The fate of a 13-year-old boy in Pomona remains uncertain after his foster dad was detained by immigration agents this week, three years after his foster mom was killed in a car crash.
The Olaez-Gomez family said relatives have been trying to comfort the teen, whose identity the family declined to reveal for privacy reasons, as he is confused and afraid that he’ll be sent back into the system.
The teen’s foster mom, Yesenia Gomez, was his biological aunt, who had raised him as her own. She was in the process of formally adopting him when she was killed by a drunk driver, the family said.
Following her death, her husband, Jose de Jesus Olaez, stepped in and became the teen’s foster dad.
But the family members said they are struggling with uncertainty again after Olaez was picked up by immigration agents this week on his way to a landscaping job.
Cellphone video provided by the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice showed federal agents surrounding the vehicle.
“I was in the work truck when I felt like I had been hit (by a car), so I stopped to see if I had been in an accident,” Olaez described in Spanish while speaking briefly by phone from a detention center. “Then I saw that it was (federal agents), and another car had stopped in front of me.”
Olaez’s family said the undocumented man has been in the United States for 24 years without any criminal record.
“‘How’s my dad doing?’ That’s the main question he asks me everyday,” Jasmine Olaez-Gomez, the teen’s aunt, said.
The teenager and his relatives are now trying to determine what would come next while working with a social worker.
“We don’t want him to go back into the system. We want him to stay here with us,” Olaez-Gomez said.
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