Texas Graduate Visits Deported Dad at the Border Wearing Graduation Gown

Graduation is one of the biggest moments in a person’s life. You also want to share that incredible moment with the people that supported and inspired. But what if those people couldn’t make it to your graduation? Would you take your graduation to them? That is exactly what Leslie Silva did. The high school graduate from El Paso, Texas, wanted her father to be able to walk on stage and get her diploma but unfortunately he could not be there.

Her father was deported ten years ago — when Leslie was just 7-years-old — to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, but she wanted nothing more than her father to be with her at that moment. Leslie did the next best thing and went to the border at the Ysleta-Zaragoza international bridge from El Paso into Juárez.

She tweeted a video of the big reunion and it went viral.

https://twitter.com/kklesliee/status/1003680287514087431

She tweeted: “My dad was deported 3 times for trying to come back to his family. unfortunately he couldn’t make it to any of my sisters graduations including mine so i gave him the honor to be the first to see me before i walk the stage.”

According to El Paso Times, the ” video was taken at about 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning just before Silva’s 9 a.m. graduation ceremony at UTEP’s Don Haskins Center. She posted it to Twitter Monday morning and by the evening, it had been shared 16,000 times, had 56,000 likes and was viewed 1.1 million times.”

That number has doubled by now.

“He was so happy. He started crying and I’ve never seen him cry,” Leslie told the El Paso Times in an interview. “He said he felt really honored and he thought it was really nice of me to go see him before my graduation ceremony.”

She goes on to say, “He has missed a lot of me and my sisters’ lives — graduations, parties and everything. So we thought it would be kind of special to see me before graduation day.”