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In the years after he settled in the United States, Humberto "Bert" Fernandez-Vargas lived the American dream. He worked hard, paid taxes, fell in love and had a child.
But after more than three decades, he ended up where he started from: Mexico. On Thursday, Fernandez-Vargas' hopes of returning any time soon to his adopted home and reuniting with his family were crushed by an opinion handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The high court said the former Ogden trucking company owner - who was sent back to his native Mexico in 2004 - is covered by a law that allows a 25-year-old deportation order against him to be reinstated. The decision means Fernandez-Vargas will have to wait at least 20 years to return to Utah unless he receives a waiver from the U.S. government.
The decision has shaken his wife and family.
"It's terrible. It's destroyed me completely today," said a tearful Rita Fernandez-Vargas. "It smashed me to pieces, took away my life. All I want is my family back together."
The couple's 17-year-old son, Anthony, also is devastated and does not understand why the court would rule against his father, she said.
David Gossett, a Washington, D.C., attorney who argued Fernandez-Vargas' case to the high court in March, said he was disappointed.
"I continue to think that we have the better of the legal arguments," he said.
The 8-1 opinion also is a blow to other undocumented immigrants hoping to legalize their residency in their adopted homeland.
"Unfortunately, this case demonstrates the harshness of the immigration laws," said Barbara Hines, a University of Texas law professor who oversees the school's immigration clinic. "The decision will affect many hardworking immigrants and needlessly separate families."
J. Christopher Keen, an Orem attorney for Fernandez-Vargas, said in a written statement that the opinion potentially could affect thousands of people, especially immigrants in the nine states that make up the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which previously had ruled differently from the Supreme Court on the same issue that arose in the Fernandez-Vargas case. Ninth Circuit states include California, Arizona and Nevada.
"Before, they could adjust their status, and now they can't," Keen said. "This illustrates the tragedy of the immigration system and how immigration laws tear families apart. There doesn't seem to be any room for mercy."
The U.S. Department of Justice did not have an estimate on how many immigrants could be affected by Thursday's ruling. A spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., Kathleen Blomquist, said the department is pleased with the decision.
Fernandez-Vargas, who entered the United States illegally in 1969 as a teenager and had a small trucking company in Ogden, landed in trouble after his wife filed a petition to legalize his status.
When Fernandez-Vargas arrived for a scheduled appointment in November 2003 at a Salt Lake City immigration office to discuss the application, he was arrested and put into deportation proceedings. After a year in the Utah County jail, the 53-year-old was sent back to Mexico, where he lives in Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua, and does odd jobs.
"It's a sad day for a lot of people who try to do things right," Gossett said.
However, there is some hope, the lawyer said: The justices stressed that Fernandez-Vargas has a strong case for a waiver that would allow him to return, he said. In addition, the ruling does not apply to undocumented immigrants who applied to legalize their presence or married a U.S. citizen before 1997, Gosset said.
The Supreme Court ruling centered on the retroactivity of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. That provision drastically reduced the possibility for undocumented immigrants to stop their deportation if they had re-entered the country illegally after having been previously deported.
The law went into effect on April 1, 1997, and a half-dozen years later, it snagged Fernandez-Vargas.
The immigrant had been deported several times after his 1969 initial arrival in the United States, the last occurring in 1981, according to court records. He returned in 1982.
After his return, Fernandez-Vargas had worked for a trucking company for 18 years before he was laid off and started his own carrier business. He married Rita in 2001, after many years together.
Fernandez-Vargas applied to become a permanent legal resident and got authorization to work while the application was pending. Then came his arrest at the immigration interview.
Keen had hoped to argue that Fernandez-Vargas should be allowed to stay because of the hardship that leaving would cause his family in Utah. But he never got the chance because the Board of Immigration Appeals reinstated the old deportation order from 1981 instead of taking the case to court.
In January 2005, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the board's decision. Fernandez-Vargas turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, which gave him a glimmer of hope when it agreed to hear the case.
At the March hearing, Gossett had argued it was unfair, and contrary to what Congress intended, to deport an immigrant for a crime - returning to the United States after being deported for being in the country illegally - that was committed years before the law changed.
Sri Srinivasan, an assistant solicitor general, countered that Congress was clear in wanting the law to apply to Fernandez-Vargas and other immigrants who violated a deportation order and did not exempt those already in the country.
The court majority sided with the government, saying that Fernandez-Vargas was subject to the new law based on his decision to remain in the United States after its effective date. The opinion says the immigrant had "ample warning" that the law applied to him and "ample opportunity" to cross back into Mexico to avoid prosecution.
"For that matter, he could have married the mother of his son and applied for adjustment of status during that period, in which case he would at least have had a claim (about which we express no opinion) that proven reliance on the old law should be honored by applying the presumption of retroactivity," Justice David Souter wrote for the majority.
In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens disagreed that Congress meant the 1997 law to be applied to cases that occurred before the provision went into effect. He said that before the law went into effect, Fernandez-Vargas' longtime residence in the country made him eligible to stop his deportation in the first place.
"He was required to have been physically present in the United States for a period of not less than seven years, to have been a person of good moral character during that time, and to have developed ties to the United States such that his deportation would result in extreme hardship to himself or to his United States citizen wife or child," Stevens wrote.
Stevens added: "Given these incentives, petitioner [Fernandez-Vargas] legitimately complains that the government has changed the rules midgame."
Rita Fernandez-Vargas - who was born in Layton and grew up in Ogden and whose family lives there - said obtaining a waiver that would allow her husband to return could take years. She plans to stay in Utah until her son graduates from high school next year.
"Then he will go into the military and I'll move to Mexico," she said. "I thought this was a test to see if I was strong. I feel like somebody has hit me with a bomb but I lived to suffer through this."