The story of Godfrey Wade, the US Army veteran who has been deported after 50 years in the country: “It’s heartbreaking”

The story of Godfrey Wade captures, almost perfectly, the complicated reality the United States is facing around immigration and deportations.

Born and raised in Jamaica, Wade moved legally to the U.S. as a teenager and built an entirely new life. More than 50 years later — after serving honorably in the U.S. Army — he was deported without ever getting the chance to reopen his case or defend himself before a judge.

Wade had been living in Covington, Georgia, working for decades in a wide range of jobs, from chef to tennis coach to fashion designer. He built a large family of six children, later welcomed three grandchildren, and shared his life with his fiancée, April Watkins. He was fully integrated into American society and, by all accounts, deeply happy.

Everything changed in September 2025, when he was stopped for a minor traffic violation. That encounter triggered an old deportation order issued in 2014 — tied to a bounced check from 2007 and a domestic dispute charge from 2006 that, according to Wade, never involved physical violence.

A bureaucratic error that changed everything

Wade had resolved those issues years earlier by paying the required penalties. But he never knew about the immigration hearing that ultimately led to his removal order. The notices were sent to the wrong address and returned as “undeliverable”. For more than a decade, Wade lived unaware that a deportation order existed.

He spent several months in detention in Georgia before being transferred to a facility in Louisiana, leaving his family fearing that deportation could happen at any moment. And eventually, it did. Wade was sent back to Jamaica while his attorney was still filing motions to reopen the case.

“It’s heartbreaking,” his fiancée said after learning the news that upended the family they had built together.

His children publicly protested the decision, arguing that the case ignored decades of deep roots in the United States, his military service, and the severe disruption to their family. For them, their father’s deportation is not only a personal crisis — it raises painful questions about what it truly means to serve a country that, when it mattered most, seemed to turn its back on him.

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