Goleta Grandmother Juana Flores Granted Temporary Reprieve from Deportation
Legislation Reintroduced in July to Ensure Permanent Residence for Parents and Spouses of U.S. Military Members and Veterans
Juana Flores, fondly known to many in the Santa Barbara area as the “Goleta Grandmother,” has received a year’s extension from deportation after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security granted a temporary reprieve extending her humanitarian parole in the United States.
In a statement released September 19, Flores’s legal team said that Flores was facing the threat of re-deportation in 2023 after her request for a temporary extension had initially been denied. However, she was only granted a year’s reprise of her Humanitarian Parole, a condition her legal team called “a temporary Band-Aid fix which must be regularly renewed.”
Flores is the mother of an active-duty sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, Senior Airman E-4 Caesar Flores, and first made headlines in 2019 after she was deported under the Trump administration for illegally crossing the U.S.–Mexico border in 1988. In June 2021, Flores was allowed to return home to the United States after the Biden administration granted humanitarian parole, which is not permanent and requires temporary extensions like the one she was granted on September 15, 2023.
Since 2019, Flores’s legal team and her family have fought for her to permanently remain in the United States, an undertaking that hasn’t succeeded yet. In July, Santa Barbara Congressmember Salud Carbajal reintroduced legislation to ensure permanent residence in the U.S. for parents and spouses of active-duty members or veterans of the U.S. military, a redress that would allow Flores and other immigrants like her to be eligible for legal permanent residence. Her team has even requested the Biden administration to pardon her for crossing the U.S.–Mexico border almost four decades ago.
While it remains a long journey to resolution for Flores to remain in her home in Santa Barbara, she has received broad support from community members and local government elected officials, including “members of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, the Goleta City Council, the Santa Barbara City Council, and the Santa Barbara School District Board of Education,” according to the press release.
