The two young daughters of the pizza guy grabbed up by immigration officers when he made a delivery to a Brooklyn military base still don’t know why their daddy hasn’t come home.
“I haven’t told them anything. It is hard for a 3-year-old girl to understand,” mom Sandra Chica told The Post.
“They only know that their Daddy isn’t here.”
Chica said she’s been trying to convince the girls — Luciana, 3, and Antonia, 2 — that their father, illegal immigrant Pablo Villavicencio, is “out working.”
“The older one, she always asks me why daddy’s in the news, and I say, ‘Oh, it’s because he’s doing a good job,’” she said.
“I have to lie because for her it’s going to be hard to understand why daddy’s in jail. I don’t know how to explain it to her.
“So from the beginning, I’ve been explaining that Daddy’s going to be working for a couple of days and he’s not going to be at home. So they know, but they don’t understand why. “
Chica called it a “really hard situation” — and one that’s soon going to get even harder, because Luciana turns 4 on June 20.
“As a mom, I just want to protect them, that they don’t suffer,” she said.
“I don’t know if it’s going to be good or not to tell them the truth.”
Chica said Luciana was especially crushed on Friday when she “heard a noise outside where the garbage is, and she got so happy.”
“She said, ‘Mommy, Daddy came! I knew he was coming!’ And I had to tell her, ‘Maybe it was a cat that moved the trash can.’ And she was so sad,” Chica said.
“Oh my God, it broke my heart.”
Despite being in the dark about their father’s predicament, Chica said the girls perked up on Sunday, a day after Manhattan federal Judge Alison Nathan blocked his deportation pending a July 20 hearing.
“They are playing today, they look happy today. It’s like they feel a different energy,” Chica said.
Villavicencio, 35, was taken into custody on June 1 while bringing an order of pasta to a sergeant at Fort Hamilton, where a guard ran a background check and learned there was an open ICE warrant for his arrest.
The Ecuadorian native ignored a court order to voluntarily leave the country in 2010 and instead married Chica, an American citizen, and settled down in Hempstead, LI.
But he remains locked up at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Kearny, N.J., pending arguments over his motion for a writ of habeas corpus and a temporary injunction barring his deportation.
In court papers filed Saturday, Villavicencio — who applied for a Green Card in February — claims that he was racially profiled and that being detained violates his constitutional rights.
He also noted that his youngest daughter suffers from a congenital heart defect, and filed letters his behalf from US Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and US Reps. Kathleen Rice, Nydia Velazquez and Hakeem Jeffries, all New York Democrats.
Details about the suit were first reported by the New York Times.
