Deportation leaves father, business reeling

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This article was published 17/08/2025 (221 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Salvator Fernandez, a “staple” employee of Renaissance Transport, was sent home on Friday as he could no longer keep himself together. He had been hit that morning with words that no father wants to hear.

“Yesterday, when he found out the news, he looked like he got run over by a bus,” said Josh Hildebrandt, one of his coworkers at Renaissance Transport. “Sal is a pretty happy-go-lucky guy most of the time – but that was not him.”

Sitting in a house on 16th Street the next morning, Fernandez is holding a piece of paper. It’s from Canada Border Services Agency, and it orders his daughter to appear at Winnipeg Richardson International Airport. His daughter, Cynthia, is being deported on Monday, along with three of his granddaughters.

A duffel bag is packed on the floor of the living room. The cupboards behind him are empty, and a mop is leaning against the wall.

The colour washed from his face, Salvator is short with words. He has lost, he says. He was trying to protect someone he loves, and he lost the battle. His daughter and granddaughters, 9, 11, and 17 are squished into the couch next to him in silence.

They will move away from the family. And they have nothing to return to in their former hometown in Mexico, either, after fleeing crime, Salvator said.

“It’s not only that we’re going to be split, but they’re going back to Mexico — and I am worried about the safety.”

In 2020, a man showed up at Cynthia’s home, sitting in her car and looking at her, she told the Sun. She had helped identify the man to law enforcement years before, after witnessing a car theft.

Cynthia fled the home the next day and stayed with family members until Salvator could fly to Mexico. They came back together to Brandon the next year, he said.

In looking to stay in Canada, the family started a long process. Applications for work permits, permanent residency and refugee status have failed, Salvator said. The situation spanned years, and the final blow landed on Friday.

“Everything came to the wall, you could see,” said his coworker Jason Laboissiere. “Sal hasn’t been himself for probably three months.”

Even Cynthia has begun to worry, he said. After getting the news she would be deported, the daughter requested that someone check in with her about her father.

“The last thing she told me, she gave me her email and she said, ‘I want weekly updates about dad.’”

Cynthia took up a job with her father and her brother David at the shop and had worked there eight months. It made for three family members on the team, and so the news has broken morale on the floor, said owner Gerald Brown.

“If you went in and interviewed my employees, they are all upset. It’s a morale thing,” Brown said. “I saw David yesterday, and he was a basket case.”

Brown told the Sun he personally got involved in the fight. He spent $30,000 trying to defend Cynthia’s effort to stay in the country, he said. But even “going to bat” for her as an employer wasn’t enough, he said.

The impacts will continue on the floor of the auto shop. Salvator will be taking two weeks off work to fly to Mexico and help his daughter settle into a new city, his wife will stay even longer to ensure things are secure, and the shop is out of the best cleaner it has had in years, Brown said.

Looking to the future, Salvator said he will begin a process applying for Cynthia to immigrate to Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, he said. The process is expected to take two years.

If that fails, it will still not be over, he said. He is now weighing the idea of moving to Mexico to live with his daughter and grandchildren — but that is a long time away.

Salvator says the family will all spend the weekend at Cynthia’s place helping her to pack, before she goes to Winnipeg on Monday.

The mother will find the same work in Mexico but never the same security, she said. Her home on 16th Street, paid for by two jobs in Brandon, inhabited by her three girls, was the best home she ever had. Her father translates her words from Spanish:

“They’re gonna be poor,” he says. “Not like this.”

»cmcdowell@brandonsun.com