By Sumayya
An Edmonton-born citizen who spent the majority of his life living inside the United States has returned to Canada, following the loss of a prolonged judicial battle to stay south of the national boundary alongside his two young boys.
Curtis Wright, 40, recounted that he survived horrific environmental conditions across multiple U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) holding infrastructure sites throughout Texas following his initial arrest 10 months ago. Instead of executing a voluntary self-deportation protocol back to Canada, Wright explained that he actively litigated to maintain his residency in the United States in order to physically bring up the young children he co-parents from a prior marriage.
“Is it possible to manage this from an entirely separate nation? Of course, but that effectively restricts things to holiday periods and summer vacations,” Wright articulated during an interview conducted from Kelowna, British Columbia. “It severely diminishes my available hours and my fundamental capacity to, you know, bond and actively function as their dad.”
Wright confirmed that federal officers sent him back to Canada from the South Texas ICE Processing Centre slightly more than 14 days ago. His young sons, who are currently eight and 11 years old, continue to reside within Texas.
Wright initially relocated to Houston during his childhood years. He subsequently secured employment operating within the localized oil and gas industrial sector.
In November, while returning from an international corporate journey to Mexico to hold consultations with petroleum firms and supply distributors, he underwent an intensive interrogation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, which caused a decades-old criminal conviction to reappear on his record. At the age of 17, he recounted, he was formally convicted on a charge of illegal narcotics possession, resulting in judicial orders to complete mandatory community service hours alongside serving a designated period of probation. A quantity of Xanax, a prescription anti-anxiety medicine, had been located inside his pickup truck, he further detailed.
Wright stated that immediately upon his arrival back from Mexico, federal border agents placed him in heavy shackles and transported him away inside the rear cabin of an official van. He attributes U.S. President Donald Trump’s intensified administrative focus on national deportations as the primary reason why his long-term life inside the country had never escalated into a legal issue for nearly three decades.
The rapid, dizzying transition from enjoying complete, unrestricted personal freedom to suddenly being locked inside a federal detention complex was entirely surreal, he noted. Amid the intense, sweltering external Texas summer heat, he recounted, he was ultimately confined within freezing cold intake processing units. “The solid concrete floor that you are forced to sit on and stretch out on is actually colder than the temperature of the air surrounding you,” he described.
