This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, Ethnic Studies at state and national levels. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
I woke up Monday morning to the news that the Trump Administration will terminate Temporary Protected Status for more than two hundred thousand individuals from El Salvador, ending their work permits and subjecting them to deportation. The stakes of the decision were amplified, for me, by the story I spent much of the past year and a half reporting, in collaboration with a team at Columbia Journalism School: an effort to build a database of immigrants—especially asylum seekers—deported to their deaths or to other harms, often after pleading for refuge on U.S. soil.
My reporting on the issue began in early 2016, when I’d noticed a curious void in conversations about U.S. immigration policy. On the one hand, politicians were routinely acknowledging the hypothetical consequences of deportation, noting that men and women who came to the U.S. fleeing Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—often got sent back to face the very harms they’d sought to escape. On the other hand, individual cases of such deaths rarely surface in the news, for a long list of reasons: the families of murdered deportees are often terrified to talk, given the frequency of retribution against those who do, and no U.S. government agency is tasked with mapping the fate of asylum seekers or others who’ve been turned away from safe harbor.
So last year, as the director of Columbia Journalism School’s Global Migration Program, I recruited a team of more than a dozen graduate students to join me in creating a database of deaths by deportation. We also tracked cases of men, women, and children deported to other traumas: sexual assault, kidnapping, torture, and more. Together, we called hundreds of attorneys, immigration-aid organizations, law-enforcement officers, and more, scouring the country, and then the hemisphere, for clues. I travelled into law offices, living rooms, and even a state prison, to interview men, women, and teen-agers who had been harmed after their deportations, or else to speak with the loved ones of murdered deportees, and to examine the clothing, notebooks, and photographs they left behind.
A year into the Presidency of Donald Trump, the threats I sought to document are only growing more urgent. Recently, Trump announced that he would end President Obama’s policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, soon terminating protections from deportation for more than seven hundred thousand “Dreamers”—including one young woman I interviewed in Texas, who faces death threats if sent back to Mexico, where she once testified in a murder trial against the man who killed her cousin. (Each day, more than a hundreddacarecipients are losing their status; come March, that number will soar, unless Congress takes swift action.) And many more are being turned away directly at the border, even when they plead for help and often merit it under domestic and international law; instead, they’ve been sent back to face a fate from which there is no return.
—Sarah Stillman
Key Quote from within:
"In December, Elizabeth’s DACA
status expired. If a legislative solution isn’t reached by early March,
nearly seven hundred thousand people in the U.S. will be stripped of
their legal status and their protection from deportation.
Before
Laura crossed the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge into Mexico, she
turned to the Border Patrol agent supervising her return to Mexico.
“When I am found dead,” she told him, “it will be on your conscience.”
On June 9, 2009, just after 2 A.M.,
Laura S. left the restaurant where she waitressed, in Pharr, Texas, and
drove off in her white Chevy. She was in an unusually hopeful mood. Her
twenty-third birthday was nine days away, and she and her
nineteen-year-old cousin, Elizabeth, had been discussing party plans at
the restaurant. They’d decided to have coolers of beer, a professional
d.j., and dancing after Laura put her three sons to bed. Now they were
heading home, and giving two of Laura’s friends a ride, with a quick
detour for hamburgers. Elizabeth said that, as they neared the highway, a
cop flashed his lights at them. The officer, Nazario Solis III, claimed
that Laura had been driving between lanes and asked to see her license
and proof of insurance.
Laura had neither. She’d lived in the United States undocumented her whole adult life.
“Do you have your residence card?” Solis asked.
“No,”
Laura said, glancing anxiously at her cousin and her friends. Solis
questioned them, too. Only Elizabeth had a visa, which she fished out of
her purse. Solis directed the others to get out of the car. “I’m
calling Border Patrol,” he said—an unusual move, at the time, for a
small-town cop in South Texas.
Laura panicked.
At five feet two inches and barely a hundred pounds, she looked younger
than her age. She often wore tube tops and short shorts, and styled her
hair in a girlish bob. Her affect was “attached to childhood,” her older
brother told me; she collected porcelain dolls, and loved Japanese
anime and Saturday-morning cartoons. Laura’s friends saw her trembling.
Like her, they had kids who were U.S. citizens and steady jobs they
didn’t want to lose, but they knew that Laura’s fear was distinct. She
had an ex-husband across the border, in Reynosa, Mexico, who had
promised to kill her if she returned.
“I can’t
be sent back to Mexico,” Laura told Solis, beginning to cry. “I have a
protection order against my ex—please, just let me call my mom and
she’ll bring you the paperwork.”
The Immigrants Deported to Death and Violence
Sarah Stillman reports on people who fled their home countries fearing
for their lives, and the tragic consequences when they were sent back.
Laura’s
two-year-old had an operation scheduled for later that week, to remove
an abscess in his neck, and Laura also told Solis about that. “I need to
be here,” she begged, in Spanish. In English, Elizabeth detailed the
threats from Laura’s ex, Sergio. “You can’t do this,” Elizabeth said.
“He’ll kill her.”
“Sorry,” Solis replied,
shrugging. “I already called.” (Solis could not be reached for comment.
He was later sent to prison for unrelated convictions, including
bribery, extortion, and drug conspiracy.)
Laura
had started dating Sergio when she was eighteen, and he soon became
physically abusive. After a particularly horrific night the previous
spring, when Sergio assaulted her, Laura had finally called the police,
and coöperated with them to secure his arrest. He was later deported. In
the year since then, Laura had tried to create a normal childhood for
her sons. She shared a small trailer with Elizabeth and the boys near
the Sharyland Plantation, a gated community of houses with
lima-bean-shaped swimming pools and Roman-pillared porches which
advertised its “delicate scent of hibiscus and bougainvillea flowers.”
Sometimes she’d dress the boys in cowboy outfits, and use the neighbors’
sheep and horses as their personal petting zoo. At night, she’d sneak
into the citrus groves and pick oranges for breakfast, humming her
favorite song, “Single Mom”: “A single mother who does not worry, who
will always fight to be a mom. Tell him she can be a mother without
him.” Still, Sergio haunted her. In Mexico, he’d reportedly joined a
local drug cartel. He often texted Laura death threats.
Laura
and her friends waited by the roadside until a U.S. Border Patrol agent
named Ramiro Garza arrived and ordered the three of them into his
vehicle. Laura pleaded with Garza as he drove them to a nearby
processing center, where Laura’s friends saw her, under pressure, sign
paperwork for a “voluntary return.” Three hours later—after holding off
until dawn “for safety reasons,” Garza later explained, “since there
were females involved”—he drove them to the McAllen-Hidalgo
International Bridge, which crosses the Rio Grande and leads to Reynosa,
a city so violent that the U.S. State Department forbids its employees
there from venturing out after midnight.
As the
sun rose, Laura stepped onto the bridge and into a much larger story,
one that has launched a major legal battle over the U.S. government’s
duty to protect prospective deportees who plead for their lives. The
lawsuit, and others like it, has implications for the treatment of
hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have found refuge in the United
States, and for whom deportation can be tantamount to death. Some, like
Laura, are survivors of domestic violence seeking safety in the U.S.
Others, like Elizabeth, are Dreamers, undocumented youths who were
granted relief from deportation under President Obama, only to have
their status imperilled by his successor. Still others are asylum
seekers from Central America, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and
elsewhere, who have fled gangs, climate crises, and armed conflicts,
and then been misinformed or turned away by U.S. Customs and Border
Protection officers, some of whom have been emboldened under President
Trump.
In the final moments before Laura
crossed the bridge, she turned to Agent Garza. “When I am found dead,”
she told him, “it will be on your conscience.”
When
Donald Trump announced his bid for the Presidency, he made anxieties
about whiteness under siege a signature part of his platform. On the
campaign trail, he promised to “deport all criminal aliens and save
American lives.” After his Inauguration, the Department of Homeland
Security created an office for the victims of crimes committed by
undocumented immigrants, called VOICE—Victims
of Immigration Crime Engagement. The office is compiling an online
database to track “illegal alien perpetrators of crime.” (Data show that
immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.)
There is, however, no White House initiative to track a more sprawling
set of legal violations involving immigrants—violations for which the
U.S. government is largely responsible.
In the
past decade, a growing number of immigrants fearing for their safety
have come to the U.S., only to be sent back to their home countries—with
the help of border agents, immigration judges, politicians, and U.S.
voters—to violent deaths. Even as border apprehensions have dropped, the
number of migrants coming to the U.S. because their lives are in danger
has soared. According to the United Nations, since 2008 there has been a
fivefold increase in asylum seekers just from Central America’s
Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—where organized
gangs are dominant. In 2014, according to the U.N., Honduras had the
world’s highest murder rate; El Salvador and Guatemala were close
behind.
Politicians often invoke the prospect
of death by deportation in debates about the fate of these immigrants
and others with precarious status, like the Dreamers. In February, 2016,
in a speech criticizing the lack of legal representation for Central
American children seeking refuge, Harry Reid, at that time the Senate
Minority Leader, warned Congress, “Deportation means death for some of
these people.” That summer, Senator Edward J. Markey, of Massachusetts,
told the press, “We should not be sending families back to situations
where they can be killed.” He added, “That’s just un-American.”
These
conversations have been largely theoretical, devoid of names and faces.
No U.S. government body monitors the fate of deportees, and
immigrant-aid groups typically lack the resources to document what
happens to those who have been sent back. Fear of retribution keeps most
grieving families from speaking publicly. In early 2016, as the
director of the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University’s
Graduate School of Journalism, I set out, with a dozen graduate
students, to create a record of people who had been deported to their
deaths or to other harms—a sort of shadow database of the one that the
Trump Administration later compiled to track the crimes of “alien
offenders.” We contacted more than two hundred local legal-aid
organizations, domestic-violence shelters, and immigrants’-rights groups
nationwide, as well as migrant shelters, humanitarian operations, law
offices, and mortuaries across Central America. We spoke to families of
the deceased. And we gathered the stories of immigrants who had endured
other harms—including kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault—as a
result of deportations under Obama and Trump.
As
the database grew to include more than sixty cases, patterns emerged.
Often, immigrants or their families had warned U.S. officials that they
were in danger if sent back. Ana Lopez, the mother of a twenty-year-old
gay asylum seeker named Nelson Avila-Lopez, wrote a letter to the U.S.
government during Christmas week in 2011, two months after Immigration
and Customs Enforcement accidentally deported him to Honduras. Nelson
had fled the country at seventeen, after receiving gang threats. He’d
entered the U.S. unauthorized and been ordered removed, but an
immigration judge then granted him an emergency stay of his deportation
so that he could reopen his case for asylum. An ICE agent told his family’s legal team that Nelson was deported because “someone screwed up,” and ICE alleges that the proper office had not been notified of the judge’s stay.
Laura’s mother holds up a blouse that her daughter left behind in Texas, after a traffic stop led to her return to Mexico.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake / Magnum for The New Yorker
“His
life is in danger,” Ana Lopez wrote, begging U.S. authorities to
reverse her son’s deportation. Her efforts proved fruitless. Two months
later, Nelson died in a prison fire, along with more than three hundred
and fifty other inmates. His lawyer told me that Nelson had been
detained by the Honduran government without charges, in an anti-gang
initiative. Survivors of the fire alleged that it was set intentionally,
perhaps as an act of gang retaliation, and that the guards had done
little to help the men as they screamed and burned to death in their
cells.
We discovered, too, how minor missteps—a
traffic violation or a workplace dispute—can turn lethal for
unauthorized immigrants. At eighteen, Juan Carlos Coronilla-Guerrero was
deported from Texas to Mexico. He later returned and settled in Buda,
Texas, with his wife. He worked as a carpenter and raised three kids. In
January, 2017, someone in his neighborhood reported him for a domestic
dispute; police found him in possession of a quarter of a gram of
marijuana.
In March, Coronilla went to the
Travis County courthouse for what, before Trump’s election, would likely
have been a quick misdemeanor hearing. Travis was a “sanctuary
jurisdiction,” meaning that the sheriff there declined to honor most
federal detention requests
for undocumented individuals without a warrant or an allegation of a
serious crime. But Trump, within days of his Inauguration, had ordered a
crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions, and ICE
agents in Travis County had suddenly appeared in the courthouse. After
Coronilla left his proceeding, his lawyer noticed two men who, he
recalled, were “dressed like hunters.” The men followed Coronilla into
an elevator, then identified themselves as ICE agents and arrested him for reëntry after deportation, a felony.
Coronilla’s
wife begged a federal judge to spare her husband. Gangs had overrun his
home town in Mexico, and deportees were prime targets for crime, since
they were presumed to have money. Coronilla was deported in June. Three
months later, gunmen woke him from the bed where he slept with his young
son. According to the Austin American-Statesman,
he tried to soothe the boy, saying, “Don’t worry, my love.” His body
was found about forty miles away, filled with bullets. When I spoke to
Coronilla’s wife shortly after his death, she told me that she’d
returned to Mexico to claim his body. She now fears for her own life.
“He was a good man,” she said. “Now I have to prepare for his funeral.”
In
the years following the Second World War, the United Nations
established a principle of international law known as non-refoulement,
or non-return, which forbids the removal of asylum seekers to countries
where they are likely to be tortured or killed. The principle was
enshrined in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees,
formalizing the concept of the “refugee” and insuring safe harbor for
people who could show “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for
reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular
social group, or political opinion.” No one with a credible fear of
persecution could be expelled “in any manner whatsoever to a territory
where he or she fears threats to life or freedom.”
For
the U.S., the effort to protect refugees was also an act of atonement.
In 1939, the government had rejected a boat carrying more than nine
hundred Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany. At least two hundred of them
were later killed in the Holocaust. As the refugee crisis worsened,
countless more were refused entry. President Franklin Roosevelt had
warned the public that Jews posed a national-security threat, and argued
for tighter restrictions on their numbers. “In some of the other
countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish
refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies,” he said at a
press conference. Among those denied entry was Anne Frank, whose father
applied for refugee status for his family in 1941, unsuccessfully. “What
is done cannot be undone,” Anne wrote in her diary, “but one can prevent it happening again.” She later died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In
1980, Congress incorporated the idea of non-refoulement into the
Refugee Act. The act established protocols for vetting and resettling
refugees and assured asylum seekers that they would not be treated as
criminals, even if they arrived unauthorized in the U.S. The act, which
had bipartisan support, was also meant to bolster relationships with
allies and to provide a humanitarian model of resettlement for the rest
of the world.
Today, the first screening of
asylum seekers at the border often falls to U.S. Customs and Border
Protection officers, who attempt to separate out candidates for asylum
and other forms of protection. Many agents treat the task with great
care. In the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas, several told me that they view
the work of identifying individuals who may have fled serious harm as
one of the most rewarding parts of their job.
A
field manual for C.B.P. agents lists a series of questions that agents
must ask an unauthorized immigrant before subjecting him or her to
immediate deportation. “Do you have any fear or concern about being
returned to your home country or being removed from the United States?”
one reads. “Would you be harmed if you were returned?” another asks.
C.B.P. agents are not authorized to evaluate the validity of the fear
expressed. Instead, anyone answering yes to these questions must be
referred to an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services and given a chance to explain his or her fear. “The inspector
should err on the side of caution,” the field manual reads, and “apply
the criteria generously.”
Nevertheless, my team
and I heard stories from more than a dozen women who say that they were
never asked the required questions, or were ignored, mocked, or even
sexually propositioned by U.S. agents after expressing their fears—and
then deported to harm. In Queens, we met Rosaleda, who had worked as a
police officer in Comayagua, Honduras, until her investigation of a
cousin’s murder revealed a high-ranking colleague’s involvement in the
crime, which Rosaleda reported to the department. Menacing phone calls
began, followed by a drive-by shooting while she worked the overnight
shift. “This is a warning,” read a note bearing her name that was left
at the scene. “Leave things alone or we will kill you and next time we
won’t miss.” Rosaleda asked a supervisor to transfer her; he said he’d
consider it only in exchange for sex. In a second attempt on her life,
while she was on patrol, two of her colleagues were killed. Rosaleda
decided to risk the
journey north. Her situation is surprisingly common, in some ways. In a
recent study conducted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights,
ten per cent of the women interviewed, who had fled El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras, or Mexico, indicated that “the police or other
authorities were the direct source of their harm.”
When
Rosaleda arrived in Texas, she was apprehended and deported without
seeing a judge or a lawyer. She hadn’t shared details of her escape from
Honduras, fearing that it would further endanger her. She attempted to
cross the border again, and was kidnapped by a cartel and held for
ransom. Eventually, she made it to New York, where she found pro-bono
legal help. But, because of her earlier—and, her attorney argues,
unlawful—deportation, she is now ineligible for asylum. (She was granted
a “withholding of removal,” which has allowed her to remain in the U.S.
but offers no path to permanent legal status.)
Men and women gather their personal belongings and are escorted across the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge.
Allegations abound
of Customs and Border Protection officers dismissing asylum seekers
more brazenly. According to a 2014 American Civil Liberties Union report
based on conversations with nearly a hundred people who were removed
without seeing an immigration judge, “Fifty-five percent said they were
not asked about fear of persecution or torture,” while “forty percent
who were asked and said they were afraid were ordered deported without
seeing an asylum officer.” For years, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom has documented Customs and Border
Protection’s noncompliance with asylum-seeker protections, including, in
more than fifty per cent of cases, officers at ports of entry
neglecting “to read the required information.” More recently, after
Trump’s election, civil-liberties groups began documenting an apparent
increase in rejections in some places on the border. According to a
recent lawsuit, C.B.P. officers have told prospective asylum seekers,
“The United States is not giving asylum anymore,” and “Trump says we
don’t have to let you in.”
On
the night Laura was sent back across the McAllen-Hidalgo International
Bridge, her mother, Maria, put her grandkids to sleep and lay down on
Laura’s bed. Lately, she’d been helping Laura with childcare. After her
daughter got back from her waitressing shift, she would often get into
bed next to her mom and tell stories from her day before falling asleep.
When Maria noticed, around sunrise, that her daughter hadn’t returned,
she began to worry.
Maria had raised Laura and
her brother as a single mother while working at a Black & Decker
plant in Reynosa, on the assembly line. She’d also done a stint at a
laundromat, where Laura kept her company. Laura grew into a mischievous
preteen. Once, she riled her brother by shaving off half his mustache
while he was sleeping. At eighteen, Laura started seeing Sergio, who
lived on her grandmother’s block. Sergio had a buzz cut, a square jaw,
and an awkward sense of humor. He and Laura talked on the phone for
hours, until Maria complained, “My phone bill—it’s a whole year’s
salary!” Sergio had Laura’s name tattooed on his arm. After a year,
Laura, who had a son from a previous relationship, gave birth to their
first child. When Sergio later moved to Texas to work in construction
with his father, Laura joined him. In 2007, the couple had another boy.
Laura found work as a waitress and sold homemade candied apples
door-to-door, while also taking care of the children. They were a
handful, and, Maria recalled, “her partner was like a fourth child.”
Maria
told me that Sergio had been abused as a child and had struggled with
addiction. “He came from a tough psychological background,” Laura’s
brother said. One time, Maria told me, Sergio dragged Laura across the
floor by her hair. Another day, in March, 2008, when Laura said she was
going to leave Sergio, he grabbed a knife and threatened to commit
suicide. As Laura protested, he shoved her to the floor and kicked her
in the ribs. He beat her so badly that she called the police and
prepared to file charges against him. A judge signed an emergency
protection order forbidding Sergio from going within two hundred yards
of Laura’s home, but the order seemed only to enrage Sergio. After
multiple threats against Laura, he was arrested, charged with assault,
and deported to Mexico.
In the years since
Laura and Sergio had left Reynosa, the town had become a cartel
battleground. In 2008, at least five thousand Mexicans died in the drug
war, more fatalities than the United States suffered during the Iraq
War. That year, a drug kingpin was captured in a shoot-out near Laura’s
childhood home, and the military seized five hundred and forty rifles, a
hundred and sixty-five grenades, and fourteen sticks of TNT. A turf war
began, to determine his replacement. After Sergio returned to Reynosa,
he reportedly started working as a cartel grunt. Maria told me that he
continued to threaten Laura, saying that if she ever returned to Mexico
he’d set her on fire, and texting, “I’m going to smoke you.”
On
that Tuesday morning in June when Laura didn’t come home from her
waitressing shift, Maria considered the dark possibilities right away.
Then the phone rang. It was Laura, from Reynosa. “I did everything I
could,” she said, crying. “I even told the police, ‘Arrest me, and I’ll show you the documents,’ ” referring to the emergency protection order.
Laura
called Elizabeth, too, and the cousins made a plan to meet in Reynosa.
Elizabeth, trying to lighten the mood, asked whether the border agent
who deported Laura was cute. Laura said that he was, and Elizabeth asked
if she had tried to flirt. Laura replied, “I told him, ‘You’re sending
me straight to the slaughterhouse.’ ”
For
years, most undocumented immigrants facing deportation in the U.S. were
given a chance to go before a judge—to show evidence, call witnesses,
and make a case for why they should be allowed to stay. In 1996,
Congress revoked that right for tens of thousands of immigrants,
expanding forms of “summary removal,” which can take place without a
hearing or judicial input. By 2013, more than eighty per cent of
deportations were nonjudicial, with the result that life-or-death
decisions now routinely rest in the hands of immigration authorities at
the border.
Even when asylum seekers get the
opportunity to see a judge, it can be difficult to prove that their
fears merit legal relief. Asylum seekers aren’t entitled to lawyers, and
children as young as three have been told to represent themselves in
immigration court. According to Transactional Records Access
Clearinghouse, at Syracuse University, asylum seekers who find legal
representation are five times more likely to win their cases. Geography
is a strong determining factor in their fates. When the Government
Accountability Office studied the outcomes of asylum cases in courts
nationwide, it found significant geographical disparities in the
responses to nearly identical situations. Between 2007 and 2014, some
sixty per cent of asylum applicants won their cases in New York City,
while in the courts of Omaha and Atlanta less than five per cent did.
Perhaps
the most formidable challenge for asylum seekers is that the Second
World War-era categories of protection aren’t well suited to immigrants
fleeing modern gang violence. Courts resist recognizing the asylum
claims of people who have been targeted by MS-13, for instance, because
the motive for violence rarely fits the criteria. For victims of
domestic violence, the legal protections, including the Violence Against
Women Act, are slightly more favorable. If Laura had gone before a
judge, she could have had multiple options for potential relief,
including a U visa, for crime victims. Still, the legal scholar Blaine
Bookey writes, “Whether a woman fleeing domestic violence will receive
protection in the United States seems to depend not on the consistent
application of objective principles, but rather on the view of her
individual judge, often untethered to any legal principles at all.”
Not
long ago, I met a young mother who asked to be identified by her middle
name, Elena. In Honduras, where she grew up, her teen-age brother was
murdered by MS-13 for being gay, another brother was killed for refusing
to join the gang, and her sister was shot for ignoring a gang leader’s
sexual advances after he’d raped and impregnated her. A different gang
member began pursuing Elena, and fired shots at her house after she
turned him down. She reported the crime to police, and then learned that
he was planning further retaliation against her.
In
2012, Elena crossed the U.S. border near Eagle Pass, Texas, and told a
Border Patrol agent that she feared for her life. He logged her
possessions: a black sweater, a hairband, gray shoelaces, and a key
chain with photographs of her two children, whom she’d left behind in
Honduras. He asked, “Would you be harmed if you are returned to your
home country?” He wrote down a single word: “No.”
In
detention, Elena fought back against this supposed denial, and won a
hearing with an asylum officer, who corrected the record. Here she
encountered a new obstacle. After she related her experiences, the
officer asked her whether she was persecuted on account of her race,
religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular
social group—the refugee criteria created by the United Nations to
reflect the political threats of 1951. Elena answered no on all counts,
and the officer determined that she did not qualify to apply for asylum.
Elena
appealed, requesting a hearing with a judge. Asking to go before an
immigration judge often means a long stint in detention, and detention
can mean poor food, minimal medical care, and scant access to legal
counsel. In the past, federal policy has encouraged releasing asylum
seekers while they await court hearings, sparing taxpayers the cost of
detention. But in the last year of Obama’s Presidency, and then under
Trump, the percentage of asylum seekers who were granted parole
plummeted. Government data obtained in a civil-rights lawsuit showed
that, in one New York facility, fifty per cent of parole requests were
granted in the months immediately before Trump’s Inauguration. In the
months after, twelve per cent were.
After three
months in detention, Elena was granted a rare hearing before an
immigration judge. The hearing took place virtually, with the judge
appearing on a video monitor. He asked Elena one question.
“Did you move to any other city in Honduras before coming to the United States?” he inquired.
“No,” she said.
“Well,
the government of the United States doesn’t afford you protection for
this type of reason. I affirm the asylum officer’s decision. Nothing
further.” Elena was deported two weeks later.
Back
in her home town, Elena was assaulted at gunpoint by the man she’d
fled. He tortured her, holding a lighter to her skin. Other gang members
cracked her thirteen-year-old son’s skull. She fled, with her kids, to a
tobacco-farming town in western Honduras, where the man who’d been
pursuing her found her again. Once more, she escaped to the U.S. This
time, authorities agreed that Elena’s fear—and the threat to her kids’
lives—was credible. But, like Rosaleda, she is barred from receiving
asylum because of her prior deportation.
Many
immigrants, after being deported, never get a second chance to prove
their claims. Constantino Morales was a cop in Guerrero, Mexico, until
he tried to break up a drug cartel and became a target of violence. He
escaped to the U.S. and worked at a Cheesecake Factory in Des Moines,
Iowa, and then became a popular laborers’-rights advocate. As with
Laura, a minor traffic stop led to his removal, which he initially
fought. At a community meeting with Tom Latham, at that time a
Republican congressman, Morales said, “If I am sent back, I will face
more violence, and I could lose my life.” Morales had applied for asylum
a month earlier. He was denied. At the time, the U.S. State Department
called Guerrero “the most violent state in Mexico.” Seven months after
Morales’s deportation, he was shot and killed.
In
October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried the “rampant abuse and
fraud” in the asylum system and said that “the system is being gamed.”
The Trump Administration has called on Congress to crack down, which
federal immigration judges may be doing already. For the past several
years, asylum grant rates have declined. In 2017, judges rejected some
sixty per cent of asylum seekers, the highest denial rate in more than a
decade.
Protections have also evaporated for
many refugees seeking resettlement in the U.S. Trump has portrayed
refugees from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Somalia not as
candidates for humanitarian assistance but as national-security threats.
In his first days in office, he banned many of them from travelling to
the U.S. The ban is being contested in ongoing litigation. Several
asylum and refugee officers told me they worry that the ban, and the
inflamed discourse about refugees more generally, misrepresents their
highly comprehensive vetting process, and undermines core American
values.
The
road where Laura was pulled over for a routine traffic stop, which led
to her return to Mexico and her death. “When a woman is afraid,” Laura’s
mother asked, “why can’t you give her the opportunity to show her
documents, to show her evidence?”
Photograph by Carolyn Drake / Magnum for The New Yorker
“We
have a great mission characterized by extreme caution and care,”
Michael Knowles, a U.S. asylum officer for the past twenty-five years,
told me, speaking as the president of Council 119, a union representing
refugee and asylum officers and other staff of U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services. “Ours is a dual mission—to identify people who
aren’t refugees and who, worst case, might wish us harm, but also to
identify and protect refugees.” At a meeting in March, 2017, with John
Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Knowles warned
that asylum and refugee officers are “deeply concerned” about the future
of the program. Knowles told me what he wished he could have said to
Kelly: “You’ve already unshackled Border Patrol. Please, don’t put the
shackles on us.”
In
the hours after Laura’s deportation, Elizabeth drove across the border
to meet her. “Ay,” Laura joked, after Elizabeth arrived at her
grandmother’s house, in Reynosa. “What’s going to happen to my birthday
party?” Maria and the kids came soon afterward, and they set up an
inflatable pool in the back yard so that the boys could play while the
adults discussed what to do.
Sergio soon
learned of Laura’s return. He began driving by the house, shouting
obscenities. A few days after her arrival in Mexico, Laura went to the
pharmacy with Elizabeth and her youngest child. As she pulled the car
out of the driveway, another vehicle T-boned her, blocking her exit.
Sergio leaped out of the car and dragged Laura from her seat through the
window, shouting, “You bitch!” He bit off a chunk of her ear and tried
to strangle her, as their child cried in the back seat. Elizabeth
grabbed a fallen tree branch and hit Sergio on the head. He stumbled,
muttering, “You better not get involved.”
“I’m
calling the cops,” Elizabeth told him, flipping open her phone. The
gesture was a ruse—her U.S. cell phone didn’t work in Mexico, and,
anyway, the local police were known to collaborate with the cartels. But
it worked. Sergio staggered back to his car and drove off.
The
incident gave the cousins new urgency. Elizabeth emptied a coffee can
and wrote “Help bring Laura back!” on it. She took it to friends and
family members, asking for money to pay a coyote to smuggle Laura into
the U.S. Laura’s trailer in Texas was only a twenty-minute drive from
Reynosa, but it would take hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, and a
risky crossing, to get her there.
The next
day, Laura left the house in her mother’s Ford Contour to buy food for
the kids. By evening, she had not returned. “We called the Red Cross, we
called the hospitals, we called the police,” Elizabeth said. The
following morning, Maria turned on the local news, and a grisly image
flashed across the screen. It was an incinerated vehicle, with a charred
human skeleton in the front seat. The car was a Ford Contour.
Sergio seems like the kind of immigrant
few Americans would object to deporting. In speeches, Trump has often
warned the country about “bad hombres,” emphasizing the spectre of
violent men to justify his deportation policies. Obama, whose
Administration deported more immigrants than any other, also divided
undocumented immigrants into neat categories: the longtimers versus the
newcomers, those keen to “get right with the law” versus those trying to
skate beneath it. “We’re going to keep focussing enforcement resources
on actual threats to our security,” he promised, in 2014. “Felons, not
families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working
hard to provide for her kids.”
But even some
immigrants who have committed felonies or other crimes have stories that
are more complicated than they first appear. At a law office in San
Francisco, I met the surviving family members of a woman named Yadira.
She’d come to California from La Lima, Honduras, in the early
two-thousands, to escape an abusive boyfriend. In 2010, she was deported
on a drug-possession charge, despite articulating her fear of return.
After she was back in La Lima, her brother, who was confined to a
wheelchair, was murdered by the Mara 18 gang. (He had left a competing
gang more than a decade earlier, after being shot and paralyzed.)
Together with her grandparents, Yadira’s fourteen-year-old daughter
discovered his body. Yadira began speaking out publicly against the
gang, and became a target. Afraid for her life, she went north, hoping
to get back to San Francisco.
At the U.S.
border, she told officials about her brother’s murder but was detained
nevertheless. “They’re going to deport me,” she told her father, in a
call from detention, saying that she had begged for protection. (The
C.B.P. stated that Yadira “did not claim fear of persecution.”) She
stepped off the tarmac in Honduras wearing her favorite “California”
sweatpants, hoping to go unnoticed. Her father, a trucker for Chiquita
bananas, drove her home. A few days later, her youngest daughter found
her body in front of the house, riddled with bullets.
Under Trump, ICE
arrests of undocumented immigrants—including those accused, but not
convicted, of minor crimes—have gone up by nearly forty per cent. Trump
describes these roundups to the electorate as a public-safety measure,
but many law-enforcement leaders argue that they can have the opposite
effect, lowering the rate at which crimes are reported. In February, a
group of sixty law-enforcement officials warned, in a letter to
Congress, that Trump’s policies “could harm community trust and make it
harder for state and local law enforcement agencies to do our jobs.” In
March, Los Angeles’s police chief noted that reports of sexual assault
among the city’s Latino population had declined twenty-five per cent in
the first three months of 2017, Trump’s first months in office.
Domestic-violence reports dropped ten per cent. (The decline was not
found among other ethnic groups.) In April, Houston’s police chief noted
that the number of Hispanics reporting rape was down more than forty
per cent.
My
team and I filed public-record requests in the twenty U.S. cities with
the highest populations of undocumented immigrants, in order to
determine the extent of this change. We obtained sexual-assault and
domestic-violence reports from heavily Hispanic neighborhoods, and
contacted more than a hundred police departments, district attorneys,
legal-services providers, and domestic-violence shelters.
Laura’s incinerated body was found in her home town in Mexico.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake / Magnum for The New Yorker
The
results were striking. In Arlington, Virginia, domestic-assault reports
in one Hispanic neighborhood dropped more than eighty-five per cent in
the first eight months after Trump’s Inauguration, compared with the
same period the previous year. Reports of rape and sexual assault fell
seventy-five per cent. Meanwhile, in Chicago, domestic-incident and
sexual-assault reports from Hispanic victims dropped seven per cent. In
Denver, the city attorney, Kristin Bronson, told us of more than a dozen
Latina women who had dropped their domestic-abuse cases since Trump
took office, citing fear of deportation. She estimates that the number
of women who have avoided pursuing legal action against an abuser is far
higher.
Many local law-enforcement officers
are also concerned about state-based legislation, including bills
requiring local cops to act as subsidiaries of ICE.
A Texas law called SB4, known as the “show me your papers” law,
threatens to jail or fine sheriffs who don’t coöperate with immigration
holds. The law, which was supposed to go into effect in September but is
in litigation, would make routine the process by which Laura was turned
over to Border Patrol. Last July, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a
group of police chiefs and sheriffs representing dozens of large
cities, joined with two other groups condemning SB4, warning the court
that the law “will dangerously impact local communities by eliminating
law enforcement discretion of how to effectively serve public safety
needs.”
On
June 17, 2009, a week after Laura’s return to Reynosa, a coroner
confirmed that her DNA had been found in the Ford Contour, and the
police delivered her remains to Maria. The next day was Laura’s
twenty-third birthday, and Elizabeth kept her promise to throw a party.
She and Maria got balloons, prepared a cake, and hired a mariachi band.
The birthday also served as a burial. At the gravesite, Laura’s family
called her Texas friends on video chat. Laura’s eldest son brought his
mother a gift, a figurine of his favorite cartoon character, and placed
it in the coffin.
That week, Sergio was arrested by the Mexican police and confessed
to Laura’s murder. He’d strangled her, according to the local press,
then doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. Maria and Elizabeth
testified at his trial. He was sentenced to forty years in prison.
Grief,
for Maria, was soon subsumed by the challenge of caring for Laura’s
sons. A teacher called her to complain that one of the boys had told his
class that his dad had killed his mom. “He cannot do that!” the teacher
said. Maria told her, “He’s a child, and he’s in pain.” One day,
Laura’s middle child Googled his mother and discovered disturbing
details about her murder. He threw a fit, smashing furniture and crying,
“I don’t want to be here without my mom!” At home, the youngest boy
asked his grandmother, “Can you make her again, so that I can see her?”
I
went to Texas to meet Maria, and she welcomed me into her darkened
apartment wearing black. She had the same deep-set eyes and velvety
brows as her daughter, whose photograph hung above an overstuffed couch.
“What I’m most proud of is what she left me—my grandsons,” Maria said,
as she made coffee, gesturing toward the boys’ grade-school portraits in
the living room. She added, “There’s a reason they’re alive.”
She
showed me a cigar box on a shelf by the front door, the boys’ Mom Box.
“If they find something girly outside, they bring it home and put it in
the box,” Maria said. We looked through the contents: pink ribbons, a
Disney Birthday Princess pin, a Mr. Potato Head ring, a Peter Pan
figurine, and assorted trinkets that reminded the boys of Laura.
Underneath was a copy of Laura’s emergency protection order, carefully
folded.
When Maria realized that the boys would
soon be home from school, she told me that there was one last thing she
wanted to show me. “You know how usually, when you box up someone’s
clothes, and then you take them out, they smell bad?” she asked. “Well,
my daughter’s clothes, they don’t smell that way. They’re still fresh.”
She went into the bedroom and returned with an armful of clothing. At
her urging, I pressed my face into one of Laura’s red satin blouses. A
gentle scent lingered—unobtrusive, vaguely floral, verging on
nothingness. I found it strange, after so many hours spent searching for
Laura, to find her here.
Maria told me that
shortly after Laura’s death she began encountering problems raising the
boys. She wasn’t their legal guardian, and doctors wouldn’t allow her to
make decisions about their medical care. Signing off on school
activities and therapy dates was complicated. So, one day in 2013, she
packed up the boys and took them to the law offices of Jennifer Harbury,
a civil-rights attorney.
Harbury told me that,
in the meeting, the boys “were a wreck.” She explained, “The older one
was rocking back and forth, and the middle child looked scared—crying
and hyper and desperate—and the little one was very upset.” The whole
family, Harbury said, showed “every sign of post-traumatic stress you
can think of.”
Maria
told Harbury that she needed help getting custody of her grandsons, and
then recounted the circumstances of Laura’s death. “When a woman is
afraid,” Maria asked, “why can’t you give her the opportunity to show
her documents, to show her evidence?”
Harbury
was stunned. Her team could help Maria get custody of the kids, she
said. But, as the pair discussed the case, another idea emerged: filing a
lawsuit against agents of the Border Patrol.
Harbury,
who is sixty-six, has made a career of challenging alleged abuses of
immigrants, including refoulements. She grew up in Connecticut and
California, in a family that had fled Nazi persecution in Holland during
the Second World War. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in
1978, she moved to the Rio Grande Valley to defend farmworkers’ rights.
In the early eighties, she noticed an alarming trend: thousands of
Salvadorans and indigenous Guatemalans were crossing the Rio Grande,
fleeing civil wars. Most were denied asylum and forced to return—often,
she said, “to face torture chambers and death squads,” some of which
were funded in part by the U.S. government.
In
1990, Harbury went to Guatemala to conduct research on indigenous women
rebels fighting in the country’s civil war. Atop a volcano, she met a
young Mayan rebel commander, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, who went by the
war name Everardo. They fell in love and travelled back to rural Texas,
where they married and, in the tradition of leftist guerrilla fighters,
exchanged silver spoons. A few months later, with Harbury’s support,
Bámaca returned home to fight the Guatemalan Army. Then he disappeared.
At
first, the Army claimed that Bámaca had been killed in combat. But
Harbury grew suspicious when she reviewed the autopsy report. “Everardo
was a walking war museum,” she said, explaining that he was covered in
scars—and yet the report noted none of them. Later, a rebel fighter who
had been captured by the Army escaped, and claimed to have seen Bámaca
alive, being tortured on a Guatemalan military base.
Harbury
began a series of hunger strikes, sleeping on the pavement in front of
Guatemala’s Presidential palace for thirty-two days, demanding answers.
She attracted the attention of U.S. news shows and celebrities like
Bianca Jagger and Charlie Rose. “If you kill him, I’m going to die
on your doorstep with convulsions in front of every camera in the
world,” Harbury said, addressing the Guatemalan government. “You’re
going to be seen.” CBS reported that the C.I.A. knew that Bámaca had
been captured alive and tortured, and Harbury moved her hunger strike to
the gates of the White House. On the twelfth day of her fast, the
congressman Robert G. Torricelli revealed that a Guatemalan Army colonel
being paid by the C.I.A. had been involved in Bámaca’s torture, as well
as in the earlier killing of a U.S. citizen, in 1990. President
Clinton’s Administration ordered internal investigations into the United
States’ role in the murders and their coverups.
Along the way, Harbury became something of a celebrity herself. The writer Chris Kraus centered part of her cult hit “I Love Dick”
on her, describing Harbury’s pre-fasting aesthetic as “Hillary Clinton
on a budget”—“a well-proportioned face with good WASP bones, blonde
tousled bubble-cut, a cheap tweed coat, clear gaze”—and noting that,
mid-fast, people looked at Harbury as “a strange animal.” Ted Turner
bought the film rights to her life story, and a Times reporter
suggested Madonna for the role, writing, “It would take a certain
controlled irreverence and mad gusto to get Jennifer Harbury on the
screen.”
In 1995, Bill Clinton suspended covert
C.I.A. funding to the Guatemalan Army after the agency admitted to
making mistakes in Bámaca’s case. To Harbury, this was far from
sufficient. By then, she’d learned that her husband had been killed by
men on the C.I.A.’s payroll. The next year, she sued officials from the
State Department, the C.I.A., and other government bodies for denying
her access to information that might have helped prevent her husband’s
killing.
The case was filed as a “Bivens”
claim, so called because of the case of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named
Agents, which, in 1971, established that citizens could sue federal
officials if their rights had been violated. Harbury’s claim was simple:
if the government hadn’t lied about her husband’s whereabouts, she
could have petitioned for his rescue. Her case eventually went to the
Supreme Court, where, in an unusual move, Harbury argued it herself. The
Court acknowledged “appreciating Harbury’s anguish” but ruled against
her.
In Maria’s story, Harbury saw a grief
similar to her own, and a chance to hold the government accountable for
another family’s anguish. “The U.S. government should not be free to
submit people to torture and murder,” she said. “They did it in my
husband’s case, and they did it in Laura’s case.”
Maria
worried about antagonizing the authorities, but she was desperate for
ways to draw meaning from her daughter’s death. Recently, she had given
Laura’s porcelain-doll collection to a center for abused girls. “In the
case of my child,” she said, “there are many lessons that could be
useful for other women.” Maria decided to press ahead with a lawsuit.
They
had to work quickly, because the statute of limitations in Laura’s case
had nearly expired. Harbury partnered with the Texas Civil Rights
Project, a nonprofit that often pursues civil-rights cases on behalf of
immigrants, and she was soon joined by one of the group’s attorneys,
Efrén Olivares. On June 5, 2013, they filed Maria S. v. John Doe, on
behalf of Laura’s three sons. U.S. immigration agents, they alleged, had
arrested Laura, then “violated her procedural due process rights” and
“refused to consider her clear eligibility for relief from removal.”
Laura had the right to a full and fair hearing before a qualified
immigration judge, and the right to counsel at her own expense, as
afforded by the Fifth Amendment. Instead, the complaint claimed, agents
had sent Laura back to “extreme danger, resulting in her battery and
death.” Their decisions, the complaint said, “shock the conscience.”
Rosaleda
was working as a police officer in Honduras when she discovered that a
high-ranking colleague had been involved in her cousin’s murder. She
began receiving death threats, and two attempts were made on her life.
She fled north, but was soon deported back to Honduras.
Photograph by Carolyn Drake / Magnum for The New Yorker
Holding
U.S. Customs and Border Protection legally accountable is difficult but
not impossible. The day before Maria S. v. John Doe was filed, the
A.C.L.U. brought a class-action case against officers from Border Patrol
and ICE in Southern
California, alleging the widespread use of coercion, threats, and
deception to get immigrants to sign their own expulsion orders,
including a form called the I-826. In 2014, the Department of Homeland
Security and other defendants agreed to a settlement. A long list of
reforms resulted, including a stipulation that prospective deportees
could use a phone to call a family member, a legal-service provider, or a
Mexican consulate before removal. The reforms, however, applied only to
Southern California.
Other suits are pending.
Last July, a nonprofit called Al Otro Lado sued officials at the
Department of Homeland Security and at Customs and Border Protection,
alleging that asylum seekers are being “systematically turned away at
ports of entry.” Last year, the city of Chicago sued Trump’s Justice
Department over a plan to withhold federal public-safety funds from
sanctuary cities.
Harbury has become involved
in still more cases. After Trump’s election, she began interviewing
recent deportees in Reynosa about their experiences with U.S.
immigration authorities, and gathered accounts of asylum seekers who’d
been kidnapped or otherwise harmed after being turned away. She compiled
her findings in a sworn legal declaration, and shared it with a
national network of civil-rights attorneys. In September, she filed a
suit against officers from ICE and other government entities on behalf of a group of “young civilians who were forced to flee their homelands due to
the ongoing violence.” These asylum seekers had come from places as
diverse as Ghana, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone, but faced the same
“danger of severe persecution” if deported. Although they had committed
no crimes, the suit alleged, they had been “wrongfully denied parole and
subjected to prolonged and arbitrary detention in prison-like
conditions.”
The case of Maria S. v. John Doe,
filed on behalf of Laura’s kids, ended up on the docket of Judge Andrew
Hanen, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, in
Brownsville. His rulings on immigration are infamous. In 2015, he
accused the Obama Administration’s Department of Homeland Security of
“criminal conspiracy” after the agency chose not to arrest and deport an
undocumented mother who had paid a smuggler to bring her child to the
States. Hanen said that the decision set a “dangerous and
unconscionable” precedent.
Government lawyers
argued for the dismissal of Maria’s suit, saying that U.S. Border Patrol
agents enjoy wide immunity from civil lawsuits. It seemed likely that
Hanen would side with the government, but, in 2015, in one of his first
decisions in the case, he took a surprising position. He refused to
dismiss the suit, writing, “Even aliens who have entered the United
States unlawfully are assured the protections of the Fifth Amendment due
process clause.” The case, he said, could move to discovery, which
would have to focus on a single issue: whether, and how, Laura’s
deportation had been coerced.
At a pretrial
hearing of Maria S. v. John Doe, Hanen clarified this critical question.
Laura, he noted, had signed an I-826 form in the hours before her
removal, checking the box giving up her right to seek asylum, which
reads, “I admit that I am in the United States illegally, and I believe I
do not face harm if I return to my country.” Why? If Laura really
feared for her life, had she signed under duress? Or did she check the
box voluntarily?
Harbury tracked down one of
the friends who had been in the car that night. She was frightened but
agreed to testify. While seated at the processing station, the woman
recalled, Laura wept and begged the border officer—Ramiro Garza—not to
send her back. The officer, she said, had a gun and an “annoyed”
expression. He put the paperwork in front of Laura, and ordered her to
sign. “This is an injustice!” Laura objected, according to the friend.
Garza, she said, “mocked” Laura, and pressed again. The pair went back
and forth until Laura caved. (Garza denied this version of events, and
said that he would never force anyone to sign the form.) Laura’s friend
said that her own decision to sign was influenced by the prospect of the
long detention that often accompanies fighting deportation. “I didn’t
want to be locked in,” she said, “because I have children.”
In
July, 2017, Hanen finally handed down his ruling. “This case presents
one of the most lamentable set of circumstances that this Court has ever
been called upon to address,” Hanen wrote. It left the court with “a
profound sense of sadness about the disastrous chain of events that
ended in the defendant’s murder.” But he said that he couldn’t overcome
the problem that “the only person who can truly reveal Laura S.’s
motivation” in checking the box—Laura herself—“was killed.” As a result,
coercion was hard to prove. Perhaps she was coerced, Hanen said, or
perhaps she signed the I-826 so that she wouldn’t be in detention during
her son’s surgery, or for some other unknown or unknowable reason.
“Despite
their best efforts,” Hanen ruled, “Plaintiffs have failed to clear the
evidentiary hurdle created by the death of Laura S.” The case was
dismissed.
Harbury felt heartsick, but she’d
always known that the case might have to wind its way through higher
appeals courts. Last August, Harbury and the other lawyers filed with
the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the case should be
heard by a jury. They noted that the lawsuit’s outcome “directly affects
ongoing life and death situations” for other immigrants. Harbury is
hopeful that, if success eludes them in the initial appeals, the case
will eventually reach the Supreme Court. And if no justice emerges
there? Harbury and her team will turn to the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights. There, they can draw on treaties meant to protect
immigrants like those the United States failed in the Second World War.
For
Laura’s family, the stakes of the case are profound. But they also have
other, more immediate worries. Not long after Laura’s murder,
Elizabeth’s purse was stolen from her car. Her visa—her only proof of
legal status—was inside. Then, in 2015, she learned about Obama’s
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA,
which was intended for people who had come to the U.S. as children and,
in many cases, grown up here, who wanted to work legally, get an
education, and stay in the place they considered home. Elizabeth decided
to apply. She had to prove that she’d come to the U.S. before the age
of sixteen, posed no threat to national security, and met a list of
other criteria. Not long after submitting her materials, she was
notified that she had won legal relief, and officially become a Dreamer.
Politically, Obama’s DACA policies have been hugely popular. Recent polls
show that more than three out of four Americans support allowing
Dreamers to remain in the U.S., and two-thirds of Republicans back a
pathway to citizenship for them. But, last September, Elizabeth got
frightening news: Trump had ordered an end to the program, and had given
Congress six months to extend its protections. Elizabeth had to submit a
renewal request before an October deadline, but she couldn’t afford the
legal fees. Her immigration attorney, she told me, refused to return
her paperwork without a substantial payment.
In December, Elizabeth’s DACA
status expired. If a legislative solution isn’t reached by early March,
nearly seven hundred thousand people in the U.S. will be stripped of
their legal status and their protection from deportation. Earlier this
month, three former Homeland Security Secretaries, including Michael
Chertoff, who served under George W. Bush, wrote a letter to Congress
underscoring the importance of a DACA
fix. “We write not only in strong support of this legislation, but to
stress that it should be enacted speedily, in order to meet the
significant administrative requirements of implementation, as well as
the need to provide certainty for employers and these young people,” the
letter read.
Some Dreamers fear for their
lives if sent back. Elizabeth testified against Sergio at his murder
trial, and she told me that he has called her relatives in Reynosa from
prison to make death threats against her. When she lost her legal
status, she also lost her work permit, and therefore her job. Some days,
anxiety overtakes her. “I’m still trying my best,” she recently texted
me, “which is what matters.”
Still, when I
asked Elizabeth what she would tell President Trump if they ever met,
she immediately thought of Laura’s boys. “Please be conscious of what
happens when a woman gets deported,” she said. “It’s not only what could
happen to her—it’s the family she leaves behind, in America. Please
think of those kids.”
At
home last summer, Laura’s boys celebrated what would have been their
mother’s thirty-first birthday. Maria decorated a vanilla cake with
fresh carnations and hung streamers from the ceiling in Laura’s favorite
colors: purple, pink, and light blue. She gathered the family in the
living room—the three boys and Elizabeth, as well as aunts and uncles
and cousins—and handed out pens. Each person wrote a message to Laura on
a piece of notebook paper, which they tied to pink balloons and
launched into the sky.
“Hi, mami,”
Laura’s youngest wrote, in Spanish. “I miss you.” He said that he hoped
to have four careers—as “a basketball player, a Nascar driver, an
engineer, and a YouTuber”—so that he could send his earnings to his mom
in Heaven, after buying himself a “fancy refrigerator.”
The
oldest boy told me of his plans to persuade the rapper Drake to adopt
him. He loved Drake’s music, and his style, and his Instagram feed, and
he knew Drake would love his, too. “Hey, Mom,” he wrote. “I need you to
take care of me.”
Laura’s middle child kept his
note secret, but he showed me a poster board he’d made for his mother,
with colorful pompoms and photographs glued above a poem he’d written:
“Wave after wave / Crushes onto my legs / I remember Mom’s every
word / To help me stand on my own two feet.”
At
the kitchen table, the boys played with an iPhone. “Siri, what is ten
to the thousandth?” the youngest asked. “Siri, who am I?”
“Who is my mommy?”
“Who is Donald Trump?”
“How old is Donald Trump?”
The oldest chimed in, “Siri, can I call my mom?”
Maria
sometimes envies the boys’ approach to death. She told me that twice
Laura’s eldest son had stood at the bus stop after school, craning his
neck, waiting. “What is it?” she asked.
“When is Mom coming?” he replied.
“Mom’s
not coming,” she told her grandson. “Remember where we left her?” she
asked gently, pulling him close. “We left her on the other side of the
border.” ♦
This story
was produced in collaboration with the Global Migration Project, at
Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Fellows include:
Annie Hylton, Anjali Tsui, Sarah Salvadore, Divya Kumar, Astha
Rajvanshi, Chris Gelardi, Yemile Bucay, Micah Hauser, and Noor Ibrahim.
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