She was straight with Hareth. They didn’t have much of a case. The only chance she saw was prosecutorial discretion, and even then, it was a slim chance. After all, Mario had two strikes against him: he’d come into the country on a visa using his brother’s information, and he was facing DUI charges. There were two options, Vanessa advised: either Mario could voluntarily deport himself with the hopes that he might be able to return after a decade, or they could fight the case and spend months of stress and money, likely for the same outcome.
Ten years is not that long, she told Hareth and her mother.
Hareth thought again of the protocol she used with other families. If they kept silent, deportation was all but certain. Going public was a risk, but it might be their only chance. They could quickly get a petition going on Facebook. But Betty refused. What would her friends and family say? She had tried so hard to live an exemplary life in the United States. She had few material things, but she had her pride. Going public with the truth would be an utter humiliation. And it might even put them in more danger. Mixed in with all those concerns was the fury she still felt toward her husband.
“If we fight, we may not win because we are fighting something much bigger,” she said to her daughter. The humiliation would be for nothing. “People don’t understand about family separation.”
But going public might be the only chance of saving her father, Hareth argued back. Maybe they could get a hundred people to sign the petition. It could help. They would need any support they could get to convince immigration officials of three things: that Mario was a valued and upstanding member of the community; that deporting him would significantly affect his family, especially his US-born daughter; and last but not least, that it would be a public relations headache for DHS.
That night, Hareth wrote up a post about her father and sent it to a friend to review. Without telling Hareth, her friend posted it online, and overnight they got 200 signatures. Within days the number reached 1,000. Betty couldn’t believe it.
Still the family debated what to do.
Betty was so angry at Mario that she was ready to face separation from him, but ten years was a long time. Hareth realized that if her father left now, he might never come back. She couldn’t imagine her family without him. She wanted her sisters to have him in their lives the way she had. Haziel, now in high school, had already missed the early years, and Hareth remembered better than anyone what the nearly four-year separation had meant for them.
True, Haziel and Claudia were both willing to go back if they had to so the family could stay together. But when she thought about it, Hareth knew she was not. She had dreamed of visiting Bolivia, occasionally entertained grandiose fantasies about returning to run for office there. Yet now, as the possibility loomed, she knew—in a way she never had before—that Virginia was her home. She was not prepared to return to a country she hadn’t seen since she was eight. She did not want to go back. She did not want to have to choose.
We must fight, she told her mother. Grudgingly at first, Betty agreed. Hareth’s mother had already lost one job when her employers found out she was undocumented. They had helped her find another position, but she worried that publicity would once again render her unemployable. With Mario in detention, she picked up extra hours with the elderly woman she’d long cared for in Georgetown, in addition to her regular nanny shift.
Hareth didn’t lie about what had happened, but she didn’t shout across virtual media that her father had been arrested for DUI. It had been a traffic stop, she said, unless she had to explain further. The days became a blur of work, shuffling her sisters between home and sports practice, helping her mom pay bills, gathering letters of support from anyone her father knew. At night she couldn’t sleep, imagining her father hours away in detention and worrying that immigration officials might come to their home in search of the rest of the family.
A few weeks after her birthday and a month after Mario’s arrest, Hareth got good news: her father’s case had finally been processed, and he would be released on bond. He would still likely face deportation, but in the meantime he would be home. The moment he walked into the house, his daughters covered him with kisses. He steadied himself and grinned, cracking jokes so as not to weep.
A simple Facebook post was Hareth’s only public declaration that day. “Welcome home Dad,” she wrote.
9
MOUNTING PRESSURE
Alex Aldana prepares to meet with his immigration attorney, Berkeley, California, September 2015.
One late night in the fall of his freshman year, Dario hung in the Harvard dorms with a few friends. It was the hour well past any studying when people lingered in rooms, still savoring a schedule that for the first and possibly only time in their lives didn’t begin at dawn. They talked home, sports, and weird indie films, the more obscure, the better. One of his dorm mates, the son of a New York banking executive, offered to take them all to a rave in the Netherlands on his father’s private plane. Sure, they all laughed, let’s do it.
Dario looked over at his roommate, Alex, who was from South Carolina and, like Dario, found the whole New York scene both awe-inspiring and ridiculous. Alex raised an eyebrow. Was this kid serious?
A couple of guys leaned forward, calculating the cost, joking about where they’d stashed their passports. Dario nodded along. Even on a free plane with room and board taken care of, there was no way he’d be able to go. He had no passport. He couldn’t leave the country, not if he wanted to ever get back in.
Raves are lame, he scoffed.
Being at Harvard was like that. One minute he was comparing math homework with a friend; the next, someone was talking about hopping over to Europe on his parents’ plane. It was insane. Dario loved and hated it. For the first time he was not the smartest, nor nearly the smartest, student in school. Sitting alongside hundreds of other students in the cavernous freshman lecture halls, he could pass. But it didn’t come easily. He struggled through classes such as medieval literature and philosophy. He chalked his difficulties up to personal inadequacy, not realizing that many of his classmates, even some from the most exclusive private prep schools, were experiencing similar doubts. He wondered if he belonged. He vowed to fake it if he didn’t.
Not long after he arrived, he met a girl. That never took all that long. He hadn’t been really single since his sophomore year of high school. She was cool and had gotten him to go to some Latino student events. They even talked, mostly in jest, about getting married so he could adjust his status.
“Dude, why are you getting married?!” Alex yelled when he overheard the plan. “You’re eighteen!”
That night Dario told Alex about his immigration status. At first Alex didn’t believe him. “I had no idea people who were undocumented could go to college and to Harvard,” he later said.
Alex was no stranger to the immigrant story. His father was from Syria, a doctor who had gotten a green card through a visa program for physicians willing to work in underserved communities. His dad had eventually met his mother, a US native, and the two had settled in Greenville, South Carolina. Alex’s father spoke sympathetically about the plight of the undocumented mostly farmworkers who increasingly flocked to South Carolina looking for work. His mother, not so much.
Why don’t they just do it the right way? he remembered her complaining. And they don’t even pay taxes.
Dario told Alex that since his father wasn’t a doctor, nor did he have a million dollars to invest in a company, there wasn’t really a “right way to come.” The line for most Mexicans was literally a lifetime long. His parents did pay taxes. Only, unlike Americans, they were unlikely to get back any of the money they put into the system when they retired.
Dario and his girlfriend didn’t get married. Instead they broke up. Dario and Alex started hanging around together more. Dario confided in Alex about the film he had started his senior year of high school with other undocumented friends. Alex was fascinated. You should keep working on it, h
e said, and he offered to help. Together they could make a real doc. Maybe, said Dario. He’d wanted to come to Harvard precisely so he wouldn’t have to think about what his immigration status meant anymore. He joined the Boxing Club. He partied alongside all the other first years.
But still he thought about it—he had to. Not just around crazy stunts like the rave. Many of his friends held odd jobs on or off campus to pay their way or even just for spending money. Dario couldn’t get a job, not on the books anyway, although he heard rumors that some undocumented students were able to get jobs cleaning the dorms.
By the fall of his sophomore year in 2012, he applied for a more creative position: sperm donor. There were ads for Harvard students all the time in the campus paper. Who wouldn’t want an Ivy League donor? It seemed like a fun way to make a quick buck, and besides, it would make for a good story.
Dario passed the health exams, the drug test, and the interview. He gave a few samples, but ultimately, the clinic rejected his services with no explanation except for a brief sympathetic note from the case manager he’d spoken with. Apparently, even Boston parents desperate enough to pay for a baby weren’t inclined to select the offspring of a dark-skinned, six-foot-tall Mexican, he thought bitterly.
Dario knew his dad wanted him to continue his engineering studies, the courses he’d so excelled at in high school, or do law. But increasingly he was drawn back to the camera: the same tool he had turned to so he could document his college application process, the same one his father had so often carried on their family outings to document their lives. With the camera, he could watch the world and have a reason to watch—with a camera he felt safe.
Alex and Dario began to stay up late, drinking beer and mapping out ideas for a film about undocumented students at Harvard. Dario found nearly a dozen, including in the graduate programs, at least as far as he could make out through informal inquiries. It was word of mouth, a friend of a friend who didn’t have a driver’s license. But few wanted to have their faces on camera. They were scared of the politics and what it would mean for them and for Harvard were they to go public.
Their fears weren’t unfounded.
By the fall of 2011, the Obama administration had been on track to deport nearly 400,000 people annually, a record.1 About half of those sent home had criminal convictions, most commonly immigration violations, drug-related charges, or traffic violations. The number of deported immigrants with criminal convictions would grow to nearly two-thirds of all those deported by 2013, enabling the Obama administration to boast that its priority was now targeting the bad guys. But of those deported criminals, the most serious conviction was generally the misdemeanor of “illegal entry”—the act of living in the United States following a previous deportation.2 United We Dream had documented dozens of cases of DREAM Act–eligible students who had been detained and put in deportation hearings since 2008. In 2011, young students continued to be among those rounded up. Felipe and other young immigrant leaders struggled to reconcile the president they had campaigned for with Obama’s stepped-up deportations, especially since the stricter enforcement hadn’t brought Congress any closer to taking action.
The action shifted back to the states. Lawmakers in more than half of the country’s fifty states had proposed Arizona-style immigration laws in 2011. Most of the bills went nowhere, but Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama successfully passed bills on a par with Arizona’s, giving law enforcement officials the right to stop and request papers from virtually anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally.
The ACLU, the DOJ, and others immediately sued to block much of that legislation3 and succeeded in part, mitigating some of the harshest measures. In fact, that year, more pro-immigrant measures than punitive ones passed nationwide.4 This time around, the business communities took a more aggressive stance against enforcement-only state bills. The immigrant groups were also better organized. Latino groups took out ads against legislation in the swing states of Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Florida. In Utah, even as lawmakers approved tough enforcement measures, they sought to create a local work permit for undocumented immigrants and to discourage local law enforcement agencies from targeting them.5
Now, too, the young activists and their allies were loud and unapologetic. In many ways, the failure of the DREAM Act had freed them from the image Congress seemed to demand of them. Presenting the story of the perfect, well-mannered student hadn’t worked. Now they could just be human. They took the social media and organizational skills they’d honed during the push for the DREAM Act back to the local fights.
In Florida, students, farmworkers, and other allies spent weeks in Tallahassee holding pray-ins, lobbying lawmakers, and protesting legislation that sought to criminalize those who were in the country without legal status. In Kansas, opponents spread audio clips of state representative Virgil Peck Jr. comparing undocumented immigrants to wild animals.
“Looks like to me, if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal immigration problem,” he joked during a committee hearing.6 The public outcry and backlash were loud and swift.
Students were arrested in Atlanta and Indianapolis in protests over measures that aimed to make it harder for undocumented students to attend state colleges. By the end of 2011, some thirteen states offered in-state tuition for students who were in the country without legal immigration status.
Earlier that year, John Morton, now the Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, had issued another memo. This one was more specific. It further laid out the categories for which his agents should use their discretion when it came to deporting an immigrant and was part of the department’s effort to focus on those deemed high-priority “aliens.”
“ICE is charged with enforcing the nation’s civil immigration laws,” Morton wrote. “ICE, however, only has resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year, less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal alien population in the United States. In light of the large number of administrative violations the agency is charged with addressing and the limited enforcement resources the agency has available, ICE must prioritize the use of its enforcement personnel, detention space, and removal resources.”7
In June, he had followed up with still another memo,8 which explicitly urged care and consideration before detaining young immigrants who had grown up in the United States.
The memo encouraged the officers to take into account the length of time the person had lived in the United States, whether he or she was a child or a teen, his or her level of education or military participation—in other words, many of the same factors listed in the DREAM Act.
The last memo also made clear it was offering no guarantees. “Nothing in this memorandum should be construed to prohibit the apprehension, detention, or removal of any alien unlawfully in the United States,”9 Morton wrote. But the memorandum showed movement.
About a month after the last Morton memo, the president was scheduled to speak at the National Council of La Raza in Washington, DC. Getting the president was a coup. Leaders from United We Dream had asked NCLR to help broker a meeting with the president, but when it became clear that wouldn’t be happening, the young undocumented immigrants took another tactic.
During the luncheon, the president addressed the ballroom filled with a who’s who of Hispanic America, reiterating his stance that he could not take unilateral action on immigration. “And I promise you, we are responding to your concerns and working every day to make sure we are enforcing flawed laws in the most humane and best possible way,” he told the group, adding, “Now I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.”10
Suddenly, a small group of young undocumented activists, let by Felipe Matos, who represented United We Dream’s southeast affiliates, stood up, unveiling T-shirts with the slogan “Yes you can!” They began chanting the same words, and to their surprise, for half a minute, many of those seated in the ballroom
in their finest evening wear joined in the chanting. It was as if they had finally freed the establishment to let go and to say publicly what so many had been thinking and saying in private.
Obama grimaced but didn’t waiver. Soon he had the room back on his side. “The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. . . . But that’s not how our system works, that’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written,” he insisted. “I need a dance partner here, and the floor is empty,” he said, referring to Congress. “Feel free to keep the heat on me, and keep the heat on Democrats,” he continued, but he insisted that whatever he proposed, Republicans would block.
“I need you to keep building a movement for change outside of Washington, one they can’t stop, one that’s greater than this community. We need a movement that bridges party lines,” he added. “And I will be there every step of the way.”11
Many took him at his word.
Some older groups, such as the National Immigration Forum, had already started campaigns like “Bibles, Badges and Business,” reaching out to more conservative religious, law enforcement, and business groups and trying to find common ground, hoping eventually the cultural shift would lead to policy change. Gaby Pacheco would eventually lead a small group of half a dozen young immigrants who opted to canvass Republican lawmakers they thought might be open to learning more about the DREAM Act and even comprehensive reform, in part to pressure Democrats—Obama in particular—to act. Yet there were many other young immigrants who were disillusioned with the Washington lobbying and the painstaking ally building that never seemed to go anywhere, who took up increasingly outside-the-beltway tactics, staking out the homes of lawmakers for protests and ambushing them at campaign events.
The young activists pushed one another to try new tactics. Later, as the 2012 election heated up, they would make national headlines confronting politicians, including GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. At a fund-raiser in New York City, a young Peruvian native and United We Dream organizer, Lucia Allain, asked Romney about his dislike of the DREAM Act on camera. It went viral.12 The young activists could get away with the confrontations precisely because, unlike their parents, they looked young, had no accents, and could often blend into a crowd of political supporters.
The Making of a Dream Page 21