The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  A few dogs, he could handle.

  SINCE HER FATHER’S death, Marie Gonzalez had taken a further step back from activism. In the fall of 2012, she and Chapin flew with his parents to Costa Rica to surprise Marie’s mother on her fiftieth birthday. Marina had begun to remake her life in Puntarenas, and for the first time, the family enjoyed a tourist-style trip, spending the weekend in the cloud forest of Monteverde. They rode zip lines and drank copious amounts of local coffee and rum. It was the best vacation Marie could remember, the first time she hadn’t been dealing with immigration papers or helping clean out her father’s belongings. They gorged themselves on local seafood, and only a day or so after Marie returned did she remember that she had long since lost her native stomach for local Costa Rican food. As soon as they returned, Chapin was immediately sent to handle claims for the insurance company where he still worked. Marie weathered the illness alone. She watched the election returns in between running to the bathroom, so sick she could barely get to work. It felt like the worst flu she could remember. A friend at work suggested she get a pregnancy test. No way am I pregnant, Marie insisted—until the little pink plus sign appeared in the window of the plastic wand.

  Marie wanted to feel elated, but she was terrified. What would a baby do to her and Chapin? He had always kept her feet on the ground, had kept her from falling apart after her parents left, had offered his parents as surrogates when she couldn’t embrace her own. He was a writer at heart, played guitar, too. He had stayed with the insurance job to support them despite his musical interests, hadn’t complained, just did it. He was big, blond, and goofy, almost the opposite of Marie in so many ways. And just when things were finally getting a little easier, a little more predictable, this. . . . She wondered how kids would affect their relationship, frightened about not being able to just blow off steam with Chapin over a few beers. And what if one day she were separated from her baby as her parents had been from her? But she could see Chapin as a dad. Yeah, she could definitely see him doing this. She dialed Chapin’s cell, a grin on her face. “Hey, so how do you feel about being a dad?”

  ON NOVEMBER 6, 2012, Obama captured 71 percent of Hispanic votes, a result second only to that of Bill Clinton’s reelection. New Mexicans were hardly the only Latinos who came out in force for the president. Obama won wide margins in swing states such as Colorado, Virginia, and Florida.

  DACA had barely begun to roll out, but the cushion of safety the order would soon provide so many young immigrants was already taking effect. Now that those with DACA could work, many organizations and even politicians were tapping them for their skills. Representative Luis Gutiérrez hired the first undocumented youth to work in his office. The activist Erika Andiola,3 from Arizona, joined the community outreach team for the campaign of a Democratic politician, Kyrsten Sinema, who that fall won her first US House election.

  Life had changed overnight for those with DACA, but not for many of their loved ones. In the fall of 2012, an officer stopped Erika’s mother, Maria Minerva Guadalupe Arreola, for allegedly speeding. It was hard for Erika to believe. Her mother had always been terrified of being pulled over, a fear only magnified after Joe Arpaio’s 2008 raids of the Arizona water parks, where she had worked. But SB 1070 also allowed local officers to pull over anyone whom they might suspect of being in the country unlawfully. The officer had run Maria’s name through the system, and that was when the traffic stop became more than a traffic stop because Maria’s name was already in the system. About fifteen years before, she had brought the then eleven-year-old Erika across the Mexican border. The first time she crossed, Maria had been caught and sent back. The second time they made it, but by crossing again she had violated Title 8, US Code § 1326, and committed the felony crime of reentry into the United States following a deportation. Punishment was up to two years of prison, followed by an expedited removal order. Now, if her information from the traffic stop was turned over to DHS, immigration officers might come looking for her.

  And they did. Around 9 p.m. on Thursday, January 10, 2013, the agents hammered on the door of Erika’s home. The agents asked her mother and brother to come outside. Minutes later Erika posted what had happened on Facebook: “My house just got raided by ICE and they took my mom and my brother. They had no reason to do this!”

  Like Hareth, Erika had worked enough cases through the immigrant networks to know time was against her. The faster she acted, the more likely she was to save her mother. Unlike Hareth, Erika was defiant from the start.

  “This is real!” she cried, her voice catching between sobs. “I need everybody to stop pretending nothing is wrong, to stop pretending that we are just living normal lives, because we’re not.”

  The next day, Erika spoke with her brother, who was eventually released from detention, and learned her mother would soon be deported. She raced to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, only to learn her mother was already on a bus to the border. Within hours, she put her activism to work for her family. She was on a conference call with ten different immigrant organizations, brainstorming about a campaign to save Maria. They put out urgent calls to their social networks across the country, and Arizona’s lawmakers, as well as the White House, were flooded with calls to save Maria. Suddenly, officials reversed course. The driver of Maria’s bus got word around 9 a.m. Friday as he was driving his group of detainees to the border. He took the call and pulled over. Shortly after he hung up, he turned the bus back around. The order had gone out; Erika’s mom would not be deported that day. News of their victory raced across the young undocumented networks. It was empowering but also chilling. They might be safe for the moment, but it was a reminder of just how vulnerable their parents and siblings remained.

  By 2013, Silicon Valley also threw its support behind the DREAM-ers. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg teamed up with tech leaders, including the cofounders of Dropbox and LinkedIn, to create the bipartisan lobbying group FWD.us, focused primarily on broader immigration reform. The group often used the DREAM Act–eligible immigrants as the face and raison d’être of the campaign. It began offering hackathons in places such as Cambridge and Miami, empowering the activists with twenty-first-century tech tools.

  Many Silicon Valley leaders were immigrants or the children of immigrants and felt a natural affinity with the undocumented students they met, who tended to be the high-achieving public faces of the movement. They also couldn’t stand the idea of wasted young potential. And they were often more familiar with the issue by virtue of being based in California than many other Americans because of the sheer number of immigrants in the state.

  But the tech titans also saw the potential for allies in their own efforts to streamline the immigration process for the world’s best, and least expensive, engineers, software developers, and also increasingly lower-level analysts, web developers, and other potential employees. An immigration policy that combined their desire for a more updated foreign worker visa program with the DREAM Act or an even broader comprehensive immigration policy might also protect them from pushback over the outsourcing of white-collar jobs.

  Laurene Powell Jobs had founded a nonprofit mentoring group for first-generation college-bound students and said it was there she had learned that a number of participants were undocumented. In 2013, she broke her nearly two-year public silence following the death of her husband, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, to advocate for the DREAM Act.

  “I think there’s been a great realization over the last several years that, in fact we do not wish to punish the children because of any actions from their parents,” she said during an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams.4

  She helped produce a half-hour film by Davis Guggenheim about the DREAMers and a website to share their stories. She founded the Emerson Collective, a nonprofit that would champion DACA and the DREAM Act, among other issues.

  Silicon Valley’s support was much welcomed, but some young activists were once again split. Should they push again for a stand-alone DRE
AM Act, taking Silicon Valley’s backing and running with it? Or now that they had some modicum of safety, should they return to fighting for broader immigration reform that would include their parents and older siblings?

  The debate wasn’t limited to what kind of legislation they should push for in Washington. Some young activists, including Tania Unzueta and many in the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, wondered whether they should be focusing on a bill at all, given how many people were being detained. They had little hope Congress would pass beneficial legislation anytime soon and believed they could have more impact by using their limited resources to reduce immediate suffering by fighting the Obama administration’s expanded deportation policy. These activists began to turn their attention back to the border. During the summer of 2012, a small group of young undocumented activists had infiltrated the same Broward Transitional Center where Juan had helped the youths plan the desks-and-chairs protest back in the fall of 2009. Their dispatches from inside upped the ante for what daring action would be taken next. Activists moved their sit-ins from congressional offices to the roads outside immigrant detention facilities, blocking the departure of buses like the one Erika’s mom had rode in to the border.

  The young activists’ parents were also emboldened. Like Hareth’s mother, Betty, who joined the Dream Project, and through campaigns such as the “No Papers, No Fear” Ride for Justice, they had begun to share their stories publicly. Now they joined their children in getting arrested while stopping buses headed across the border.

  HER FATHER’S ARREST spurred Hareth to expand her role in the movement. It felt selfish to focus only on her own family’s troubles. During the summer of 2012, she made public service announcements to encourage other teens to register for DACA and expanded her work with the DREAMers of Virginia. And she began to think about comprehensive immigration reform that would go beyond those eligible for DACA.

  Hareth attended her third Dream Summer program in 2013. This time, she was placed at an even bigger organization, the AFL-CIO. The subway ride each morning from Arlington to the McPherson Square subway stop only blocks from the White House transported her across a distance far greater than just the Potomac River. At the AFL-CIO, she was part of a much broader conversation about the future of America than she had been even at United We Dream.

  It had been more than a year since her father’s detention. Mario had completed his alcohol education classes and paid his fines. But as the next immigration hearing approached that fall, the family’s attorney, Vanessa Rodriguez, once more warned them about getting their hopes up. Now she advised them to at least consider voluntary departure, and they trusted her enough to take her advice seriously.

  Had Mario been in the United States for a decade before being arrested, he might have had a better chance of staying. A decade of good citizenship was worth something in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama, but Mario had been two years shy of that marker. He wasn’t a college student with a clean record. The family could fight the case for another year or so against what was an all but inevitable outcome, or he could start ticking off years on the ten-year ban and come back sooner, Vanessa told them.

  Once again Hareth’s parents looked to their eldest daughter for the final say.

  We fight, she said.

  Earlier that year, Hareth had met Erika Andiola at an organizing training and learned firsthand about the online petition and the videos Erika had created for her mother. Hareth decided to create a similar campaign for Mario, spreading the word about his case throughout the national immigrant networks. On her long subway ride home from work, she racked her brain for people she’d forgotten to reach out to and the small, neglected details about her father that she could add to the page to help his case. One afternoon she began writing a few free-form lines in her notebook. The words began to shape themselves into thoughts, ideas she was too shy to share. It felt good to write. Hareth leaned back against the vinyl seats of the air-conditioned subway train, and for a few minutes she felt free.

  At first she kept her father’s case quiet at work, some days not speaking to anyone. But she confided in her supervisor, Ana Avendaño, the union’s longtime immigration policy coordinator. And over time, her colleagues began to learn her story.

  “The AFL-CIO takes care of its own” had long been a union staple. But Ana put a different spin on the words. “We take care of each other,” she told Hareth. Don’t give up.

  In September, a month before her father’s hearing, the AFL-CIO offered Hareth a speaker’s spot at its national convention in Los Angeles. The union had promoted a pro-immigrant platform since 1999. But Hareth’s speech came as the union announced it would include more low-wage nonunionized labor, even undocumented immigrants, in its organizing efforts. Now more than ever, the union sought to bridge the native/immigrant labor divide as states across the country sought to copy a 2011 Wisconsin law that had significantly weakened union influence.

  At the convention that year, the AFL-CIO issued resolutions to support citizenship drives; a push for comprehensive immigration reform; and the creation of low-interest loans and other union benefits even for those who weren’t able to join the union.5

  Many of the proposals the organization announced weren’t new, but that year they were updated with input from groups such as United We Dream and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. The largest federation of unions in the United States of America was no longer paying lip service to the importance of immigration reform. It was looking to become a lead partner in the fight.

  President Obama was set to address the convention the same day as Hareth was scheduled to talk, and Hareth planned out in her head how she would wait for him offstage and beseech him to help save her father. Ana Avendaño warned her how hard it would be to just “grab” the president, but she couldn’t bring herself to dampen Hareth’s determination. Hareth was almost giddy. If anyone could help, it would be the president.

  Then, at the last minute, Obama didn’t come. Hareth was crushed. The morning of her speech, she stepped outside to the parking lot for a few minutes to collect herself. It was the day before her father’s birthday. What exactly could she say to these men and women to convince them her family’s plight was worth their time? She called her friend Carolina Canizales, the national deportation defense coordinator at United We Dream.

  Carolina had been cheerleading for Hareth throughout that year. Even if they couldn’t save Mario, even if he was deported, they would keep fighting to get him back, she’d insisted. Don’t give up hope, she’d admonish Hareth from time to time. Hareth had to keep her father’s spirits up as well. Now once again Carolina offered advice. Tell them to stand up, she suggested. The physical act of moving, getting up out of a chair, literally standing up for something, was a long-standing organizing tactic. It would send a powerful message of solidarity to anyone watching and would create energy in the room, she promised.

  Suddenly Hareth began receiving urgent texts. The schedule had been changed again. Her turn was almost up. She needed to get back into the convention center.

  She made it to the stage just in time. Richard Trumka, the AFLCIO president, gave a brief introduction and description of her family’s case, then Hareth stepped up.

  “Hi, everybody, how are we doing?” she called out. The crowd murmured in response.

  She squared her shoulders, smoothed the black blazer she wore over her red-and-pink flowered dress, and looked out at a sea of gray-haired, mostly pale men in suits and polo shirts. She exhaled. “I know we can do better than that,” she said, her nervous laugh echoing. Louder shouts.

  She pushed ahead. She reminded herself she had little to lose. She told the crowd how she’d hoped to see the president and tell him about her father and how disappointed she was that that wasn’t going to happen.

  Backstage Ana and the schedulers looked at each other. Hareth was supposed to read a poem she’d written, not improvise.

  Hareth con
tinued. Maybe, she said, since she wasn’t going to speak to the president, they could all send a message to the president together. “If you want to tell President Obama to stop my dad’s deportation, please stand up,” she said. Ana held her breath. She peeked out from the side of the stage. It was difficult to see the faces on the darkened convention floor.

  Ana heard the shuffle of chairs and feet. First from the front, then slowly a wave moving toward the back, the cavernous room thundering with applause as hundreds of union members rose to their feet.

  Hareth clasped her hands and stepped back up the broad blue-carpeted steps of the convention stage. She turned to survey the crowd, a timid smile spreading across her face. Only then did she launch into the words she had first sketched out on those long metro rides, words that over time she had polished into a poem:

  AMERICA, WE NEED TO TALK!

  Don’t be afraid, and stand because we believe this is the year, the year that the dreams of my parents will be realized

  And the dreams of millions who came and crossed borders

  Unimaginable to reach the land of opportunities

  . . .

  Let’s go on and tell them,

  While they who have the power sit

  Separating us as they see fit

  While my father’s hands blister from work all day

  And he doesn’t feel like he has a say.

  Her voice cracked. Yes, she was talking about immigrants, even those in the country who had taken union construction jobs. Yet her audience wasn’t turning on her. They, too, were fathers and daughters.

  They seemed to understand she was speaking about them, too, and about a system that each year seemed to provide ever-growing rewards for an ever-shrinking number of people.