The family of a Manhattan man who holds a green card and provides primary care for his beloved son with special needs is begging for help after ICE took him into custody.
According to his loved ones, 43-year-old Heury Gomez of the Dominican Republic had been training to become the permanent caregiver for his 18-year-old son Noah, who lives with special needs, when federal agents arrested him on Aug. 5 of this year. The arrest came months after a judge awarded him sole custody of the teen.
Noah is non-verbal and lives with multiple medical challenges, including being dependent on a tracheostomy and a feeding tube. Zapata said that between work hours, Gomez would visit his son at a children’s hospital and was learning to administer round-the-clock care when the training abruptly halted due to his detainment.
Gomez, who works as a night porter at The New School University, landed at Newark airport when he was accosted by ICE agents. His cousin, 36-year-old Carolina Zapata, recalled his arrest in an interview with amNewYork.
“They pulled him off to a room to question him, and then they said that he would need to be detained until he sees a judge, and they really didn’t give him any more details outside of that,” Zapata said. “My heart dropped, because I already knew what that probably meant. He was held at the airport for, I would say, over 30 hours. He was just held at the airport, just sitting in a chair.”
According to Zapata, Gomez entered the country legally and has been a green card holder for the better part of two decades, but found himself the target of ICE based on two near-decade-old misdemeanors.
Although Gomez maintained his innocence, he was nonetheless convicted in 2017 on attempted assault in the third degree and attempted petit larceny for a single incident dating back to 2015. His family says he spent 20 days in jail for a crime, completed probation, and paid the fines associated with it.
His family says he has never been associated with any other crime and has been in and out of the country multiple times in the years since the conviction, without issue, until August.
Zapata added that the recent judge’s determination to grant him sole custody of his son demonstrates that he should be held in good standing with the law.
“He really proved to the courts that he’s mentally stable, that he’s professionally stable, that he’s able to provide Noah with a safe home environment, as well as the emotional support and the love, the love that Noah deserves. Because one thing that I’ve observed personally from Heury is how much he loves his son,” Zapata said.
After being held at a New Jersey ICE facility, Zapata says Gomez was woken at about 4 a.m. on Aug. 19 and shackled before being whisked hundreds of miles away to a detention center in Michigan, where he now faces deportation proceedings.
“It was just such a traumatizing experience for him, because I remember speaking with him on the phone once he arrived in Michigan, and it was the first time where I heard his morale being so low, because he was like, ‘What have I done? I was treated like an animal today, and I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,’” Zapata recalled.
The incident has put the family under an emotional and financial burden, and now they are working with a lawyer in hopes of dismissing the deportation proceedings.
Zapata says she created a GoFundMe account to help pay for the legal fees.
“He’s about to enter a phase in his life where he has to take care of a child, and taking care of a child like Noah requires a lot of financial stability, so I don’t want to add debt in his financial life,” Zapata said.
