The Undocumented Americans

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

  As his time in sanctuary stretched from days to weeks to months, Leonel began to grow dark. “I am in a fight with myself all the time,” he says. “I’m getting depressed more and more, I feel a desire to run out and leave this all behind. I ask the Lord that He not abandon me. On days I know I’m going to be alone, I don’t want to wake up or even eat.”

  He has lost weight, and his hair, which he cut about two months into sanctuary, has grown back, curly and thick. He wears soft fabrics that fall loosely around his ankle monitor. Big sweatpants or shorts. He does not cry. “When I feel I am about to explode like a volcano, I’ll watch sad movies or listen to sad songs, so then I cry to let it all out. But I’m crying about the movie or the song. I don’t cry about this. They’ll never have the pleasure of seeing me cry,” he tells me. To occupy his mind, he built the church a modest but exquisite lectern with wood so thin it looks like paper, and a burgeoning cross in its center.

  Welcoming an undocumented immigrant with a deportation order into a church has to be done carefully so it cannot be misconstrued as harboring a fugitive. As a first step, the church makes clear to ICE that they are acting within their capacity as a sanctuary space in accordance with their beliefs as followers of Jesus Christ. They send a fax to ICE headquarters announcing that the immigrant is there once he or she arrives so nobody can claim they are “hiding” them. All parties are aware of the immigrant’s whereabouts. They’re wearing ankle monitors given to them by the Florida private company GEO Group. Sanctuary works because ICE has a policy against forcing their way into places of worship. Violating that policy requires special permission from ICE headquarters, but so far that hasn’t happened, and one immigration lawyer told me he thinks that if it did happen, “all hell would break loose.” It would certainly be bad PR. The image of armed men in uniform forcing their way inside a church door being physically blocked by priests, rabbis, or imams is dramatic to think about, and although it hasn’t happened, it feels imminent. The activists and religious leaders involved in the sanctuary movement think it’s enough of a possibility that they have a plan for it. If ICE tries to force their way in, members of the congregation would rush to the church and try to block the door with their bodies.

  In the United States, the tradition of immigrants claiming sanctuary in churches dates back to the 1980s, when a network of churches took in nearly five hundred thousand refugees fleeing the death squads in Central America. An underground railroad of sorts moved people through Mexico to more than five hundred places of worship across the country. After sending in undercover informants to infiltrate the movement, the federal government charged two Roman Catholic priests, a nun, and a Protestant minister with conspiracy to smuggle aliens, and they faced jail time of up to twenty-five years. They got probation instead.

  But the tradition of sanctuary is even more ancient than that. In the Old Testament, Mosaic law determines that some cities should be set aside as “cities of refuge,” where an individual who accidentally killed someone could be protected from prosecution. Saint Paul taught that any stranger who asked for help could be an angel undercover, and medieval churches would establish a range outside their walls within which refugees could not be arrested. There was an ancient Greek belief that someone turning away a supplicant ran the risk of turning away Zeus himself.

  Leonel decided to go into sanctuary at the last minute. The first church the family approached denied them sanctuary because they wanted an assurance that the stay would be short, and Leonel and Sofía couldn’t make that guarantee. “It was like your house is burning down and someone asks you for a month’s rent first before lending you a hand,” Leonel says. So they contacted Latinos Fighting for Justice, the local Latinx rights organization, which in turn reached out to Pastor Lisa at the Vineyard Church who welcomed Leonel, convinced that Jesus Christ would have done the same.

  Leonel’s room is upstairs; it used to be the pastor’s office. His bed is in the corner, a twin bed low to the ground with thin, flat pillows and a crocheted brown blanket. The clock on the wall has been stuck at 12:22 for the past three months. It’s like Vegas in this room: no windows anywhere and only a single broken clock. Small acrylic paintings of naturescapes line the walls, and I see Leonel has arranged an assortment of greeting cards on top of his air conditioner. There are shelves filled with cookies, chips, teas, and instant coffee. A small table and chairs in the middle of the room. One night family and local activists crowd into the room, sitting on the floor and on chairs and on his bed, and I ask Leonel what time he goes to sleep. “When the people leave,” he says.

  During one of my visits, I pull up a chair while Leonel is in the middle of telling his family about the South African photographer Kevin Carter and the picture he took of a large vulture approaching an emaciated toddler during the Sudanese famine. He scared the bird away but did not touch the child. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. A few months later, Carter committed suicide. “That photo cost him his life,” says Leonel. This anecdote comes up naturally during a discussion of starving children, which is part of a larger discussion of how fortunate we are in relation to the people all over the world who really do suffer. It’s not hard to see why Leonel is intrigued by Kevin Carter. He doesn’t understand how someone could visit a tragedy but not actively work to alleviate the suffering they witnessed. He doesn’t understand how people could choose to watch a good man waste away in god’s own house while the seasons continue their course and the church empties out of family each night, leaving him alone, with his thoughts, in the darkness. I don’t say anything.

  A lot happens while Leonel is in sanctuary—school shootings, daily bombshells in the special-counsel investigation of the president and his campaign—but I generally do not bring up the news with Leonel. I do not bring up the weather, even though that’s the simplest way to start a conversation with another human being, remarking how cold or hot it is, how much it’s raining. I shed my outer clothing as soon as I’m in the church to try to hide the changing seasons from him. I try to wear basically the same thing. I do not want to cause him pain by reminding him of the outside world. I always contact him ahead of time to plan my visits, and text him if I am running even five minutes late. I notice that other visitors—old ladies from the church, Yale kids—drop by unannounced, as if he were a man with nothing but time to spare. We make hours go by with small talk. I feel grief at the knowledge he’s in there. I feel as if someone is being killed and I am being forced to watch it, blinders on, and the bullet travels in slow motion, but I cannot stop it.

  Before I tell you what happens next, I should share with you a little story about something I did when I was around fifteen years old. My father was working as a deliveryman, and the owner of the restaurant hired a new manager to oversee the deliverymen—all immigrants, nearly all Mexican. The guy was Puerto Rican—an American citizen—and became immediately abusive, calling the delivery guys wetbacks and spics, threatening to call ICE on them, yelling at them, getting up in their faces. My father fell into a bit of a depression. I had just watched All the President’s Men for the tenth time, and what I did was I made myself a pot of tea, put on my best posh accent, dialed *69 to block my number, and called the restaurant. I asked to speak to the owner. I said I was a beat reporter for a big city newspaper, and I had just received a tip from a customer about overhearing racist abuse in the kitchen and did he have a comment. The owner said he’d handle it and asked me not to write the story. I don’t know, man, I said, it’s a pretty good story. In the end, the manager was fired, and the cloud over my father lifted. My father was furious when I told him what I did, but not for a minute in the fourteen years since have I felt that what I did was unethical, nor have I felt guilty for having a man fired. I’d do it again but my accent would be better.

  So I got into a fight with Leonel’s lawyer. I was working on a newspaper story on Leonel and he had been telling me for a long time that his lawyer had been t
reating him—communicating with him or not, mostly not—in ways I understood to be negligent and so I called him up and asked him a list of Bob Woodwardy questions that any discerning person would have understood meant I was asking around the issue of negligence, and he asked me to meet him at the church the following night at eight o’clock on the dot, like a playground bully, and yelled at me in front of Leonel and Sofía, told them they could not trust me, because he did not trust me, and they looked down at the floor because what could they say?—their lives were in his hands. So I was quiet for their sake, and also I am not a confrontational person—I am shy and I cry easily—and I went home and I cried and cried. But a few weeks later I sent him an expensive bottle of scotch to appease him because I needed to still have access to him, because access to him meant I could help Leonel. Our meeting forced him to go to the church for the first time in god knows how long, which is what Latinos Fighting for Justice had been trying to get him to do, and while he was there, they talked to him about a new strategy, which he agreed to pursue. One of the organizers called me that night to ask if I was okay and to say that never mind all that, the strategy had worked (oh yes, the strategy!). On Thanksgiving Day, out of nowhere, Leonel was released. He was out! He called me and I tried not to cry, because it wasn’t about me, a known pussy, and our conversation was awkward. Are you stretching your legs, Leonel? Soon after, on Facebook, I saw a picture of him stepping outside the church for the first time while Sofía cried by his side and I am lucky I was already married and will not have kids so I do not have to lie about what the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is.

  A few weeks later, my partner and I drive to Leonel and Sofía’s home. He opens the door with his hair still wet from the shower. I tell him he looks great. “All that has changed is the location. I’m still a prisoner,” he says, and points to his ankle bracelet. It’s still on. A decision from the immigration courts can take hours or it can take months, maybe years. We admire his house, our first time seeing it. Then they get to the point—there is a new man who has just taken up sanctuary in a nearby church. His name is Francisco Valderrama. He is Ecuadorian too.

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  Most people with deportation orders do not go into sanctuary. Right now, there are only forty-two individuals in the United States living in churches in defiance of their deportation orders. It takes a particular kind of person to go into sanctuary. They’re extraordinary.

  From the undocumented people I have loved, I have learned that all of us share something a bit peculiar, fantastical, and controversial, which is this: We operate in this world like we are a little bit above the law. This does not mean we are not law-abiding. We have to be extremely careful not to have any run-ins with the law—because even a traffic ticket can lead to deportation. We pay taxes too. In 1996, the IRS even made a special provision for us to be able to pay taxes without Social Security numbers—that’s the ITIN number, which you’ll see advertised everywhere in immigrant neighborhoods.

  But as an undocumented immigrant, everything we do is technically against the law. We’re illegal. Many of us are indigenous in part or whole and do not believe borders should exist at all. I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an “unjust law” as being “out of harmony with the moral law.” And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?

  Francisco Valderrama and Leonel Chávez have very specific profiles. They have young children and lives they love and do not want to give up. Still in their prime, they haven’t been defeated by decades of racist abuse and manual labor yet; they walked into the church with their heads high. They’re individuals of strong faith who do not lose hope easily. But they’re also roguish. They’re wild. They’re stubborn. They’re frontiersmen. They know how to make just about anything appear out of thin air, they have lovely homes they created from nothing but sheer will and obstinance, and when they were in trouble, they managed to find communities to rally around them. Francisco is a completely fluent English speaker whose leather couch and flat-screen TV are the result of him outsmarting big-box stores in perfectly legal but kind of eyebrow-raising ways. Now Francisco’s home is an abandoned menagerie, a wildlife sanctuary cobwebbed by an apocalypse. His senior dog is alone most of the day, confused by why his dad disappeared one day. The two parakeets, Blue and Birdy, sing all day with nobody to hear their racket. A goldfish named Fishy swims in the dark.

  Francisco’s wife, Flor, is soft-spoken and shy and laughs easily, which hints to a private life their daughters have told us about in which she is “extra” and “crazy.” Their three American-born children, Brianna, age sixteen, Franny, age thirteen, and Johnny, age five, are also pretty extra. The girls are just like Francisco: stubborn and overflowing with a restless energy. Franny wants to become a famous actress “to prove white people wrong” and Brianna is a STEM whiz who wants to become a nurse. Johnny, controversially, wants to be a cop. The children visit their father at the church every day after school, and every night when Johnny has to leave the church, to return to his fatherless home, he cries and that makes Francisco cry too.

  I don’t know how it happened. All I know is that at first, I was resistant to meeting a new person in sanctuary because my relationship with Leonel had made me sick, and the next thing I knew, my partner and I were going over to the church for dinner with the family every week. Then more than once a week. Francisco and Flor would cook some delicious folk Ecuadorian dish to cure my newfound homesickness and it would feel like going to bed with a hot water bottle. I would sometimes even get warm and sleepy eating sopa de bola, a soup with green plantains stuffed with meat, or encebollado, a warm tuna and yucca soup that my partner ate a sixth of politely. We’d play a game with the family, like Pictionary or charades, while all wearing face masks, the skin-care kind, and it was easy. It was never tense, there were no memories I had to work to suppress, meaning it was like suddenly having the most loving and least complicated family in the world, except that this family was in hell. When I had my wisdom tooth removed, my partner had to go to work, so she dropped me off at the church to recover and I lay on the couch in the church basement, tucked in with blankets by Francisco, him sitting respectfully at the corner of the couch holding up an iPad for me to watch a documentary about the Inca Empire. Flor made me her special hen soup with a hen she had killed specially for me. My real family became extremely jealous. “They’re taking advantage of you,” my mother would text me, livid that I had spent yet another quiet evening with them, laughing and embracing, instead of talking to her. I told her to not talk to me about them again.

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  One night, we’re having dinner with the Valderramas at the church and a religious group that Leonel and Sofía belong to stops by unannounced. Since leaving sanctuary, Leonel and Sofía have developed an unshakable concern for Francisco and his family. You can see it pains Leonel to visit, but the guilt of turning his back hurts more. They’re about twenty people deep, and they bring guitars. They form a circle. Someone grabs my arm and brings me into the prayer circle. I sit between Leonel and Francisco. The first hour of the prayer session consists of the group of faithful men and women on their knees beating their chests and crying out to god for forgiveness. I look at them intently. Some of them seem for real but overall it’s super performative. I do not pray to god for forgiveness, because I believe I have nothing to apologize for and he might have to explain a couple of things to me, so I just sit there, moping, angry, but still trying to radiate positive vibes because I’m not going to be the person who is ruining faithful migrants’ experience of community. I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer but basically only i
n the lives of people who suffer.

  One of the loudest chest beaters brings the two sanctuary couples to the center of the group. “We will pray for the families,” she says, and then takes me by the hand too. “Oh, I’m not family,” I say, but she shakes her head and says, “It doesn’t matter. Jesus loves you.” So we stand in the center of a prayer circle twenty people deep, and they say, Close your eyes and hold hands. I’m still in between Leonel and Francisco, so I hold on to their hands, tight. The two couples close their eyes and bow their heads. Prayer begins. As soon as the song starts, Francisco and Flor collapse into each other’s arms. Tears fall onto Flor’s baby-blue shirt. Leonel and I are not crying. We are still holding hands, fingers tightly interlaced, and we lock eyes. He guides my body so we wrap Francisco, Flor, and Sofía in our arms and squeeze.

  When the prayer circle is done, I go back to my seat. I take advantage of a pause in the next round of prayers and walk out quietly. I go sit with Franny and Brianna in Francisco’s room. When he sees me again, Leonel teases me. “Was the exorcism really hard on you, little atheist?”

  * * *

  —

  Francisco’s case moves slowly through the backlogged immigration courts. The months began to pass, quickly, slowly, marked only by legal dead ends and more prayer circles. My partner and I begin to play a larger and larger role in Franny and Brianna’s lives. They begin to call us “moms.” When we say we are going to pick them up for dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings, their favorite restaurant, basically all Connecticut teenagers’ favorite restaurant, at six o’clock and it is 6:01, we receive a text message from Brianna: “It is 6:01.” The girls decide that our friendship anniversary is on Brianna’s birthday, which is February 23. That night, we took them to see Black Panther because I thought it would be inspiring for them as young women of color. I’m a didact. Franny texted throughout the whole thing and I was very upset! Within a few months, they were sleeping over. When February 23 rolled around for a second time, with their father still praying for a miracle, we decorated T-shirts with our friendship anniversary and hearts in glitter glue. There were times that Franny asked to come over to our apartment to do homework, so we picked her up from school, at enough of a distance from the entrance that we didn’t embarrass her in front of the other tweens wearing spotless Air Force Ones, sat her at my desk, and pulled up a chair next to her to unsuccessfully remind her to bring down the X as she went through each step in an equation. We made sure she used the website that listed all answers for her textbook just to check her answers, not to cheat, and she relished the discipline. She enjoyed dangling provocations in front of us. I’ll cheat! I won’t hand this in! I’ll talk back to my teacher! She was going to either do or not do those things anyway, but she liked it when we pleaded with her, gave her lectures on the importance of grades, and insisted on talking to her principal when she was treated unfairly by a teacher. Once, Franny said she didn’t want to go to college and I said, “Oh hell yes you are,” and told her I was going to take a needle and thread and sew her ear to mine so she would have to go wherever I went and I would go to college. She thought that was “crazy” and made me “a weirdo” but she enthusiastically repeated my words to her father, pleased I cared enough about her to put my ear through so much.