the courts.
But after Purohit was arrested in December for resisting an officer without violence - charges that were later dropped - ICE came to their house.
He was ordered Thursday to return to India by Saturday and not come back.
Early Saturday morning, he met ICE agents at Jacksonville International Airport and took that flight.
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Rebecca Black, a Jacksonville Immigration Attorney told Action News Jax that in cases like these, immigration officials will weigh the reasons for deportation against efforts to establish citizenship - like through the couple’s pending marriage petition.
“It’s a matter of grace built into the system that any executive can exercise some sort of prosecutorial discretion or, you know, they can have empathy in the facts,” said Black. “And currently, we’re not seeing a lot of that.”
Ashley says even if that petition does go through, her husband faces a 10-year ban from the states, and the couple now faces an uphill battle for his return.
“We can file a request for a waiver of this, but the chances of getting that have always been slim.”
Black said these kinds of waivers “are taking about three years at this point, just processing time.”
Action News Jax reached out to ICE about this case several times since Thursday, but we have not heard back.
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