Yet the president was right about the legislation. That would continue to require painstaking organizing, lobbying, and votes. It would also require more allies. Solidarity among immigrants, US-born Latinos, and black Americans was hardly new. When a group of Southern California parents had turned to the courts in 1946 to end public school segregation for Mexicans and Mexican American children, the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall had worked on the case, honing the arguments he’d make before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka less than a decade later.4 Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram of support for Cesar Chavez’s fast on behalf of farmworkers. And in the early 1970s, the more radical Chicano Brown Berets and the Puerto Rican Young Lords modeled themselves after, and worked with, the Black Panthers, creating breakfast programs for kids and a neighborhood health clinic in Chicago. But by the millennium, much of that unity had fallen out of the public narrative.5 Stories about tensions between those living in traditionally African American neighborhoods and the Latino and Asian immigrants moving into these communities, more often dominated headlines.
As many young immigrant activists refocused their efforts on fighting detentions and deportations, the natural overlap between their campaigns and the fight to reduce the incarceration rates of black Americans came into focus. Donors saw this, too, and by 2009, they had already begun funding bridge-building retreats between young African American and immigrant rights activists. Trayvon Martin’s death had been a key moment for activists like Felipe and Alex Aldana. But Ferguson made those connections feel more urgent, with the immigrant activists retweeting messages from Black Lives Matter activists and livestreaming video from the protests.
DARIO WATCHED the Ferguson protests from his room on the outskirts of Mexico City. Alan Klein had told him to sit tight. He had left the United States without permission, but he had been desperate, the lawyer reasoned and was optimistic they would eventually get things sorted out. Dario took the advice and tried to view his time as extended vacation.
But the government denied Dario’s initial request for parole back into the country. As October began to fly by and it was clear Dario would miss another semester, his confidence began to crumble. He considered telling his story to the media, but his lawyer worried that any publicity would hurt his case with officials in Washington. Dario, meanwhile, wondered whether anticipation over Obama’s next announcement on immigration might make officials reluctant to intervene. Since the president’s June promise to take action if Congress didn’t pass immigration reform, the flood of immigrants from Central America had slowed. Direct pressure from the United States on the Central American governments had begun to take effect. So, too, had pressure from the United States on Mexico, which in turn began its own immigration crackdown along its southern border to keep Central Americans from passing through on their way north.
Now that the immediate crisis was beginning to recede, immigration advocates demanded to know when the president would make good on his offer. Yet once again, Democrats running in tight congressional races feared a backlash and urged the president not to act before the election. Obama bided his time.
Alan Klein submitted another request for Dario, and they waited for the government’s answer. Weeks went by. Alan finally agreed to let him speak to the media on the record. A few days after that, AP reporters spent a day with Dario at his grandparents’ home in the suburbs of Mexico City.6 The story went live on the afternoon of October 14. Two hours later, Dario’s attorney announced the government would allow him to come home. Dario received word he had been given humanitarian parole. Records obtained under a FOIA request showed that DHS officials had already been working to get Dario his humanitarian parole, thanks in large part to intervention by both Harvard and Senator Durbin’s office. Still, it was unclear how much longer the process would have dragged on, nor whether it would have happened at all, had it not been for the media coverage.
After that, Dario’s life became surreal. Reporters staked out his family’s home back in Carson. Media in Spanish and English wanted interviews. A week later, Dario arrived at the San Ysidro border, dressed in a stylish blue oxford, jeans, and glasses. He carried his mother’s ashes as he crossed the same border he and his friends had visited the year before. He grinned and held up his passport as he walked out of the Border Patrol office and into the fall sun. A gaggle of reporters and cameras followed him. On his passport were printed the words: “Not a visa. Holder has been granted parole authorization for up to two years.”
“I can’t believe I’m home,” Dario told the reporters. “In just a few hours I’ll be home with my parents”—he stopped—“with my dad.”
On the drive home, Dario couldn’t help but notice that people used their turn signals, that there was so little trash along the road. Since TV cameras were still parked outside his father’s home, Dario met his father and brother at the home of one of his dad’s clients. Andrea had stayed behind with family friends.
They pulled into the garage, and Dario waited nervously for his father.
“Hijo!” Dario Sr.’s hands trembled slightly in front of him as he ached to reach out to his son. Instead he rubbed his stomach nervously as he slowly strode toward Dario.
“Wassup?” Dario asked.
That was all it took. Dario Sr.’s hands instantly flew around his son, squeezing him so hard that Dario let out a groan. Fernando joined in, and Dario closed his eyes, exhaling between brother and father.
LESS THAN A MONTH after Dario’s return, President Obama stepped up to the microphone to announce his most audacious immigration policy change yet. Behind the scenes, Esther Olavarria had again worked to pack as much into the proposal as possible. This might be the last chance to produce something out of the years she had dedicated to reimagining the US immigration system. Labor unions wanted farmworkers to get protected status. Activists such as Erika Andiola wanted to see the parents of all DREAMers covered. Other young undocumented immigrants wanted the arrival cutoff age to include those who had entered at sixteen. The administration lawyers kept pushing back. Whatever the president did, it needed to be limited to hold up in court and in the court of public opinion. The debates within the White House continued. Up until hours before the announcement, few activists knew who would be covered and who would once again be left out.
On November 20, Obama spoke directly to the US audience. This time, he did not choose a Rose Garden ceremony, where reporters might interrupt. Instead, he made the announcement on a Thursday night during prime time. ABC declined to interrupt its Shondaland lineup for the speech. None of the other major English-language networks aired it live, either. But the Spanish-language channels carried the president’s words uninterrupted. The speech was timed to air before Univision’s prime-time presentation of the Latin Grammy Awards, meaning millions of Latinos across the country had their TV sets primed and waiting.
In Arlington, Hareth watched Obama’s speech at home with her parents. They were joined by their friend Ingrid Vaca, a fellow Bolivian and single mom who cleaned houses to support her young sons. A reporter from The Guardian camped out with the group as they sprawled across the living room in front of the TV with pizza.7
They listened to the Spanish translation as the president spoke. It was time to step up security at the border, said Obama. DHS planned to increase funding for surveillance and apprehension, especially for new arrivals. The administration would also make it easier for high-tech workers and students to stay in the country. But few in Hareth’s living room were interested in any of that.
Finally the president got down to it. DHS, he said, would expand temporary protection to cover young people who had been living in the United States since 2010, rather than the original date of 2007. The order would keep the cutoff age at time of entry at younger than sixteen, but it would no longer matter how old DACA recipients were when they submitted an application. The Department of Homeland Security would also issue deferred action to the parents of US-born citizens and
legal residents who had been in the country since 2010. The order was again meant to be a stopgap measure, Obama stressed. It had been nearly eighteen months since the Senate had passed the last version of a comprehensive immigration bill, and Speaker John Boehner still refused to bring it to the House floor.
For those in Congress who questioned his authority, “I have one answer,” Obama told congressional leaders. “Pass a bill.”
As the president spoke, Hareth stared at the television, stunned. She glanced at her mother. Betty didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She and Hareth’s father would be legal for the first time in a decade, would not have the threat of deportation hanging over their every move.
The expansion of executive-branch protection for a broad class of immigrants was not unprecedented. But the scope in terms of actual numbers made it the most expansive in US history. Still, as ever, the president had to draw a line. And this time, that line cut right across Hareth’s living room.
Her parents looked over at their friend Ingrid. Like the Andrades, Ingrid had entered the United States at least a decade before Obama’s announcement and had two nearly grown children. She had been a leader among the DREAMer mothers, encouraging Betty and others to speak up. But because, unlike Betty, she had not given birth to a child in the United States, she would be left out of the president’s largess.
Betty’s mind was already racing toward the future. Maybe Mario could go back to working as an architect instead of contorting himself into crawl spaces to fix electrical wiring. Maybe she could return to work as an accountant or even go back to school herself. But first she wanted to visit her father, who had suffered a stroke a few years before. It had been a decade since she’d seen him. A few days later she let her employers know she would need time off to travel to Bolivia as soon as the regulations were put into place. She would take the time unpaid. It didn’t matter.
That night at the Latin Grammys in Las Vegas, Enrique Iglesias won Song of the Year for “Bailando,” and in his acceptance speech he recognized the president’s announcement. “Tonight is not only an historic night for all Latino artists, but for all Latinos who live in the United States,” the pop star told the crowd via video link from Paris. The Colombian singer-songwriter Carlos Vives dedicated his award to President Obama.8
A day later, Obama repeated the announcement before a friendly audience at a high school in Nevada. Undocumented immigrants made up more than 7 percent of the state’s residents, the largest population share in the country.9 In the audience stood veteran farmworker advocate Dolores Huerta, Senator Bob Menendez, Representative Luis Gutiérrez, and dozens of immigrants and their families.
Astrid Silva, the young woman from Las Vegas who had gotten Senator Harry Reid’s attention in 2010, introduced the president. Now her father faced possible deportation. “I cannot imagine my life without him. There are so many families in the same situation and thanks to President Obama’s action, they will go to bed without the fear of being awoken by a knock at the door,”10 she said.
The new regulations wouldn’t help everyone, she realized. But Astrid and others like her had privately concluded this was the best they could get. And something was better than nothing. “I know our community and the president will keep fighting for comprehensive immigration reform,” she added.
Backers of the DHS order estimated it would affect some 5 million immigrants, nearly half the nation’s undocumented population. Privately, they knew the number could be even higher. Still many immigrant activists had hoped the president would go bigger. Even up to the night before the announcement, they had lobbied and prayed the president would include all parents of DACA-eligible immigrants, not just those whose children were permanent residents or citizens.
Their logic: since Republicans were likely to challenge in court whatever the president did, he had nothing to lose by casting the net as wide as possible. Some activists were so disappointed by the final proposal that they declined to attend the Nevada speech, fearing their presence would appear to be a stamp of approval on a policy that still left so many of their friends and community in limbo.
Days later in Chicago, hecklers interrupted the president during a speech, demanding an end to the detentions and criticizing him for not going further. “I understand why you might have yelled at me a month ago,” Obama retorted. “. . . It doesn’t make much sense to yell at me right now when we’re making changes.”11
Overall, the announcement was celebrated within the immigrant community, even as it reinforced what Hareth saw as a false divide. In Nevada, Obama had spoken of “exceptional people like Astrid,”12 a comment that seemed to exclude the millions of workers who weren’t going to fancy colleges or standing before the AFL-CIO. Once again, the administration was emphasizing the need to deport felons, not families. Hareth thought of her father and his DUI and how slippery the line between the two could be.
Still, she printed out all the requirements and posted them on the fridge. Betty and Mario organized their documents to be ready at the first chance. Mario’s immigration case was closed, at least for now. They saw no reason why he wouldn’t qualify.
AS PART OF THE CHANGES, the administration would also end Secure Communities, the program that required local law enforcement to automatically run fingerprints of those arrested, even for traffic stops, through the DHS database. For the rest of Obama’s time in office, such searches would go back to being at officers’ discretion. It was the third incarnation of the federal government’s effort to better coordinate between local and national authorities, balancing the government’s need to know who was in the country with local law enforcement agencies’ need to build trust in their communities. The program was facing constitutional challenges, too. Citing Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable seizure, a growing number of law enforcement agencies pushed back against DHS immigration detainers.13 These were the requests that police and sheriff departments hold immigrants who were arrested for up to forty-eight hours after they would otherwise be released, to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents time to come get them.14
Felipe and Isabel were dubious about the Secure Communities changes, but they were elated by the expanded protections. Felipe’s sister would finally be able to come out of the shadows and drive her children to soccer practice without fear.
“The bottom line is, mass amnesty would be unfair. But mass deportation would be both impossible and contrary to our country’s character,” the president said.
In his Nevada speech, Obama acknowledged the pushback he would receive from ordinary Americans over the new regulations. “I want everybody here to understand, there are folks who are good, decent people who are worried about immigration. They’re worried that it changes the fabric of our country. They’re worried about whether immigrants take jobs from hardworking Americans. And they’re worried because they’re feeling a lot of economic stress, and they feel as if maybe they’re the ones paying taxes and nobody else is taking responsibility. So they’ve urged me not to act,” he said.
“And I hear them. And I understand them. But you know, I’ve also got a lot of letters and emails reminding me why we had to act—from American family members of hardworking immigrants who feared their families could be torn apart; from DREAMers who had proudly stepped out of the shadows and were willing to live without fear, even though it was a big risk for them; from Republicans who don’t agree with me on everything, but are tired of their party refusing to vote on reform. . . .”
What few people focused on in his speeches was the stick that came along with the carrot: “If you plan to enter the United States illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back are going up.”15
Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders16 came out in support of the new directive.17
On the Republican side, the reaction was even swifter. John Boehner accused the president of acting like “an emperor.” Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called the plan “a
threat to our democracy.”18 They also noted that mass amnesty wasn’t even necessary. If people got the idea that it was tougher to enter and live and work illegally in the United States, more would leave on their own accord. Even Senator Lindsey Graham, part of the Gang of Eight that had crafted the 2013 legislative reform, threatened to defund the effort.19
Yet it soon became clear Obama had put Republican lawmakers in Washington in a bind. Shutting down the government hadn’t gone well for them in the past. Impeaching the last Democratic president hadn’t worked either, and they were unlikely to pass a veto-proof bill to stop the order. Besides, DHS’s US Citizenship and Immigration Services, in charge of processing immigrants, was almost entirely self-funded through application fees—including fees for the very types of applications Obama was proposing. The immigrants would pay their own way for the new Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program.
State politicians, however, had more leeway in challenging the president. Leading the charge was Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, who had just won the governor’s race with a “get tough” border policy platform. On December 3, 2014, Texas sought an emergency injunction to preemptively stop DHS from moving forward with applications until the full case could be heard in court.
Some twenty-five other states joined the lawsuit. Many of the states, including Texas, Florida, and Georgia, were among those with the largest number of undocumented immigrants and thus potentially among the most burdened by the requirements of the new measure. But they were also among the states that had most benefited from the labor in construction, hospitality, and of course agriculture that those same immigrants provided. Others, such as Nebraska and North Dakota, had relatively few undocumented immigrants. But, like Florida and Texas, they were led by conservative GOP legislatures and governors who opposed the order on principle. They threw Obama’s own words back to him, emphasizing that to go beyond the original DACA order would be beyond the scope of his powers.
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