But others would continue the in-your-face actions against their allies and even the president. In November of 2013, Ju Hong, a twenty-four-year-old UC Berkeley graduate and an undocumented activist from Korea, interrupted Obama during a rally in San Francisco.
“You have the power to stop all deportations—” he shouted over the president.
“Actually I don’t,” the president replied, waving away Secret Service agents ready to remove Ju and others from the event. Once more, Obama reminded the activists that their only permanent protection lay with Congress.
“That’s part of our tradition. And so, the easy way out is try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws, and what I’m proposing is the harder path, which is to use our democratic processes to achieve the same goal that you want to achieve, but it won’t be as easy as just shouting,” he warned. “It requires us lobbying, and getting it done.”
Alex Aldana was inspired by Ju, and by the Bring Them Home campaign. He was also increasingly concerned about what he wasn’t seeing in the news: the unofficial reports that more young teens, sometimes kids, who were arriving in the United States alone or with only their mothers. Through his outreach work, he had met some of them, kids fleeing abuse and gangs back home, and kids simply seeking a better life. He couldn’t help but identify with them, and lately there seemed to be more and more arriving.
He was right. In the summer of 2013, Joseph Langlois, an associated director for refugee, asylum, and international operations of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, provided drafted comments for a congressional hearing to Alicia Caldwell of the Associated Press, noting that asylum requests, most of them from Central America, had nearly quadrupled since 2009, with more than 12,000 requests in south Texas alone. Many were young people coming alone, officially described as unaccompanied minors.2 Still, most major outlets had yet to pick up on the impending Central American migrant crisis.
Alex felt helpless when it came to these kids, and he felt stuck on so many fronts. As he coordinated media support for the California participants in the DREAM 9 and the DREAM 30, he began to wonder whether he shouldn’t throw it all to the wind and go back to Mexico himself. Life remained uncertain without DACA. He couldn’t advance with the nonprofit work without proper identification. Every day he feared he’d lose his job. He and Nico had parted ways.
When his paternal grandmother became ill in the fall of 2013, Alex opted to return to Mexico. It was a good time to go as he had been invited to talk about his activism at the prestigious international art conference 89+ Americas Marathon3 in Mexico City. In late December, he crossed the border and took a bus to Guadalajara to care for her. He hadn’t seen her in a decade, and he’d already lost one grandmother without saying good-bye. He knew he might not be able to get back to the United States. But he felt he had nothing to lose.
IN FEBRUARY 2014, Hareth’s father had his final immigration hearing. A crowd of supporters joined them in the court. Hareth sat on the wooden benches with her father, mother, and sisters. As the judge called out the name of each immigrant on the docket, she wondered whether they had family helping them, whether they had come to the United States alone. She remembered back to the first day her father arrived in the United States and how she had not recognized him. In recent months he’d spoken about his case and about others at local churches. They had collected so many letters of support. Vanessa had gotten a call from the judge’s chambers. Things looked good, but Vanessa was afraid to get her clients’ hopes up. As Hareth glanced over at her father, her heart sank. So much depended on the judge.
It seemed as though the judge would never get to Mario. Finally the bailiff called his name. Friends and supporters waved American flags. Mario stood up.
If the judge isn’t in a good mood today, Hareth thought, it’s not going to be a good day for us either.
She nearly missed the judge’s ruling.
“Administrative closure.”
What? At first Hareth didn’t even know what it meant. But everyone was cheering. She felt faint. For practical purposes, the case against her father was closed. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could reopen it, but even Vanessa was now optimistic that at least under President Obama, it was unlikely anyone would go after Mario again—unless, of course, he went looking for trouble. A story of family separation and victory like hers didn’t happen very often, Hareth knew, and she said a silent prayer of thanks.
Mario’s case was done. So was Hareth’s body. A month later, exhausted, sick, and with terrible stomach pain, she was rushed to the emergency room in the middle of the night.
“My body has officially given out,” Hareth wrote on her Facebook page in February. Doctors ran tests but came up with very little besides stress. When she was released twenty-four hours later, she was afraid to tell many of her friends and fellow activists the conclusion she’d come to: she wasn’t sure she could continue the fight. In the cold gray of winter, she dreamed of leaving the movement behind, fleeing the responsibilities of family and work, and running off to Florida to finish college by the sea. It was a crazy idea, but she’d learned about Miami Dade College through Gaby Pacheco, and it sounded to Hareth like paradise.
In the next few months, as Hareth’s health improved, her friends convinced her to stay in Virginia, and she returned to Capitol Hill with the Bridge Project, but her heart wasn’t in it. She applied for a scholarship to finish her international relations degree at the small, all-women Trinity College in Washington, DC, whose alumnae included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, Maggie Williams. When she was accepted for the fall, Hareth danced for joy. For the first time in four years, she would simply be a student—free to work, dance with friends, go to the gym, go out to eat, enjoy the small pleasures in life she had so often missed. She couldn’t wait to start.
HARETH WAS hardly the only activist exhausted and wondering whether there were a way forward. Even the veteran advocates were frustrated and in some cases burned out.
“I never thought I’d still be doing this so many years out. I imagined myself doing a lot of other things,” Frank Sharry said quietly during a break at an immigration conference in late 2013.
John Boehner was still refusing to bring the comprehensive immigration bill to the floor for a vote. When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican whom activists had viewed as more sympathetic to the bill, lost his Virginia primary in a surprise upset by a candidate with a strong anti-immigrant platform, any chance of the House taking up the bill evaporated.
Meanwhile, the number of deportations and unofficial returns on Obama’s watch inched its way up to 2 million. Prodded by the DREAMers, even the National Council of La Raza, one of the few veteran groups that had remained at least outwardly steadfast in its support of the White House, publicly drew a line in the sand. On March 4, the organization’s president, Janet Murguía, called the president “Deporter in Chief” and demanded he stop the stepped-up deportations. Gutiérrez took to the House floor and repeated the demand.
But the president truly still believed Congress was the correct body to tackle the issue, Cecilia Muñoz insisted. And unlike some of the young activists, he very much believed in the concept of national borders. During one meeting with DREAMers and veteran immigration advocates about the growing number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border, Obama told them he hadn’t slept well the night before.
I’m not just worried about these kids but also in Sudan and other places, Cecilia Muñoz recalled him saying. It’s very unfair that kids in El Salvador live in a very different situation than a kid born in the United States. [But] we live in a world with borders. And I’m president of a country with one, and I need to enforce these borders.
But it wasn’t all up to the president. The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to detain those crossing the border illegally. And if that meant mothers with children because they were the ones crossing, then s
o be it, was essentially the agency’s view.
Cecilia worked with others over the summer to provide better shelters for the children who were coming in increasing numbers, but that didn’t mean they would all be allowed to stay. Sometimes she grew exasperated with her former colleagues. Even as she knew how frustrated they were with the logjam in Congress and the years of inaction, they had become so focused on the issue of deportation that they no longer seemed to be pushing lawmakers to act, focusing instead all their ire on the president.
To those behind the Bring Them Home campaign, the success of the first two events and the increasingly strong words from Washington allies signified one thing: it was time for one more, even bigger border crossing.
“The participants in this third border-crossing were deported or forced to leave the United States because of programs supported by the Obama Administration,” the organizers said in their statement. “. . . State laws denying immigrants access to a college education, jobs, or housing also made life incredibly difficult. Some were just tired of living in fear, and returned. However, upon leaving their homes, they found life even more difficult. . . . No one should be forced to stay away from their children; no one should be forced to live in a country they barely remember.”4
ALEX HADN’T RETURNED to Mexico just to see his grandmother or even attend the conference. He’d also hoped to use the techniques he had learned helping with the DREAM 9 and DREAM 30 to bring back his older brother, Carlos, who had self-deported to Mexico after a bad breakup. Once he was there, though, the activist in him couldn’t help but also get involved in LGBTQ and other organizing events, including attending the first official lesbian wedding in Guadalajara. But Carlos didn’t want to go back. And in the barrio where he lived, Alex was often singled out by locals for the patterned shirts he wore, the way he walked. Not long after he arrived, he was jumped by a few men on his way home from a club. Alex was ready to go home.
He had been in touch with Lizbeth Mateo, and as he learned about plans for a third border crossing, he reached out to help. He was afraid to stay with his brother any longer, and he hated the idea of returning to his undocumented life. This time he would request asylum based on credible fear of homophobia in Mexico. The organizers told Alex they would attempt to bring back 150 people this round, not just DREAMers but adults, too, families, and a couple of unaccompanied minors. This time they would challenge the entire immigration deportation system and force the media and activists to recognize more than just the immigrants in caps and gowns. Alex had already walked more than a thousand miles across the United States. He’d lived in a shelter with his mother. He figured he could survive detention, especially if it would get him home.
The plan was to turn themselves in at the border in Tijuana and once more seek asylum. They would literally and visibly overwhelm a system they already deemed broken. But what Gutiérrez and others had been trying to tell the young activists was that getting asylum wasn’t easy: you had to be able to document credible fear of persecution by your own government or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion that your own government failed to protect you from. And just who won asylum often depended on the jurisdiction and on what judge heard the case. Approval rates varied wildly.5 In Arlington, Virginia, for example, where Hareth lived, judges approved more than 70 percent of the cases they decided between 2009 and 2014. But in San Diego during that same time, approval rates ranged from less than 10 percent to more than 60 percent, depending on the judge.
But to Alex, the persecution he would face as a gay man in Mexico seemed clear, especially as an outspoken activist. He wasn’t worried, not for himself anyway. The National Immigrant Youth Alliance organizers were also confident. Most of the DREAM 30 had been allowed to wait out their cases in the United States. They might lose, but at least they could buy time, maybe until comprehensive immigration reform passed.
As the day for the return drew near, Alex began to feel more uneasy. He had little interaction with the national nonprofits, but he’d begun to hear some of them were strongly discouraging the actions. And when two young girls who had traveled across Mexico to cross the border joined the group, he wondered if it might be better for him to remain behind and help them in case they were turned back. Still, he listened to those who insisted that when so many people were actually detained, advocates would have to step forward and defend them.
Days after Murguía called the president “Deporter in Chief,” more than 150 people showed up at Otay Mesa Port of Entry on the San Diego border.6 On Monday, the first day of the action, nearly 30 DREAMers turned themselves in. Many had self-deported like the previous groups—some days or weeks before Obama had announced DACA. One twenty-year-old, Jaren Rodriguez Orellana, had recently returned to Honduras after his older sister had been deported.7 He described being stabbed by local gang members at 10 a.m. one day after he had refused to pay their “protection” fee.
The rest of the week brought parents, sometimes with small children, who were often hoping to reunite with their US-born sons and daughters. A small group of people, including Alex, were seeking asylum based on their LGBTQ status. A handful more tagged along on the off chance their cases could be resolved. Alex tried to keep a spreadsheet of everyone. He tallied about twenty-five families, thirty-five DREAMers, and ten LGBTQ activists.
The returning immigrants came in waves across the same entry point that Dario had visited the year before and each time requested either humanitarian parole (which allowed them to enter legally but did not grant permanent residence nor necessarily a work permit) or asylum. They were quickly detained at the border and taken to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, which had a mostly open floor plan, with pods around a center area filled with metal cafeteria-style tables and seats. At night their cells were locked, as well as several times during the day at “check-in.” But otherwise they could circulate in the common area or visit the library, which was also in a small cell-like room. Officers housed the gay detainees in cells in the center of the long wall, two to a room. To Alex, it felt like being forced onto center stage.
At Otay, Alex met detainees from around the world. One twenty-year-old man was fleeing Afghanistan and hated loud noise. “But the Nigerian folks, the black folks, the Mexican folks, everyone [was] watching telenovelas, and they put him right there, and it must have been driving him crazy, all this noise, and one day he snapped and smashed the TV,” Alex said. The Afghani was taken to solitary confinement as punishment.
Psychologists came and talked with the detainees for a few minutes and listened. They’d give them ibuprofen but not much else, Alex said.
The ACLU would later call for closure of the Otay Mesa Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America, following reports from nonprofits of several serious complaints, including sexual assault, harassment, and neglect.8
By then Gutiérrez was refusing to work with the organizers. Hareth was no longer working at the AFL-CIO, which had also pulled the plug on its support of the border crossers. The nonprofits had helped provide bond for the few dozen youths who’d previously crossed, but they didn’t have endless funds, nor were they willing to spend a lot of resources on a form of protest they hadn’t been consulted on and didn’t support. Many other advocates were pouring all their energy into getting Obama to expand his earlier executive action.
Alex had helped organize for the DREAM 9 and the DREAM 30. Alex thought he knew what to expect. But there were so many people who needed his help, and this time he was on the inside. Each day it felt like The Hunger Games. Nobody knew who would be chosen for deportation, who would be allowed into the United States. DREAMers who assumed they’d have a chance to be released into the United States and make their appeal got a rude awakening.
I’m going back because I have a degree and I don’t speak with an accent, Alex remembered one young man with DACA telling another immigrant who had a minor crim
inal conviction. Both men were sent back across the border to Mexico.
The DREAM 9 had left detention after less than a month. Most of those in the DREAM 30 group had also been released, in large part because outside groups had agreed to pay their bond. Now the numbers overwhelmed even those nonprofits that did try to help. This last group, the DREAM 150, had to hustle to get their families to raise the roughly $7,500 to pay the bond so they could fight their cases from outside of detention.
To Alex, the saddest cases he saw at Otay Mesa were the indigenous women arriving from Chiapas. Many hadn’t come with his group and had little support. They often struggled just to make themselves understood. Many couldn’t read, and although their first language might be Kanjobal or Tzotzil, they had to explain their cases in Spanish or English, often without a translator. They would be asked over and over about the traumas they had faced, domestic violence, gangs, military assaults. Each time they had to relive the trauma, sometimes breaking into sobs as they met with immigration officials.
People looked to Alex for guidance and advice, calling him “lawyer” and jokingly nicknaming him “messiah.” When he couldn’t help them, they also blamed him.
You lied to me! You said you were going to help me!
At first Alex and many others refused to pay the high bond fee.
We are not going to pay anything. We aren’t criminals, we shouldn’t have to pay to get out of jail, he insisted. Alex appealed the cost of his bail three times. Some in the group conducted hunger strikes, but many of the participants did eventually get some outside support from family, friends, and even a few nonprofits, and posted bond. By late April, more than a month after he had been detained, Alex was among the last of the 150 still at Otay. He began to worry he would never get out. He had applied for asylum based on the harassment he faced in Mexico, but there’d been errors in the application that had delayed processing. He’d visited Vera Cruz, but officials marked that he’d lived there. The first day he was interviewed, he’d given conflicting dates for the beating he’d received in his brother’s neighborhood.
The Making of a Dream Page 27