He played ball at JB Pennington High, went to the Baptist church on Sundays and Methodist youth group Wednesday nights. He fell in love and drives a pickup and referees high school FB and talks with a better Southern accent than I do.
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Small town Alabama is the only home Fonzie knows, but ICE came for him anyway
“I don't know nothing about Mexico,” he said. “I don't even know how their political things work."
Small town Alabama is the only home Fonzie knows, but ICE came for him anyway- Updated: Aug. 08, 2025, 9:53 a.m.
- |Published: Aug. 08, 2025, 6:45 a.m.
 From top left: Bralie Chandler, Alfonso "Fonzie" Andrade and their son Glen; the Pennington High yearbook, Andrade at graduation; and Andrade as an Alabama high school football official.Special
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The town of Blountsville knows Alfonso Andrade as Fonzie. Like from Happy Days. He got that name in fifth grade at Blountsville elementary, and it stuck.
Ayyyyy.
Fonzie played football on the JB Pennington High School squad – an undersized wide receiver and DB – and graduated in 2017, robe and all. He went to the Baptist Church on Sundays and Methodist youth group on Wednesday nights. He fell in love and drives a pickup truck and referees high school football games and talks with a better Southern accent than I do.
And now, after a couple of stupid mistakes, the world is upside down.
Blount County, Alabama, is the only home Fonzie has ever known. But Thursday, at the age of 26, he sat in the Etowah County Detention Center awaiting a transfer to Louisiana that could lead to his deportation to Mexico.
“There’s nothing about this kid that’s not American,” said the Rev. Tyler Cantrell, a former Blountsville Town Council member who met Fonzie when he came to youth meetings at the Methodist church.
Almost nothing.
A quarter century ago, when he was 1, his family crossed the Mexican border to California, Fonzie said. The family moved to Blount County when he was 3. He was a teenager when he learned he was not an American citizen, and that alone was crushing.
He thought he was the very definition of the American dream.
“I don’t know nothing about Mexico,” he said Wednesday night from the detention center. “I don’t even know how their political things work. I don’t know how the government works. I don’t understand none of their things like I do here.”
Yet he is told it’s a coin flip whether a judge at a hearing next week will order his deportation, or allow him to stay in this country with his fiancee and their 1-year-old son. He has been told he could be dropped at the Mexican border to fend for himself. He is hardly fluent in Spanish.
“That just scares me,” he said. “I don’t know nothing. I really don’t even know the words. It’s just like I’m so numb to everything. And it hurts.”
Fonzie knows he screwed up. He got popped in Blount County for possession of a small amount of marijuana in 2020. And again in 2021. He later ran from police, and was afraid to go to court because he was “scared to show my face.” But his supporters in Blountsville are many.
“He tries to do what’s right,” Cantrell said. “He can sometimes be easily led, but he has what I call an internal compass. He comes back, he tries to do right.”
Fonzie lived with Donald Nation and his wife, Laura, before she died of ovarian cancer in 2021. Fonzie was a pall bearer, and Nation says he was a big help personally and to his church, where he helped start a Baptist youth rally called Beach Reach.
“He’s not perfect, but he’s a good kid and he’s trying really hard and he’s doing a lot better,” Nation said.
You hear that a lot from townspeople. No excuses for smoking pot or testing the patience of his court referral officer. But Nation and Cantrell and others point out his offenses were nonviolent misdemeanors, that he has done more for his community than he has done to it.
“He’s just being judged different,” Cantrell said. “No one would blink if it was a white kid who’d make these mistakes, or white young man.”
Fonzie refers to himself as “100% Southern, born and raised,” but has to check himself as it rolls off the tongue. He wasn’t, after all, born here.
“I was a baby when my parents brought me here for a better life,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice, but I’m so thankful they did.”
He agonizes over his mistakes, and his regrets, and prays his errors won’t cost him the country he loves.
Bralie Chandler, Fonzie’s fiance and the mother of his 1-year-old son Glen, said Fonzie had heard rumors that ICE agents would be waiting for him when he went to check in with the court last week, but he decided to go anyway, so as not to make things worse.
Two agents met him, along with his court referral officer Pamela Pullins, Chandler said. They took him into custody.
Pullins did not return calls.
Chandler is desperately worried for Fonzie, and for Glen, who toddles around their trailer asking for Dadda. She’s worried about herself, too.
“He takes care of me,” she said. “He takes care of us.”
Fonzie considers himself an American, an Alabamian, a proud Blount Countian. He dreamed of going into law enforcement. He dreamed of becoming an NFL official. And now he dreams of seeing Bralie and Glen.
I am struck by his faith in America. Even now.
“I really do believe the system is going to do justice,” he said. “I want to believe the government won’t do this.”
That will be up to a federal judge in Louisiana. As America becomes harder and harder to recognize or reconcile.
“I think it’s horrible,” Nation said. “He’s got a little baby boy. He doesn’t know anything about Mexico. He barely speaks Spanish. He can speak it, but it’s not good. He can’t read or write it.”
“We are so worried,” said Debbie Goble, a teacher who has known Fonzie for years at school and at the Baptist church. “All he knows is our little town of Blountsville.”
“He can’t survive in Mexico,” Cantrell said. “Especially if they dump him at the border.”
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