SEQUIM — The people clamored, and Norm Dicks listened.

Deluged with thousands of e-mails, letters and phone calls for nearly two months, pleading with the veteran congressman to use his influence to secure the release of South African expatriate Oliver Strong from the Tacoma federal detention facility at which he had been held since Oct. 21 to await deportation — Dicks responded.

Three days later, Strong was on his way back to his Blyn-area home to spend Christmas with his family after having passed both Thanksgiving and his 44th birthday inside the Northwest Detention Center.

“If the congressman hadn’t have stepped in, this wouldn’t have happened,” Strong said in an interview last week at his home.

“It was a major, major relief to us.”

The release doesn’t mean the bronze sculptor and father of five no longer faces the threat of deportation.

He and his wife, Penny, failed to work with federal immigration officials in resolving the couple’s illegal-alien status after having let their work visas in the United States expire more than a decade before.

30 days or more

It does mean, however, that the couple will be given at least 30 days — and possibly more — to prepare to depart the country on their own terms once their forced-departure order with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division is changed to a voluntary departure order.

A motion to put that new order into effect is pending before the U.S. Bureau of Immigration Appeals in Virginia, said Robert Gibbs, the Strongs’ Seattle-based attorney.