His mother made videos pleading for help for Alex.
But when he spoke to her on the phone, she rebuked him. I don’t have the money for bail, hijo, she sobbed. Why, why did you want to leave?
Finally, Alex received the green light to apply for asylum due to a credible fear based on being an LGBTQ activist, and he grudgingly asked friends to raise the bail money as a loan. After his initial petition for asylum was accepted, he posted bail while he waited for the case to make its way through the courts. Ironically, his sexual orientation, which had always made him feel vulnerable, now might save him.
Alex left Otay the first week in May. There were no cameras, no huge celebrations. Friends gave him a ride back to San Francisco, where he’d lived before his departure. It was a relief to be there as the city had become a sanctuary for LGBTQ refugees. He was not alone. The process was glacially slow. The immigration courts were woefully backed up. It might be years before a final decision was made in his case. Meanwhile, he could buy time and gather evidence. His asylum hearing was pushed back until December 2017.
He was done with big protests. He wanted to go back to doing work he knew would have a direct effect, rather than waiting years for politicians to move. He owed thousands of dollars for the bond. He slept on friends’ couches, taking odd jobs until he could get his temporary work permit reinstated. Eventually he returned to his work in HIV prevention, helping researchers study health care outcomes for those most at risk in the LGBTQ community. Enclosed spaces and white rooms now terrified him. At night, when he closed his eyes, he heard the sobbing of the women and men he had not been able to help. Still, he knew he was better off than many. If his petition was approved, he would be on his way to US citizenship. And either way, for now, he was free.
A MONTH AFTER Alex’s release, in June 2014, President Obama publicly stated that he would go it alone on immigration if House Republicans refused to bring the Senate bill up for a vote.
Activists eagerly awaited the president’s next move, preparing for a summer of outreach around executive-branch immigration relief, just as they had done for DACA back in 2012. But once again outside events intervened. Roughly 60,000 unaccompanied children and teens, mostly from Central America, had come across the border in the last year. Many mistakenly believed they would be able to take advantage of any new proposed legislative or executive changes to the nation’s immigration rules, or they and their families feared it would be even harder to cross after. The crisis Alex had seen coming, the one USCIS officials had testified to Congress about the previous year, finally made the front page.
Obama delayed executive action on immigration as the administration tried to reduce the flow across the border. But now congressional Democrats from swing states were nervous about how such an announcement would affect their campaigns. They urged the president to hold off until after the November midterm elections.
IN LATE JUNE, USCIS called Isabel and Felipe in for their interview, the so-called marriage test, the last hurdle to Felipe’s getting a green card. Felipe was terrified. What if they got a homophobic officer? After all, it was Florida, where gay marriage would remain illegal until January of the following year.
But in the end, the only problem with the application was that Felipe’s doctor had forgotten to sign a page, which they quickly remedied in a frantic rush to his office across town. Once more, they opted for a name change, this time to combine Felipe’s mother’s surname with that of Isabel’s father, becoming the Sousa-Rodriguez household.
They celebrated Felipe’s legal status on July 4, but the reality of his new life didn’t sink in until he got his work permit in the mail. That night, he sent a photo to his mother. She told him she was both laughing and crying. She might not approve of his marriage to Isabel, but at least she could appreciate the vast difference this one piece of paper would make because of it.
Earlier in May, Florida had finally passed in-state tuition for undocumented youths, thanks in no small part to months of lobbying and organizing by Isabel. The win buoyed the spirits of state and national activists. Seeing their success, Felipe, too, was moved. Inspired by Isabel’s work and refreshed by a couple of years away from the fiery heart of the battle, Felipe left GetEQUAL and rejoined United We Dream, this time directing strategy from Washington, splitting time between the nation’s capital and Florida.
Almost immediately, though, he put to work his experience at GetEQUAL. When the Obama administration announced workplace protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, United We Dream put out a press release congratulating its LGBTQ brothers and sisters on the executive order. Felipe was back but bringing in new allies from his time away.
DARIO SPENT the summer of 2014 focused on a different kind of documentation: medical insurance, doctors’ orders, prescriptions. He’d come home telling himself it would be a break from the stress at school, a vacation. But he knew from the beginning that the odds of beating renal cancer weren’t good. By May, the chemo wasn’t working. Rocio’s legs were thinner than those of his eight-year-old sister Andrea. She lay most days unable to move on the hospital bed in their living room, soft casts keeping the muscles in her calves from atrophying. Andrea spent hours by her side.
It fell to Dario to translate what the doctors were saying. It wasn’t the language exactly. His dad was surprisingly fluent in English after so many years working for and with Americans. It was more what wasn’t being said, the tone, the scientific language. They had known they might have only a few years. Now the doctors were giving Rocio only a few months.
Dario and his father sat down at night and filled out insurance form after insurance form. For years Dario’s father had been using his old Social Security number to pay taxes, and through it he had acquired medical coverage for the family. They would not have to rush to the emergency room and wait long hours for what would essentially be free treatment. But the out-of-pocket expenses burned through their savings. The insurance company sent back their claims. It wanted to know if Rocio could eat solids and walk twenty paces before it would pay.
“People should really be worrying about their health and not all this bullshit,” Dario groused.
Rocio’s family flew in to see her, the first visit in years, and she seemed to realize the significance of such a gesture. Still, Dario wasn’t sure his mother understood how rapidly she was deteriorating. The doctors didn’t seem to want to say it in front of her, and he wasn’t sure how much his father was telling her, either.
Dario tried not to respond “with overtly emotional distress,” as he put it to adults who asked how he was doing. He owed that much to his sister and brother. But sometimes he worried his outward lack of emotion made his mother think he didn’t care.
Dario began filming Rocio, getting her to tell stories about her childhood and her arrival in the United States. It distracted them both. And he began using his university-level research skills to find alternative cures. He started with diet. He tore up the family’s traditional menu of meat, rice, and a few veggies on the side. He began to cook organic, vegetable-laden meals. He invested in an industrial-strength blender, filming the day it arrived, as orange carrot juice went flying into his hair.9
“The first to vomit loses!” they joked after Dario whipped up his first cleanser and mother and son lifted and clinked their glasses. Dario Sr. hated the ever-present camera. But Rocio insisted. Let him film, she said. Her husband was powerless to say no. Eventually the family got used to the little red light and the glass eye constantly trained on them. And, after a few weeks of the health diet, Rocio could walk again. She had more energy. One afternoon, as she sat in the living room, she heard a loud crash from the kitchen.
“Hijo, be careful of your toes!” she called.
“How do you even know what happened?” Dario yelled back.
Was he using a big knife?
Uh, yeah.
Did it fall on the ground and almost land on his foot?
Uh, yeah.
But the tumor had continued to grow. There is nothing more that can be done, the doctors told Dario and his father.
They were afraid to share the news with Rocio. Dario stepped up his Google research. He ordered $200 herbal remedies from Mexico. He learned about experimental treatments outside the United States. He found dozens of advertisements online for holistic and alternative healing centers in Mexico that Americans were flocking to. There was one not so far away in northern Baja that boasted advanced immunotherapies. Maybe, just maybe, he could take her there.
Dario Sr. stalled, fearing Rocio might not be able to get back into the United States. She began to lose energy again. Dario insisted, “We have to even if it’s against her wishes.”
His father acquiesced. After all, his son was a student at Harvard. He knew much more about these things, and living far away from his own family, Dario Sr. didn’t know who else to consult. If he did nothing, he would feel guilty. And they had little to lose. Since Dario had DACA, he could request permission to leave the country and accompany Rocio. Fernando, a U.S.-born citizen, could visit her there. Dario Sr. would stay behind with Andrea.
At night Dario Sr. curled up onto the edge of the hospital bed next to his wife and fell asleep to the sound of her breathing. They hadn’t slept apart in decades. He couldn’t imagine being separated even for a night.
Dario applied for fast-track permission to leave the United States and waited. Those with DACA were at the mercy of US Citizenship and Immigration Services as to whether they could leave the country. The process was still new, and it was not uncommon for their applications to visit ailing relatives outside the country to be rejected.
The government responded quickly. It didn’t deny his request, but DHS wanted more evidence to show the dire need for Dario’s departure. Afraid of calling too much attention to his mother’s status, he had also mentioned an ailing aunt back in Mexico. Now he would have to go into the DHS office and make his case. All he could think about was how little time his mother might have left. They had to leave, he decided. Dario figured his dad could send the necessary documentation while he was in Mexico. He knew it was reckless to leave without permission, but he’d watched on TV as the DREAM 30, and many in the DREAM 150, had made it back, from what he could tell. If they could do it, so could he.
On the day Dario and his godparents were to drive across the border, Rocio refused to get out of bed. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to leave her younger children.
Andrea sat next to her mother. “When will I see you again? Are you coming back?”
Dario Sr. begged her to get up, and when that didn’t work, he began yelling. “You think I want you to go? You think I’m happy about this? You have to get up. You have to do this,” he said, his voice breaking.10
Rocio turned her face to the wall.
But later that morning, Dario and his mom eased into the back seat of his godparents’ minivan. It would all be fine, he told himself. He was at Harvard. They would work it out once his mom got the treatments.
The alternative treatments didn’t work. After a couple of weeks, Dario took his mother to the home of her parents in Guanajuato, Mexico. Fernando flew down to join them. On the night of August 13, 2014, Dario Sr. spoke to Rocio. Take care of the children, she told him. Not yet, he protested.
The next day, Rocio Meneses closed her eyes for the last time. She was surrounded that afternoon by her two sons, her parents, and her siblings. The man she had shared her life with for almost a quarter of a century, the man with whom she had raised her children, fought and flirted, cried and danced with, was not by her side. He couldn’t risk leaving the United States. Fernando and Dario were old enough to fend for themselves if he couldn’t get back in, but not Andrea.
Shortly after his wife’s death, Dario Sr. received a letter from the US Government. His son’s request for advance parole, the required permission needed to leave the country, had been denied because his son had failed to supply the additional evidence requested.
After his mother’s death, Dario went to visit his father’s family on the outskirts of Mexico City. He contacted a lawyer, Alan Klein, recommended by his friend Oscar. He asked what he needed to do to get home.
It’s not that simple, his new attorney explained. Dario had likely lost his protected DACA status by leaving the country without government permission. In the eyes of the government, he had self-deported. He was going to need special humanitarian parole.
Dario’s uncles said he should just walk across the border with a bunch of other college kids and no one would notice. He could risk going to the border and turning himself in like the DREAM 150, the lawyer agreed, but he discouraged that tactic unless Dario was ready to spend weeks or even months in detention. Dario didn’t feel quite as brave as he had driving down to Tijuana from the other side of the border. He decided instead to wait out the process at his grandparents’ home. He contacted Harvard, and the school’s attorneys and lobbyists in Washington put in a good word for him, but the November elections were coming up, and no one seemed in any hurry to give a relatively privileged Ivy League DREAMer a break.
At first Dario passed the time with the cousins he’d never known, going to clubs with them, learning about Mexico. But his cousins worked, and they soon returned to classes. Dario began sleeping till noon in the tiny basement room of his grandparents’ home. He was embarrassed to admit that he was often afraid to walk around the neighborhood, of getting jumped by the local gang.
Down the road from his grandparents’ house was a garage and, next to it, at the bus stop, a liquor store. It closed early but kept a window open for those in need, often for workers getting off late. Dario took to waiting for his cousin in the afternoons as she got off the bus, so she wouldn’t be harassed.
He thought about his cousin earning 10 pesos an hour, about 50 cents.
Fuck no. Fuck no, he declared silently.
He stayed up till 4 a.m. writing music and free verse. He couldn’t sleep anyway. He joked to friends that it was Emma Watson that kept him going, inspiring him to fight to return to the United States and win an Oscar so she would notice him. He told himself it would all eventually make for a good film. He tried to sound chill when his friends called or when the dean checked on him. This was his semester abroad. He’d be back by Christmas.
He wore his mother’s rosary and kept her ashes in a box near his bed. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, Dario had to admit to himself that as much as he had wanted to pretend otherwise, his life was still governed by the one piece of paper he did not have. Yet during those sleepless nights, the realization that truly made his heart pound had nothing to do with his immigration status. It was simply this: “I don’t have a mom anymore.”
12
NEW ALLIANCES
Immigrant activists await oral arguments in U.S. v. Texas at the Supreme Court, Washington, DC, April 18, 2016.
As immigrant groups waited for Obama to make his next announcement, another domestic crisis was brewing. Shortly after noon on August 9, 2014, a young man named Michael Brown was shot at least seven times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael Brown was black, the officer was white, and African Americans in Ferguson spilled out onto the streets to protest, quickly joined by supporters across the country. Local residents’ anger stemmed from more than the fatal shooting of the teen; it came from years of living under a police department that the US Justice Department would later describe as having a pattern of unconstitutional policing. As one subsection of the Justice Department review put it: “Ferguson Law Enforcement Practices Disproportionately Harm Ferguson’s African-American Residents and Are Driven in Part by Racial Bias.”1 The August uprising gave new life to the Black Lives
Matter movement and reignited national discussions about race, justice, and the very definition of the word criminal.
Obama weighed in on the controversy in November, linking the protests to the immigration movement. “I’ve never seen a civil rights law, or a health care bill, or an immigration bill result because a car got burned,” he said. “It happened because people vote. It happened because people mobilize. It happened because people organize. It happens because people look at what are the best policies to solve the problem. That’s how you actually move something forward.”2
The president’s words were both true and not true. What he asked of the young people, both the black Americans demanding change from police and the immigrants seeking to stop the deportations, many could not do. Nearly one out of thirteen adult black citizens had lost their right to vote due to having a criminal record, according to the nonprofit Sentencing Project.3 In some states, such as Florida, the number was much higher. There, more than a fifth of black adult citizens were unable to cast a ballot because of the arduous process of regaining that right. The vote was, of course, similarly out of reach for millions of undocumented immigrants. But people were paying attention to those demonstrating in the streets of Ferguson and to their issues, just as they were paying attention to the immigrants stopping buses at the border and chaining themselves to the fences around federal buildings. These young people were mobilizing and changing the conversation on social media and beyond.
The Making of a Dream Page 28