The Undocumented Americans

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

  They have been having nightmares of clowns. They have been watching horror movies because they are spending a lot of unsupervised time at home because their mother is working long hours to support them now that their household has only a single income. They tell me about a YouTube video they watched where a drone flying over a field shows a clown with a machete ready to kill children. Andres is fourteen, Omar is eleven, Elias is ten, and Greta is six. “You don’t understand, they kill you with machetes,” says Omar. In English, MACH-eh-teh is pronounced mah-SHEH-tee, I say. “They kill you with ma-SHEH-tees,” they say.

  The video is called Hunting Killer Clowns with Drone! We Found One! (Not Clickbait!) and it is made by two preteen boys who fly a drone over a field, out of which jumps a tall person in white face paint and a toy machete. The boys are not good actors, the machete does not look real, and it is not believable in the slightest. Jesus Christ, I think. These are children.

  Javier Quintanilla, their dad, had lived in the United States for sixteen years. He was stopped for driving without a license in 2008, and local police alerted ICE. After a deportation order was issued in 2011, he was granted a stay to remain in the country, and he dutifully checked in with immigration authorities every six months until March of 2017, when an immigration agent met him at his appointment and told him to get ready to be deported.

  In the weeks leading up to his deportation, Javier and the kids went door-to-door around Willard asking their neighbors to sign a petition asking for his stay. (Courts sometimes consider community support in deciding whether someone gets a stay, and it helps mobilize support for the case.) Not everyone was nice to them. It was fruitless. When the day came, Javier did not even pack a bag, just a folder of his immigration documents. He thought something or someone was going to intervene at the last moment. “We went to the airport but we had hope until the very end,” his wife, Patricia, says. When they said goodbye, Javier told her he loved her and made her promise she’d take good care of the children. He, in turn, promised he would come back. When Patricia and the kids returned home, the house still smelled like him. His sneakers were lying on the floor, his dirty clothes were in the hamper, his toothbrush was in the bathroom, not yet dry from that morning. His razor sat in the shower. It would soon begin to rust. He was everywhere and he was gone.

  Both sides have adhered to the promise to talk on the phone every day, but Javier is different now. The trauma of being separated from his family and being forcefully removed like a criminal has worn at his mental health. It started even before he left. As the date of his deportation approached, he became short-tempered and silent. His ankle monitor had only an eight-hour charge, so he had to charge it while he was at work, which was humiliating. Patricia often tripped over the ankle monitor charger. “He’s a changed man,” she says. “He wants to express himself and tell us that he misses us, but for some reason he can’t. He says, I can’t see you, I don’t know what you’re doing, and it frustrates him. He’s impatient, he’s mad all the time, he’s moody all the time.”

  Peter Maximillian, the family’s immigration lawyer, has made an impression on the children, who are hungry for male protection. He dresses well and has his own office, which the children think is incredible. He is the most powerful person they know. Andres is especially besotted. Peter comes down from Cleveland on a Saturday to take the children to lunch with me. They want to go to Applebee’s, which is forty-five minutes away, and Patricia asks me to please make sure they don’t smother Peter, which I quickly see they are keen on doing. We end up going to Wendy’s instead, because it’s only about five minutes away. Andres says he wants them to make an exception of their minimum age requirement—sixteen—so he can work there. He is fourteen. “I’m the man of the house now,” he says in the back seat of the car, and Greta punches him. When Javier left, so did the only member of the family who drove. Now they are stuck in rural Ohio without a car. Andres walks three miles to the grocery store and returns carrying heavy bags. He was going to join the wrestling team but now has to come home right after school to take care of his younger siblings. He watches them while their mother is at work. Patricia sometimes takes an English class after work, and comes home in the evening. She is always tired, and when she gets home, she cleans, cooks, and sits on the couch, running her fingers through Greta’s hair while she draws, her eyes fixed on a point in the middle of the room, barely blinking.

  About a week after returning to Connecticut, I am in the shower and get a call from the boys. Omar is doing his science homework and wants to get an A on it. He says he has a question: Do trees die during the winter?

  I begin to improvise, summoning forth everything I know about winter, about plants, about death, about Holden Caulfield asking the exact same question about ducks in Central Park, about how old the kids will have to be before I can explain to them what allusions are, about how I still think knowing what allusions are can save them. My partner whispers: Look. It. Up.

  How do trees survive in winter? Omar asks me. It seems like they should die. How can they live without the sun? I wrap a towel around myself and run to my computer. “Trees go through a process similar to hibernation called dormancy, and that is what keeps them alive during the winter,” I read from the screen. Do you know what dormancy means? It comes from the Spanish word dormir, “to sleep,” I lie. Isn’t that cool? I ask. They sleep right through the winter, and when they wake up, it is spring again.

  Javier used to work at a factory packing cookies. He would often bring home small cheddar crackers in the shape of goldfish. Those were their favorite. Andres is not his biological child. Patricia had him young, when she was eighteen. Andres was a year old when she got together with Javier, who cared for him like they shared blood. She always thought there was something special about the way Javier took care of Andres. “He’s just given him more than the others. Everything Andres has wanted he has always received.” Because they were always family, and because they thought the adoption process would be overly complicated and expensive, they kept putting off a formal adoption. But as the boys got older and began asking why they did not all share the same last name, it became clear that Javier would adopt Andres. So a couple of years ago, they went in front of a judge, who told Patricia she liked to ask the same question to everyone who went in front of her with an adoption request. “Tell me one thing that’s going to make me sign this order.”

  “He doesn’t know another father,” Patricia responded. “Javier used to work the night shift so he was always with the boys during the day and he took care of Andres from the time he was a baby. He bathed him, he always changed his diaper.” “I’ve heard enough,” Patricia remembers the judge saying. The family celebrated that night. Every evening, before Javier began his shift, they would all sit together after dinner to drink coffee, talk, and watch the evening news. They were news junkies and kept each other close. “Even if it was to put gas in the car, all six of us went.”

  Patricia is small, with heart-shaped purple lips and black hair pulled back into an elegant knot. When I met her, she was wearing purple acrylic nails on one hand and short nails filed in a round shape on the other. She wears glasses with clear rectangular lenses and modest, nondescript clothing in dark colors. She speaks to me warmly in a conspiratorial whisper, especially in the presence of Peter, the lawyer, who does not speak Spanish. She giggles as she observes the boys crowding over where he is sitting, showing him funny videos on their phone. Look at them. He’s going to walk out! He’s going to explode! He can’t put up with them! I wonder how she was with Javier, with her sidekick laugh and expressive almond-shaped eyes. I wonder what secrets they kept together, what inside jokes made them laugh, before they were separated and it all turned sour.

  Omar is skinny, with a top lip that looks carved in amethyst. His mom tells me he is a solitary soul, and while the entire family crowds the living room during my visit, he is not there. He’s up in his room a
lot. When we go out to Wendy’s, he picks a two-person table across from us and sits alone. I call him over to sit next to me. He asks how old I am and I tell him to guess. He guesses nineteen—a hopeful guess because he has a crush on me. I tell him I am old enough to be his mother, and he blushes.

  “Omar does not cry,” Patricia tells me. “He has not cried once. He is stoic and strong, but he is the one who asks after his father the most.” Classmates have been taunting him at school. “I hope your mom gets sent back to Mexico too,” they tell him. I ask him how he is sleeping, and he says that he tells himself his dad will be gone for only a few weeks. “Last night, I did not sleep at all because I missed my dad.” So he tucked himself into his mother’s bed. I have brought him a copy of the first book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, on my brother’s recommendation. A lucky guess. Turns out Omar loves the series and has taken the books out of his local library. He’s never owned a copy of his own. Omar asks me to sign the book because although I am not its author, I am an author, and he thinks that’s pretty cool. I autograph it.

  In the pictures of the scene at the airport, moments before Javier was deported, the only one photographed crying is Elias. He is ten years old. Elias says he misses going to the mall with his dad, where he would spoil him and buy him treats, and he misses how his dad would make funny voices to make him laugh, like the impression he made of the old-timey children’s character El Chavo, a grown actor assuming the voice of a child. “Sometimes I dream the world is going to crack open and I am going to fall inside,” he says. While I am talking to his mother, Elias goes upstairs to bring down his report card to show me. Some Bs and Cs in the humanities but a perfect 100 in math. He says his favorite way of passing the time is by doing multiplication exercises with decimals in his head. After I return to Connecticut, Elias texts me formal greetings and terrible pictures of himself with the camera lens pointing up. One early morning he sends me a picture of Greta all dressed up, wearing a long white tulle skirt and a denim vest with a doily collar. She is wearing a tight ponytail and doing ballerina poses. He sends them at 7:24 in the morning. I wonder if he just thought his sister looked pretty but had no one to share it with. Good morning Karla. How are you today?

  Greta is a terror. She laughs hysterically—she cackles—at her own jokes, and she ranks her brothers in order of how much she hates them, which is actually the order of how much she loves them, and punches the winner, usually Andres. She spends the entire time drawing and hangs up the drawings on the wall herself, then puts her hand under her chin like an art critic and makes exclamations about the drawing. She steals her brothers’ cell phone to send text messages to Patricia about how much she loves her, even when she is sitting on the same couch or in the adjacent room. Sometimes she sends me a long, multiline string of emojis that she signs Greta. I brought her a tiny pink plush purse carrying a plush puppy. If god is fair, he will allow her to grow up into a woman with the resources to spoil a stupid toy breed like a Cavapoo that she’ll carry around in a purse. Patricia tells me Greta stopped eating after her father left, and lost a lot of weight. When I visit, she barely touches her food.

  Stories in the news often end at the deportation, at the airport scene. But each deportation means a shattered family, a marriage ending, a custody battle, children who overnight go from being raised by two parents to one parent with a single income, children who become orphans in foster care. One study found that family income dropped around 70 percent after a deportation. Another study found that American-citizen children born to immigrant parents who were detained or deported suffered greater rates of PTSD than their peers. I know Javier wants the children to move to Mexico to be with him, and it is a source of fights with Patricia. “I think it’s selfish to take the children to Mexico,” she says. “This is their country. The whole point was to allow them to receive an education here.” A coffee plantation awaits them in Mexico. But even if they stay in Ohio, things look bleak.

  The boys are worried about winter coming for the first time without their father in the house. They have no car. They are in the middle of rural Ohio. Everything is so far away. Andres, who will start high school next fall, walks a few miles down to the local public library to do his homework when he needs a computer, but with winter coming, it gets dark early. I have a fundraiser among my friends and collect enough money to buy the family a used MacBook and a year’s worth of Internet. That’s a thing I do sometimes—hold fundraisers among people I know for migrants I love who are in need. It’s the same people who donate every time, older white hippies and children of immigrants, not my former Harvard classmates who post pictures of themselves at rooftop happy hours every day, the kids who work at Silicon Valley start-ups, the ones who have precious weddings with hashtags and babies they want to make sure you know the sex of. At night, at around 8:00 P.M., when I decide that I want the day to be over and close all the blinds because it’s time to usher in unconsciousness, in the delicious few seconds before sleep befalls me, I imagine them being fatally impaled by a stop sign on a trip abroad.

  Anyway, I write down a list of rules for the boys. I write them a card. I set up the password to their computer. It is studyhard. I tell them that school got me out, that it can get them out. Out. Out of what? The ghetto? I grew up poorer than I remember. But I grew up with two parents. I grew up with nightmares but they are living through nightmares.

  I am almost six hundred miles away. I’d never seen a tractor before I visited them, and they’ve never seen New York. There are no clowns in fields with machetes in America. There are white moms who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta’s mom will be deported too. There are no clowns in fields with machetes, but there are ICE officers who pose as nice people trying to buy a piñata off the Internet, meet you in a parking lot, and detain you. If we get good grades, will you take us to New York City? Is Connecticut near Cleveland? What’s the best college in the whole country? I’m going to go to Harvard. I’ll become an immigration lawyer, like Peter, so nobody’s dad will ever be taken away again.

  * * *

  —

  I start my days sitting on the floor of my shower, naked, the water as hot as I can bear it blasting onto my head. I find relief only in the water. For the past ten days, I’ve had a migraine that follows me like a shadow. One hundred and forty-two hours of incessant pain, an eight on the ten-point scale. My doctor has suggested codeine, which I refused, because once I took too much Percocet after a tooth extraction and threw up for twenty-four hours straight. I have a CT scan, an MRI, I go to the neurologist—the readings are all inconclusive. I’m told it’s a migraine with an unknown cause. Have you tried yoga? they say.

  “Stress headache,” says Leonel Chávez when I visit him one morning. Leonel is a forty-five-year-old Ecuadorian man holed up in a Methodist church off the Yale campus in defiance of ICE, which considers him a fugitive. He is in sanctuary. In 2007, a wrong turn during a family trip landed him in Canada and ICE took notice of him. A judge ordered his removal in 2009, but he managed to keep his head down and stay under the radar. In 2016, he was given a stay on the removal order as long as he checked in every six months. But under the current administration, the authorities have all but stopped granting stays, so in July 2017 he was ordered to leave within the month. Just like Javier. The day of his scheduled deportation, he claimed sanctuary in the church, a space that Immigration and Customs officers do not enter. He has been living in the church for over three months.

  “Probably,” I say. “But what can I do?”

  He shoots me a look. “There’s always something to be done,” he says defiantly. “For example, me. I control my thoughts. I just move them away from what’s causing me stress and onto something else. I’ve been doing that this entire time.”

  The migraine thing is new. I’ll visit Leonel on a Monday, then wake up with a headache on a Tuesday and h
ave to lie in the dark for the next two days, sometimes going to Urgent Care for a migraine cocktail through an IV. My arm starts looking like I use. Then I visit him again. The migraines will not stop. I will just have to start taking daily medication to prevent them and emergency medication at their onset. They will become a part of me, and Leonel will become a part of me, and the sanctuary movement will speak to me and my traumas in the way nothing ever has before.

  * * *

  —

  Leonel arrived in Connecticut twenty years ago on a Sunday afternoon at two o’clock. A family friend’s rotisserie-chicken restaurant was hiring a dishwasher. Dishwashing is a popular job for the newly arrived. It doesn’t pay great, the hours are long, and it’s boring and grueling, but Leonel was thrilled to see a job opportunity materialize so quickly after arriving. He took a shower and began his first work shift in America three hours after setting foot in the state. That’s Leonel. Leonel is also handsome, like a cowboy. No, not like a cowboy. Like a bad boy with a toothpick in his mouth. Actually, no, forgive me, he is precisely the Ecuadorian version of Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds. A fine Nazi-killing small man.

  Leonel has lived in the United States ever since and has firmly laid down roots. He left the restaurant industry and became an in-demand construction worker, which netted him a healthy income. His wife is named Sofía, and they have a daughter and a son in their twenties, both on DACA, who live with him in the house, as well as a twelve-year-old daughter, Diana, who was born in Connecticut and is an American citizen. She speaks to her parents in English. The older kids are busy with their jobs, but Diana visits her father in the church nearly every day after soccer practice. Diana is always hanging her body off her father lovingly, like a sloth on a tree. She loves dogs and has this really brilliant plan to travel to Ecuador to rescue street dogs and bring them to the United States to sell for profit, marked up for the Third World je ne sais quoi. I’m waiting until she turns eighteen to introduce her to venture capitalists. Sofía is consistently one of the most powerful speakers at rallies, vigils, and press conferences. She speaks off the cuff and brings everyone to tears. I am a little afraid of her because when she hugs me and looks at me, I feel like telling her I hurt too much.