As a young unwed pregnant woman, González had her plans to find and marry the father of her unborn child derailed by the United States Treasury Department when she was excluded as an alien "likely to become a public charge" upon her arrival in New York City.

Her case was an appeal from the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, filed February 27, 1903, after also having her writ of habeas corpus (HC.

He went with the intention of finding a job in a factory in Linoleumville, Staten Island, in the neighborhood where Isabel's brother Luis González worked.

The U.S. occupation brought about a total change in Puerto Rico's economy and polity and did not apply democratic principles in their colony.

[7] The United States exerted its control over the economy of the island by prohibiting Puerto Rico from negotiating commercial treaties with other nations, from determining tariffs, and from shipping goods to the mainland on other than U.S.

The U.S. Congress was reluctant to fully incorporate Puerto Rico because its population was deemed racially and socially inferior to that of the mainland.

[8] In 1899, a letter published in the New York Times described Puerto Ricans as "uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people who were only interested in wine, women, music and dancing.

As a result, many Dominicans started marrying Puerto Ricans in greater numbers in order to stop immigration problems at US ports of entry.

[2] In the Downes v. Bidwell case of 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that the U.S. Constitution functioned differently in Puerto Rico from the way it did on the mainland.

[2] In August 1902, González boarded the S.S. Philadelphia, a small Red D Line steamship that departed from San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the Port of New York as its destination.

He also instructed his inspectors to attach the label of "public charge" to unmarried mothers and their children, despite most of them already expecting to receive a job upon admission to the United States.

Degetau then contacted Le Barbier and Parker, who informed him that they planned to appeal Gonzalez's case to the Supreme Court.

The case now would be about settling the status of all the native islanders who were in existence at the time the Spanish possessions were annexed by the United States.

[2] By February 16, 1903, Frederic René Coudert, Jr., an international law attorney from New York, who launched the Downes v. Bidwell case for clients protesting tariffs levied on goods shipped between Puerto Rico and the United States, joined Paul Fuller, Charles E. LeBarbier and Degetau in the Gonzalez case as a collaborator.

[2] The case, which became known as Gonzales v. Williams, was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on December 4 and 7, 1903, with Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller presiding.

She married Juan Francisco Torres on November 17, 1915, and stayed in New York until the 1930s when they moved to New Jersey (1930 Cranford Township NJ Census).

She wrote published letters in The New York Times that the decision and surrounding events of her case revealed that the United States failed to treat Puerto Ricans honorably, breaking promises to them and marking them as inferior to "full-fledged American citizens".

But instead of U.S. citizenship, Puerto Ricans got "the actual (current) incongruous status—'neither Americans nor foreigners,' as it was vouchsafed by the United States Supreme Court apropos of my detention at Ellis Island for the crime of being an 'alien.'"

[14] The act, which was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on March 2, 1917, also revised the system of the government in Puerto Rico.

Her great granddaughter, Belinda Torres-Mary, now actively pursues and maintains information regarding González's history and immigration struggle and is the keeper of the family documents.