Things haven’t been easy lately for the Giudice family since both Teresa Giudice and her husband Joe Giudice were locked up in prison, Joe specifically for mail, wire and bankruptcy fraud. But the water got even muddier for the Real Housewives of New Jersey family when it was said that Joe may be deported back to Italy due to not being an American citizen and having committed a crime on U.S. soil. Now, his eldest daughter Gia is threatening to cut their relationship off if he doesn’t fight against possible deportation.
“I already told him, say you lose this appeal, you better fight it until the Supreme Court,” she said on an episode of the popular Bravo reality series. “And at first, he didn’t want to be in ICE, he was like, ‘I’m done with this s—.’ And I said, ‘If you do that, you will not have a relationship with me.’”
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“If I were my father, I would have the urge sometimes too to sign the papers and go straight to Italy. But his deportation should not be happening,” she mentioned during her confessional. “He should have made himself a citizen a long time ago. It just shouldn’t have been done, and now this is the time for my father to show us that he really does love and care about us.”
All of this happened on the premiere of RHONJ when Giudice was talking to her children, Gia, 18; Gabriella, 15; Milania, 13; and Audriana, 10; about the appeal process. The episode was shot a week before his release from prison and into ICE when they were unsure about what would happen next. Joe served a 41-month prison sentence and was released back in March to then be transferred to ICE custody at the Clinton County Correctional Center in Pennsylvania. He stayed there up until last month when he was transferred again, this time to Italy as he waits for the final ruling on his deportation appeal.
Although Joe is from Italy originally, he was moved to the states just a year after he was born when his parents decided to settle on U.S. soil. However, he never became a U.S. citizen and according the law, deportation is an option if a person is convicted of “a crime of moral turpitude” or an “aggravated felony.”
Gia, who just graduated from high school and is now a college student at Rutgers University, is studying law after what happened to her parents.
