U.S. Marine Pleads: Don’t Deport My Father

By Bryan Llenas
Published December 21, 2010

Lance Cpl. Aspar Andres is pictured left and his father Juan Andres is pictured right.

A U.S. marine is pleading for leniency on behalf of his father, who awaits deportation to Guatemala after being detained earlier this month.

Lance Cpl. Aspar Andres, 21, returned home from his base in Hawaii in anticipation of a 2011 deployment to Afghanistan to find out that federal authorities were holding his father, Juan Andres, 41, in Louisville, KY’s Boone County Jail.

Juan Andres’s attorneys, Ron Russell and Becca O’Neil, both acknowledge that Andres came into the United States illegally 25 years ago. But they are requesting that the government grant him leniency, citing his good moral character and his son’s service in the Marines.

“I feel like that if I am serving this country, at the very least I should be able to come home and see my parents and my family,â€