LOYAL. LOCAL. COMPLETE.
For years, Jose Fiscal Belli has been known around Paris as the man who showed up.
He coached Little League games, sponsored youth athletics, helped feed local teams, supported community fundraisers and recently opened Main Street Cafe in downtown Paris with his wife, Courtney.
Now, as the husband and father of four sits in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, it is his family, friends and city leaders who are asking the community to show up for him.
The call came Monday, July 27, during the Paris City Council meeting, where a resident stood before city leaders not to debate an ordinance or ask about city services, but to ask how an entire community could help one of its own.
“I am here as a citizen of this community, and I would like to find out about one of our citizens who is in trouble,” the resident said. “I’d really like to help and gather other people together who might like to help, but I don’t want to do that if it’s not in the best interest of the family at this time.”
Mayor Craig Smith responded by explaining that the City of Paris has already reached out to federal officials but has little authority in an immigration case.
Instead, he said, the family needs the community’s voice.
“If you want to do something, call,” Smith said. “Get your friends to call. The calls seem to work better than anything else. It shows them that he is an active person in the community. He’s a good person.”
According to both Smith and the family, Jose’s story began long before he ever became a restaurant owner in Edgar County.
Family friend Nick Conner, who organized a fundraiser to help the Fiscal Belli family, said Jose was brought to the United States from Mexico as a minor by his father, who came seeking work to support relatives back home. After immigration officers conducted a raid on the apartment building where they were living in Minnesota, Jose and his father were detained and later released because they had committed no crime and were not the intended targets of the operation.
Soon afterward, the family relocated to Indiana for work.
According to Conner, an immigration court notice was mailed to the family’s former Minnesota address after they had already moved. Because neither Jose nor his father knew about the hearing, they missed it, and a removal order was entered against Jose in 2011 while he was still a minor.
Conner said neither the family nor Jose’s immigration attorney knew that order existed for years.
Despite that, Jose continued building a life.
He married Courtney in 2021, and together they began the legal process for him to obtain permanent residency through a marriage-based green card.
According to Conner, every step of that process had been approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Smith likewise told the council that Jose had been working with an immigration attorney for approximately four years and had already advanced to the second stage of naturalization, with a required family interview even being waived because he had no criminal record.
Then, last week, everything changed.
Smith said Jose traveled to Indianapolis on restaurant business.
“He made a mistake,” Smith said. “He went to Indianapolis to get a license for the restaurant in Clinton. He parked in a 10-minute meter area. He exceeded the 10 minutes. They gave him a ticket, ran the plates, bingo! ICE was contacted. Just a crazy, crazy deal.”
Because of the years-old removal order, Jose was taken into ICE custody.
According to Smith, he was initially detained closer to home before being transferred to Louisiana.
“They had him in Clay County and moved him in the middle of the night to Louisiana,” Smith said. “That’s what they do. We’re living it. It’s happened here.”
While Jose remains hundreds of miles away, Courtney has taken to social media, pleading for the public to help before he is deported.
“Jose has been taken to Louisiana, and they are trying to rapidly deport him,” she wrote July 24. Two days later, after speaking with her husband by video, Courtney shared what she said he described inside the detention center.
According to her post, Jose reported one bathroom for approximately 147 detainees, lights that remain on around the clock making sleep nearly impossible, violence among detainees that he said often goes unchecked, transportation without air conditioning in Louisiana’s summer heat and concerns about the quality of drinking water.
She also said he described witnessing inadequate medical attention being provided to another detainee who later died after repeatedly complaining of chest pain.
The Prairie Press has not independently verified those allegations.
Still, Courtney’s message was focused on keeping attention on her husband’s case.
“I will not be quiet!” she wrote. “Please don’t politicize this... We will not be quiet until this inhumane treatment is stopped.”
Those closest to Jose say the attention should not be centered solely on how he was detained, but on who he has become.
Conner described him as “the guy who shows up.”
“His generosity reaches well beyond our team,” Conner wrote. “He’s shown up again and again to help feed our kids and support them however he can.”
He said Jose sponsors a soccer team, coaches Little League, mentors young athletes and has quietly become someone many families in both Paris and Clinton rely on.
“Ask around Paris or Clinton, and you’ll hear the same thing over and over,” Conner wrote. “He’s a friend to so many, and family to even more.”
Smith echoed those sentiments before urging residents to tell federal officials exactly what Jose means to the community.
“Tell them his contribution to our community,” Smith said. “He’s important to his four children, to his wife... He’s just a good person, and he’s entitled to a fair shake.”
Conner said Jose’s attorney is now working to reopen the years-old removal order while also seeking to finalize the residency process that had already been progressing. Because the prior removal order remains active, he said, the legal fight is now about obtaining the opportunity for Jose’s case to be heard before deportation can occur.
Those claims have not been independently verified by The Prairie Press.
As legal efforts continue, the family is asking for help in two ways: by contacting Illinois’ congressional delegation to advocate on Jose’s behalf and by supporting the family’s fundraising campaign to help cover legal expenses and household costs while he remains detained.
For Smith, however, the issue ultimately comes down to something simpler than immigration law.
“This is not political,” he told those gathered Monday night. “This is what’s right and what’s wrong.”
For a man friends say has spent years investing in his neighbors, coaching their children and building a life in Paris, supporters hope the community will now invest in him.