Ofelia Torres has spent almost every day of the past month at Lurie Children’s Hospital, where the 16-year-old Lake View High School student is fighting cancer.
After a tough few weeks where the disease spread through her body and doctors inserted a drain in her abdomen to relieve fluid, the Torres family worked with her oncologist to arrange a short getaway over the weekend, where she and three of her closest friends could enjoy a Saturday of simple pleasures and normalcy before a scheduled return to the hospital and chemotherapy.
The girls were getting their nails done as Ofelia’s father, Ruben Torres Maldonado, was at work.
Hours later, he called his wife Sandibell Hidalgo from a number that came up on caller ID as “prison / jail.”
“It’s me,” he said. “They got me.”
In that moment, the Torres family experienced the pain of separation gripping hundreds of immigrant families across Chicago and the suburbs since Donald Trump’s administration last month launched “Operation Midway Blitz,” the president’s aggressive deportation plan.
Now they’re fighting cancer and the United States government. Their attorney, Kalman Resnick, filed a petition in federal court to have him freed while Torres’ deportation case proceeds.
His family needs him, they say.
Ruben Torres and Sandibell Hidalgo are parents of not only Ofelia, but also a 4-year-old son, Nathan. The father, a 40-year-old painter and home renovator, is the primary breadwinner in a household with carefully balanced child care responsibilities in their Portage Park bungalow. The mother often sleeps at the hospital while he takes care of their preschooler.
“He will take Nathan to school every morning and make sure he leaves from work in time to pick him up and then comes home, gives him dinner and takes him to see us,” Hidalgo said in an interview at her home. “Every day, he was doing the same thing. I’m like, how am I going to be able to do this?”
Resnick said he will try to prevent Torres’ deportation “on account of his many years of residence in the U.S., his good moral character, and the exceptional and extremely (unusual) hardships his children will experience if he were removed from the United States,” he wrote.
In a statement, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin accused Maldonado of “habitual driving offenses” and said he backed into a government vehicle while attempting to flee. She called his legal filing “nothing more than a desperate Hail Mary attempt” to keep him in the country.
Meanwhile, his wife sat in the living room of the family home Monday. Her husband renovated their bungalow basement. Medical instructions from Lurie on how to care for their daughter sat on a table nearby.
“We came because this is a great country, because our lives were gonna be better,” Hidalgo said. “He belongs with her, and especially in this portion, because we don’t know if she’s gonna make it. She has Stage 4 cancer, she has it all over her bones. The treatment is so aggressive, that it will put her down for days. Her mental and spirit, it’s amazing, but her body is sometimes getting tired. Who knows how long the body’s gonna take it? So he deserves to be with her.”
Ofelia told the Tribune her father instilled in her the value of independence. For her 15th birthday, he took her to the Chicago Cultural Center for traditional quinceanera photos but instead of spending money on a big party, he bought her a car.
Torres carefully searched Facebook Marketplace listings looking for the perfect vehicle. When he saw a candidate, he meticulously inspected the vehicle and took it on test drives.
“He would examine every little corner of this car. Under the car, the wheels, this and that,” Ofelia said. “He’s like, this car, this car’s not good, this car’s not good. It wasn’t taken care of.”
Eventually, they found a 2006 Ford Mustang with 39,000 miles on it that had been well cared for and largely kept in a garage.
“My dad test drove it. He was like, this car, this is your car,” Ofelia said. “On my birthday, the day of my birthday, he bought me my car.”
One day, Ofelia drove home with the top down as her dad was sitting on the stairs. He stared at her quietly and intently, she recalled. She asked if there was something on her face and he said no.
Later, he told her, “that day that you came home with your car, I felt like I had done it. I made it in life. Everything I had done, everything I worked for, everything I sacrificed, everything I suffered, was worth it because that’s what I wanted to see.”
Growing up, he took Ofelia to boxing and karate classes. He would coach her on how to fight. “It just made me stronger and that was our bonding,” she said.
“His number one goal with raising at least me, was making sure that I never had to rely on anyone,” she said. “That once I moved out of the house, that I grew up, that I knew how to take care of myself. He wanted me to be an independent person.”
While the family is close-knit and supports one another, Hidalgo said the father has taken his daughter’s health problems hard.
“One thing he always says, especially when things don’t go right with the treatment or she has to go through a procedure and he sees all the pain that she’s going through. He says, why us? We’re not bad people. We don’t kill, we don’t steal. We’re just hard workers,” Hidalgo said. “We just came to this country to make our lives better and there’s people out there that do so bad in this world and nothing happens to them. Why us? Why are we going through this? My answer was, like, ‘God only knows.’”
The family is well-known and beloved in their pockets of Chicago. Ofelia’s teacher, Valerie Wadycki, described her as a girl who donated nutrition shakes she didn’t like to a food pantry rather than throwing them away.
Earlier this year, Ofelia did a research project for Wadycki about the cost of health care that spread her story further.
Impressed by Ofelia’s interest in the subject, Wadycki introduced her to her friend, state Rep. Laura Faver Dias from Grayslake, who had an hourlong discussion with the teenager.
“She is smart, funny, inquisitive, engaging. We just talked about state health care policy. We talked about her fears, our shared fears about what happens to Medicaid for her and her family as she is navigating cancer,” Dias recalled in an interview. “The hoops her mom has had to jump through to make sure they get the best care possible because they’re on Medicaid.”
Dias introduced Torres to the family’s state representative, Will Guzzardi, who was inspired by the girl’s sharp mind.
“This family is going through so much. They’re so strong,” Guzzardi said. “Ophelia is so brave.”
Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, whose ward includes the high school, noted cancer patients need an ironclad support network.
“As a father, I find it nearly impossible to put into words how horrific this situation is,” Martin said. “At a time when Ofelia and her family need their father the most, ICE has torn their family apart.”
Over the weekend, Ofelia took to work fighting for her father. She made a video that has since been published on a GoFundMe page by her teacher about the situation.
“I find it so unfair that hardworking immigrant families are being targeted because they were not born here,” Ofelia said in the recording.
Speaking to the world, Ofelia said she was making the video “to spread awareness and remind the public that immigrants are humans with families and deserve to be treated with love and respect like anyone else.”