Another Philly illegal immigration sob story (Part 2)

There is an amusing quality to the fact that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong has been writing a series she called “Blaxit,” about black Americans who have chosen to emigrate to various locations in Africa, is now lamenting that an illegal immigrant and previously convicted criminal has been deported to his native country.

Germantown mom wants out of Philly after ICE deported her husband to Belize

Steeliness has replaced grief in Charlene Maddox Chimilio. The 43-year-old Philly native has come to terms with the fact that the best place for her family might be outside the city she loves so much.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, June 10, 2025 | 6:00 AM EDT

Earlier this year, I wrote about Jesreel Chimilio, a father of two from Germantown who was seized outside his home by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and whisked away for deportation.

His wife, Charlene Maddox Chimilio, came running out after him with their 9-month-old son, Zechariah, on her hip, but it was too late.

Neither she nor their children — they’re also the parents of 3-year-old Jezreel — has seen him in person since that day in February. Charlene tried everything — reaching out to U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Philadelphia), doing media interviews, and seeking asylum on his behalf.

In April, Charlene learned Jesreel had been deported to his native Belize, which he left as a teenager to travel to the United States with his mother. He has been away from the Central American nation for so long that he’s essentially a stranger in a strange land.

Further down:

An elementary school teacher, she has been searching for a job she can perform remotely. If all goes well during her visit to Belize next month, the mother of two may settle in the country commonly referred to as “the Jewel” because of its natural beauty.

Hmmm. That hardly sounds like a terrible, terrible place to live. Belize is actually a prized vacation stop for Americans.

It’s a shame it has come to this. It’s one thing to stop security threats at America’s borders, but it’s a whole other thing to cruelly rip apart the families of hardworking and otherwise law-abiding immigrants who pay taxes and have lived in the United States for decades.

“Otherwise law-abiding immigrants,” huh? We previously noted Mrs Armstrong’s earlier column on this story. All the way down in the tenth paragraph of that column, we come to this:

In 2011, he was arrested on DUI and drug charges and served an 11-month prison sentence. But he had no further run-ins with the law until earlier this year, when Montgomery County police pulled him over on Feb. 2 and discovered he was driving without a license. (Like most states, Pennsylvania doesn’t permit undocumented immigrants to obtain licenses, which is a failing of the system that needs to be corrected.)

So, it seems that Mr Chimilio wasn’t an “otherwise law-abiding immigrant.” DUI and drug charges hardly qualify as “law-abiding,” and the fact that he was caught this year for driving without a license simply compounds the fact.

If Mr Chimilio had no driver’s license, what else does he not have? We are not told, but the obvious question is: how can someone who does not have a driver’s license carry insurance? If he doesn’t have insurance, and he gets into an accident — and if he doesn’t have a license, he’s automatically at fault — how does his victim get compensated?

If the vehicle is insured under his wife’s name, does that even count if she allowed someone without a license to drive it?

We were told that Mr Chimilio had a job, “work(ing) at a property management firm.” Being an illegal immigrant, it has to be asked: how could he have had a job, without a green card, and without legal documents noting his status to work legally in this country? Did the property management firm know he was here illegally? Did he present forged documents to get the job?

Mrs Armstrong told us that Mr Chimilio’s mother and he moved to the United States from Belize, in 2002, when he was 17-years-old. It would seem that Mr Chimilio had plenty of time to become a legal resident, 23 years of time, including twelve of those years under Democrats Barack Obama, and his DACA program, and Joe Biden. The younger George Bush was more concerned about illegal immigration, but wasn’t openly hostile. And while Mr Chimilio managed to make it through Donald Trump’s first term, he apparently didn’t try to get right with the law during Mr Biden’s term, or, if he did, the columnist didn’t tell us.

Of course, if he was a convicted felon, getting legal here was probably impossible.

In a “21 questions” interview article by Victor Fiorillo in Philadelphia magazine, Mrs Armstrong responded to the question, “One thing about Philly that really pisses me off is . . . the crime. The crime. The nonstop crime.” Doesn’t the columnist realize that if Mr Chimilio had a job in the United States, he was committing a “nonstop crime” every single day he went to work?

Enforcing our immigration laws is a hard, hard thing to do, and as we have mentioned before, sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here] to do that job. President Trump is that kind of [insert slang term for the anus here], and we all knew it when the American people voted to elect him President again.