The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  It’s like when someone has a huge infection, and you say, “Let’s just treat his arm,” Felipe thought. Finally he was treating the entire body.

  THAT SAME MONTH, Hareth was finishing her first year at Northern Virginia Community College. She had balanced school with her work for the United We Dream affiliate, the DREAMers of Virginia, helping fight deportation cases. UWD had begun working out of the Washington offices of the National Immigration Law Center, Josh Bernstein’s group. But it had soon grown too big for the small space and moved into the offices of the National Immigration Forum.

  The administration continued to insist that deportations were not targeting DREAMers. “We would show they were,” said Gaby Pacheco, now working as United We Dream’s political director. Whether they were targeting young undocumented immigrants or not, students were getting swept up in the raids. They called their first campaign “End Our Pain” in response to the stepped-up detentions in cities and towns nationwide. United We Dream focused on hundreds of cases, mostly DREAM Act–eligible students facing deportation. It wasn’t always easy to identify them. Immigration officials certainly weren’t publicizing the cases, and many families were too scared to reach out or didn’t know how.

  For Hareth, it was scary to think these young people’s lives were partly in her hands, but it was also a relief to feel she could do something now that the legislation seemed to be going nowhere.

  On Saturday, May 12, 2012, the same day Felipe graduated, Hareth lay in bed, enjoying her first taste of summer vacation. The house was quiet, and it felt so good to be lazy for once. She grinned and fell back asleep.

  Her cell phone jerked her awake. She stumbled across the room to see a missed call. She listened to the message. It was the Arlington County jail. Her heart began to thump. She googled the number. It was a number used by inmates to call out. The phone buzzed again.

  She hit “Answer” and slowly raised the phone to her ear.

  “I’m sorry. Lo siento,” she could hear her father’s voice.

  What?

  “I’m so sorry,” he repeated, his voice breaking. He sounded far away. It was so noisy in the background.

  Hareth was awake now.

  Quietly, Mario explained. He had been arrested for going through a stop sign at 4 a.m. Yes, he had been drinking.

  Hareth looked over at Claudia, who was sleeping. Then she remembered that her mother had taken Haziel to cross-country practice. She steadied herself, asked if he had spoken to her mother.

  No, not yet. He had called Hareth first.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to focus. She’d been through this drill with others at United We Dream. Now it was her turn.

  She needed to get every scrap of information from her father that she could. The line could go dead at any minute, and it was only a matter of time before immigration agents might come to the jail where they were holding him. She asked him to tell her where he was, whether he’d been offered a lawyer. Coolly and calmly, she walked through the protocols she’d learned as if his were some case handed to her at the office, not the man who had tucked her into bed as a child, bandaged her scrapes, picked her up from basketball games, taught her how to draw.

  She could feel his shame pour through the phone, and it broke her heart even as she wanted to shake him. But this was not the time for recriminations.

  Three years before, Virginia had become the second state in the nation to fully implement an agreement with the federal government to participate in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Secure Communities program. It was the latest evolution of an ongoing effort to coordinate between local law enforcement and DHS on immigration-related cases. Early on, Arlington County, where Hareth lived, had tried to opt out of the program, as had Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois. But by 2012, DHS had made the program mandatory.

  When individuals were arrested, their fingerprints would automatically be run through both the FBI’s database and that of DHS. If Mario’s fingerprints did not clear, immigration officers would likely issue a detainer—a request that he be held for forty-eight hours (longer in this case, since weekends didn’t count) until they could take him to the nearest available detention center, which might be several hours, or days, away. The family might not find out until he had arrived.

  Secure Communities was based on a simple idea: that the government should know if someone who might have committed a crime had a legal right to be in the country. In practice, it was more complicated. Immigrant advocates, civic leaders, and many law enforcement agencies had long opposed the notion of local police and sheriff departments serving as an extension of immigration officials. They argued the fear of deportation made people in some of the most vulnerable communities less likely to serve as witnesses, offer tips, or otherwise work with police on crime prevention. Victims of abuse would be warier of turning in their abusers. Drivers stopped for even minor infractions would have an incentive to flee the scene.

  The program also meant that many more people charged with minor infractions were now being placed in deportation proceedings, even if they weren’t convicted. Of the more than 227,000 people removed5 as a result of Secure Communities by the year Mario was arrested, roughly a third had felony convictions on their records serious enough to earn them punishment of more than a year in prison. In general, the largest group had only misdemeanor convictions.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter if his fingerprints checked out. Under questioning from the officers, he had already confessed everything without having ever spoken to a lawyer, and he’d agreed to be turned over to immigration authorities. Like thousands of other immigrants, Mario had essentially initiated a process of deportation without even realizing it. He told Hareth he had believed the men in uniform who told him signing the confession would help him reunite with his family more quickly.

  Her father’s call time ran out. Hareth put the phone down.

  She took a deep breath and then sank down. The tears began to fall, quietly at first, then harder, all the tears she had not shed when the DREAM Act failed, when her parents argued, when she thought there was no way she’d ever go to college. She clamped her mouth closed. She could not wake her sister.

  Then she stood up. Hareth was only twenty years old, and she had just become the unofficial head of her family.

  She called her mother, her aunt, and Dr. Emma, who agreed they would have to act fast and gave her the number of a young Bolivian attorney. The lawyer explained the logistics: the first action item would be to put money in an account for Mario to make calls.

  They spoke to Mario again and began to get more pieces of the story. He’d taken friends out after a long day at work. He’d drunk too much. The bill had been too big, so he’d left his phone at the restaurant until he could return with the cash, and the only numbers he could remember belonged to Hareth and her mother. He had chosen Hareth.

  Hareth imagined her mother waiting up for his return, worried sick when he did not come but having to pretend otherwise.

  Mario had been only a block or so from their home when he was pulled over. He’d refused a Breathalyzer test, but even if he had tested below.08 percent blood alcohol, in Virginia officers could still have arrested him on suspicion of driving under the influence.

  He’d been giving his friend Leonel, also undocumented and from Guatemala, a ride home. The officers had offered to let Leonel go, but Leonel had refused to leave Mario, even as he knew his loyalty would mean that his name would also be run through the federal system, likely guaranteeing his deportation.

  Over the weekend, Hareth, Eliana, and Betty scrambled to pull together enough money to post Mario’s bond of roughly $5,000, hoping that he wouldn’t immediately be flagged by DHS and that they could get him out of jail before he was moved to a distant detention center.

  Meanwhile, Mario quickly learned how things worked at the Arlington County jail. Some inmates had been there several years. Some worked in the kitchen for 50 cents an hour, using the
roughly $30 they earned each week to buy chips and other specialties. The job was considered a privilege.

  All those years driving through downtown, and he’d always passed right by the jail. And I never paid attention to this place filled with so much suffering, he thought.

  On Monday morning, Mario looked out his cell’s tiny window. Only blocks away was Francis Scott Key Elementary School, where Claudia was in fourth grade. He wondered what she knew and what she must think of him.

  Claudia did not know, not yet. Betty had told her that their father had a lot of work. No one told Haziel, now a freshman in high school, but the adults all seemed to assume she had figured it out. It wasn’t until days later, when Tía Eli came for dinner that Claudia finally learned her father’s whereabouts. Furious at her brother and angry that the family was still trying to cover for him, Eli blurted it out: “He’s in jail! He’s not coming home!”

  Behind her anger, Eliana Andrade was heartbroken. A deeply religious evangelical, she had spent years volunteering with new immigrants, warning them against the perils of drink, and encouraging families to take a stance of tough love and to follow the law. Now it was her brother, and she was torn. He had taken such a terrible risk, and he ought to face the consequences. Yet she couldn’t bear to see the girls separated from him.

  “I had seen so many cases like my brother’s, and then it happened [to us], and I didn’t have another choice but to help him,” she said. “I didn’t want him separated from the family.”

  The family finally spoke to the lawyer again on Monday. To figure out where her father would likely be sent, Hareth needed to get the number assigned to his case and his alien registration number from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She would have to go there herself. Hareth’s boyfriend at the time drove her to the nearest office. She had no license and was terrified to enter, but maybe, just maybe, she thought, she might catch a glimpse of her father before they moved him from the jail to whatever detention facility they planned to take him to. She never saw him. By Tuesday morning, the family had cobbled together the money and the necessary paperwork to pay the bond. But by then, Mario was gone.

  ICE agents had banged on his cell door at 4 a.m. Tuesday morning. They’d shackled his arms and feet and loaded him and more than a dozen other prisoners onto a bus. Mario had no idea where they were taking him. He imagined himself being dumped over the border into Mexico.

  Four hours later, they arrived at Immigration Centers of America Farmville Detention Center, a low-slung complex encircled by barbed wire about seventy miles west of Richmond. Throughout the 2000s, immigrant detention centers, which resembled low-security jails despite their name, could not be built fast enough, nor their beds filled quickly enough. Lawmakers wanted an end to the government’s catch-and-release policies, whereby detained immigrants were often set free because there was no place to hold them. By 2009, Congress had approved money for a minimum of 33,400 detention beds, nearly double that of the previous decade—a number that generally became a stand-in for the minimum number of people Congress expected Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep locked up each night.6

  The Farmville facility was set in the woods, with only a water treatment plant for a neighbor, and was the largest in the Mid-Atlantic region, part of the Obama administration’s effort to create a “civil detention” system, with more freedom of movement for immigrants whom the government wanted to hold but who were not necessarily charged with a crime.

  The new facility “is mostly here to address the impact of Secure Communities,” Robert Helwig, assistant director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told the Washington Post in 2010. “We do anticipate a surge in detainees.”7

  Back in the late 1950s, Farmville had briefly gained attention for voting to close its public schools rather than integrate. Now the recently opened detention center operated by the private Immigration Centers of America company was among the main sources of employment for the shrinking community. Opened in 2010, the center had created some 250 jobs and provided the town’s budget with an extra dollar a day per detainee held. By 2015, between the per inmate fees and other taxes, the flow of private detention center funds to Farmville would reach nearly $300,000 annually.8

  The Richmond-based Immigration Centers of America took in revenue not only from the detention center but also from the private transportation company that ferried detainees such as Mario from immigrant-heavy neighborhoods of eastern Virginia to the southwestern region of the state.

  At Farmville, guards woke Mario around 5 a.m. for breakfast, and by 9 a.m., his stomach was once more growling. Some detainees complained about boll weevils in the food.9 Detainees could buy extra food, but Mario recalled a small soup costing nearly $5. Telephone calls could be up to $16 a minute, and sometimes the password on the calling cards didn’t work.

  Food wasn’t the only problem at Farmville. A year after it opened, a Salvadoran inmate had died of liver failure five days after arriving at the facility. The facility’s nurse later told inspectors she had urged guards to provide him with more serious care and had been blocked from taking his vital signs.10

  A 2011 planned inspection found the center not to be in compliance with more than a dozen federal guidelines,11 including staff responsiveness to emergencies. In a follow-up review conducted just months before Mario arrived, federal officials described the facility as generally being well managed. Yet that review also noted the detention center still failed to meet certain standards, including things like requiring reasonable suspicion before strip-searching detainees and ensuring the person in charge of training staff had actually taken the required forty-hour training course.12

  Mario was surprised to learn that many of the people in Farmville had green cards. They had been convicted of a crime, had served their time, and were now being deported. Some had lived in the country more than thirteen years but told him they had been pressured to agree to deportation rather than fight their case. If they did decide to fight, they had to do so mostly through video calls with the deportation officers managing their cases. Judges spoke to the detainees remotely from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.

  ICE eventually deemed that process “ineffective,” in part because the video calls were made only once a week, on Mondays. That meant that for someone like Mario, who arrived on Tuesday, a week would go by before he was able to talk to his case management officer.

  As Mario waited for word from his family, he tried to remain upbeat. But it was the doors, the sound of the heavy metal slamming shut and screeching open early in the morning, signaling the departure of yet another group, that terrified him. The noise kept him from sleeping. The doors reminded him of how little power he had and of how much he had utterly and completely screwed up.

  Hareth was afraid to visit her father. Not only was Farmville far away, but she worried she, too, might be detained. Only her Tía Eli, already a citizen, could go, and she was the most furious at her brother. But at least she was family, and while she was there, she visited Leonel as well.

  On June 3, Hareth turned nineteen. It was the first time since her parents had arrived in the United States nearly a decade before that she hadn’t celebrated her birthday with her father.

  When the family finally did see him in court, it was via a video monitor. He had been taken to a room at Farmville to participate remotely. Many detainees missed their hearings, unaware they could participate via video, but the family had made sure Mario would be notified. He was wearing shackles on his wrists, a chain connecting them to his feet as if, it seemed to Hareth, he were a murderer or slave to be sold at auction. She tried not to think about how pale and thin he looked.

  Hareth knew what people would think of her father, her family. Those who wanted the chance to stay should live an exemplary life, should be above and beyond all reproach. Millions of people would give an arm or a leg to call this country their home.

  Only two years before, in nearby Prince William County, another Bolivi
an man, who had twice been convicted of DUI and was facing deportation and driving drunk, had slammed into a car carrying three Benedictine nuns, killing one and critically injuring the others. The case had made national headlines.13 What if her father had hit someone? What if he’d hit a child? Hareth shuddered at the thought. Yet in Virginia, a first-time DUI offense received a $250 fine and a year’s license suspension. Prosecutors might tack on a minimum of five days in jail if the driver’s blood alcohol level was more than.15 percent.

  Hareth took stock. It seemed so unfair. They could stay in the country, and her father could help build people’s homes and rewire the electrical circuits in their offices. Her mother could raise their children and take care of their grandmothers, and most people would look the other way. But an error that would cost anyone else a couple hundred dollars and the loss of their license would likely mean permanent banishment for her father.

  Now, not only could she lose her father, but everything the family had worked for. Her mind began to race. Combined, her parents reported some $50,000 a year in income, with Mario bringing in the majority of the money. Without him, the family would likely lose their apartment. Maybe they could move in with their aunt, though that didn’t seem likely to work well. But the younger girls might even end up in the foster care system if Tía Eli didn’t take them. Hareth would probably have to drop out of school and work to support her sisters. Without Mario, it was less likely Haziel and Claudia would even make it through high school, let alone college.

  Mario’s attorney, Vanessa Rodriguez, had come to the United States from Bolivia at age three and had coincidentally been a mentor to Hareth in high school through a Bolivian American youth enrichment program. Only three years out of law school, she didn’t look much older than Hareth, and maybe partly because of that, Hareth immediately trusted her. But she also came highly recommended by Dr. Emma. Vanessa shared her small office with her mother’s real estate company. She often met with clients on Saturdays, when they were free, padding around in soft bedroom slippers as she reviewed cases.