The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  In fact, Maggie and others like her at Miami Dade College did more than help teens like Felipe get in to school. In welcoming them to their institution, they inadvertently created a pipeline of young, well-educated activists for the Florida Immigrant Coalition. The Coalition’s new director, Maria Rodriguez, had gotten her start in activism protesting apartheid at Georgetown University and was eager to work more with the students who had testified in Tallahassee for the in-state tuition bill. Among them was a vocal, young Ecuadoran native and student government leader named Maria Gabriela “Gaby” Pacheco. Soon Maria and Gaby helped establish a new offshoot of the Coalition led by the students themselves, modeled after similar groups in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. They called it Students Working for Equal Rights, or SWER.

  But Felipe wasn’t looking for any such group when he arrived at the college. As part of his commitment to the church, he looked for ways to raise awareness about aid for Ugandan schoolchildren, framing the issue as a question of access to education. And if he couldn’t participate in the US democratic process, he could at least participate on campus. He decided to run for student government, making the Ugandan children part of his platform. To his surprise, he won, and through student government quickly became friends with Gaby. They both dreamed of becoming teachers, but they had something else in common: just like Felipe, Gaby’s family was living in the country illegally.

  There’s another group you might be interested in, Gaby told him one day. And so he found his way to SWER, an organization that would change Felipe’s life and, through him, inspire thousands of others across the United States.

  OUTSIDE OF SAFE HAVENS like Miami Dade College, though, the mid-2000s ushered in an even more difficult time for those in the country illegally. Whether most Americans wanted to admit it, many of the nation’s largest industries—farms, hotels, restaurants, in-home health and child care, construction—increasingly thrived off the muscle of undocumented workers.

  Yet because these immigrants were often paid under the table and were not officially recognized as being in the country, much of the added stress they created on the local infrastructure also could not be officially addressed, meaning the responsibility to help them integrate into American life often fell to local law enforcement and politicians, those with the fewest resources. The children of new arrivals often required language support in schools. Undocumented immigrants were less likely to go to the doctor out of a combination of fear and lack of access to insurance, but proportionately, they were more likely to end up in the emergency room.7,8

  It was hard to see where textile jobs went overseas or how many machines were now doing the work of locksmiths and factory workers. Visible were the changing last names and the changing color of many new Americans. Between 2000 and 2010,9 while the white US population remained steady, the percentage of Asian Americans and Latinos each grew by 43 percent.

  Americans had once directed such fear and mistrust toward Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and Irish immigrants.10 Now it was increasingly directed at those coming from Latin America. The United States had long maintained a complicated relationship with its neighbors in the south, particularly Mexico, importing Mexican laborers during times of need, particularly during both world wars, then sending them back as soon as US soldiers returned. But in fact, for most of the nation’s history, fear of new immigrants focused on those coming from Europe and Asia.

  Then came the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ultimately ended national visa quotas in an attempt to loosen discriminatory regulation on southern Europeans, Jews, and Chinese. It also included a new twist, “family reunification,” which gave priority to relatives of those already in the United States, a move that lawmakers believed would weigh in favor of white northern European immigrants already living in the country, who would presumably bring in more relatives and balance out the newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But as it turned out, most of the European families that wanted to migrate already had. And with the last world war more than a generation behind, their home countries had become increasingly stable. Instead, family reunification became a lifeline for Latin American and Asian immigrants seeking a new home in the United States. Four decades later, many of those who had feared the influx of immigrants, now feared what would happen if millions of these potential new citizens were allowed to petition for their spouses, parents, children, and siblings.

  In 2005, more than 150 immigration enforcement bills were proposed in thirty states seeking to penalize those living in the country illegally as well as anyone who sought to help them. That same year, the federal government passed a law requiring states to provide a national REAL ID card to more easily catch those in the country without authorization.

  Around that time, news outlets began to pick up stories about a loose coalition of private citizens patrolling the US-Mexican border. The previous year, a retired CPA and Marine Corps veteran named Jim Gilchrist from Orange County, California, had founded what became known as the Minuteman Project. This group of gun-wielding vigilantes was fed up with government inaction and promised to stop the criminals crossing the border and protect Americans from the “Latinization”11 of their country. Gilchrist’s cofounder, Chris Simcox,12 would later be convicted of sexually molesting a young girl and receive a nearly twenty-year sentence for his crime. But at the time, the Minuteman Project served up a visual symbol of Americans’ desire for greater law and order, and the group’s very existence pressured the federal government to take more action.

  President Bush condemned the Minuteman leaders’ vigilante swagger, but he urged Congress to step up enforcement and pass some kind of immigration reform. As the former governor of Texas, he understood the role immigrants played in his state’s economy, and, after all, his younger brother Jeb had married a woman from Mexico. Yet the president’s exhortations were too little, too late. He had spent most of his political capital on the Iraq War, and much of what remained he’d bet on an unsuccessful push to overhaul Social Security. Congress seemed to heed only the president’s call for enforcement. Bill Frist, a doctor turned politician, was the Senate majority leader, and his four years at the helm coincided with a massive increase in funding for border security and for the detention13 of immigrants living in the country illegally.*

  BACK IN MISSOURI, Marie’s family story became something of a celebrity cause, reaching some of the most powerful people in the government. It wasn’t just the “We Are Marie” campaign. The Jefferson City Council passed a resolution urging federal lawmakers to allow them to stay. Senator Durbin asked to meet with Marie after seeing her interviewed on TV. Latina magazine named her one of its top ten Women of the Year in 2005. Officials at a small liberal arts school, Westminster College, in nearby Fulton, Missouri, learned of Marie’s case, and its admission officers encouraged her to apply. She received a partial private scholarship.

  “If we should turn our back on someone like her,” Westminster College president Fletcher Lamkin warned, “it sends a very powerful negative message that something’s wrong, something’s really wrong.”14

  But none of her celebrity lifted the very real threat of deportation. And as summer approached, Marie and her family waited for a last-minute reprieve. Despite fourteen years of living in the United States, despite buying a home and paying taxes every year, Marvin and Marina had little legal claim to stay. They were at the mercy of DHS’s discretion, and the government was not predisposed to waive a deportation order, especially not for what had become such a high-profile case.

  As evidenced by the very name of the “We Are Marie” campaign, advocates had never really banked on saving the entire family; it was Marie they set their sights on. And it was she who could set a precedent for the kind of prosecutorial discretion that might justify the broader DREAM Act.

  Marie still felt nauseous each time she told her story and framed herself as almost a victim of a crime. Yet she also knew that in the worst-case scenario, her parents could survive back in Co
sta Rica, while Missouri was the only home she remembered. She clung to the hope that through her own story, she could spare them all. Through the CCC, she not only kept a blog to count down their departure, but she also did a podcast to raise awareness about her case and the DREAM Act. She traveled to Wisconsin, Chicago, and Miami to do radio interviews and make speeches.

  The family’s deportation date was set for July 5, 2005. The three of them bought plane tickets for Costa Rica. On the afternoon of July 1, 2005, Marie received a call from her attorney: DHS had granted a last-minute reprieve from deportation.

  Marie gripped the phone, shouting. She wanted to sing! The news was too good to be true!

  Wait, wait, her attorney stopped her. It’s just you. At the last minute, Durbin had reached an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official at an Independence Day party, convincing him to sign off on Marie’s waiver.

  Marie tried to breathe. She had four days to say good-bye to her parents, maybe for a decade. Marvin and Marina faced a ten-year ban from the United States for overstaying their visas. If Marie were to leave to go visit them, she would be banned from returning for ten years as well.

  The family spent the July Fourth holiday weekend packing. The day her parents left, they all wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words “God Bless the USA.”15 They met friends at a nearby park and prayed with fellow churchgoers. Local TV stations showed up to cover Marvin and Marina’s departure. An independent filmmaker captured their last hours together.

  Marie vowed to continue her fight, “and use my story so this doesn’t happen to other families.”

  Marvin put one arm around Marina, the other around Marie. He spoke a few prepared words. “Everybody, take care of my daughter,” he pleaded.16

  Later, Marvin lifted his suitcases into the family SUV and hugged his daughter so hard he nearly crushed the reading glasses dangling around his neck. Some forty cars caravanned with them through downtown Jefferson City to say good-bye.

  And then they were gone.

  Marie exchanged her plane ticket to Costa Rica for one to visit relatives in California, while friends back in Missouri auctioned off most of her family’s belongings to raise money for her. Marie couldn’t bear to watch. That fall she attended Westminster College as an exchange student, meaning she had to sit in orientation sessions with privileged classmates from around the globe as they learned about American culture, politics, and history. Meanwhile, she moved in with a friend’s family, storing the last of her family’s belongings in the basement, where she slept until school started.

  At Westminster, it was hard enough to focus during those first few months—her mind often distracted with her parents’ resettlement—but then there were the cameras, following the famous young immigrant activist across campus. Some days, Marie wished she could simply melt away. At nineteen, she was balancing her freshman-year course load with selling her family home, maintaining grades high enough to keep her scholarships, working to pay the rest of the tuition, and sending money to her parents in Costa Rica. By the time she got her work permit (and finally her driver’s license), she was a semester behind in school payments. Her reprieve was only for 365 days. Every morning as she woke up and looked around her dorm room, Marie wondered where she’d be in a year.

  She didn’t have much time for the freshman social scene. In the rare moments between work and school assignments, Marie hurried to the gym, as if by running in place on the treadmill she could somehow escape the panic attacks that woke her up in the middle of the night. One afternoon on her way there, a football came flying at her from across the green. Marie instinctively caught it and tossed it back to its owners. One of them, a blond, blue-eyed, corn-fed Kansas boy named Chapin Deel, introduced himself and complimented her throw. Marie recalled him from the school welcoming committee. He was a burly senior and in a fraternity. Marie could hear her mother’s voice: Stay away! Far away.

  Chapin’s friends urged her to come to a party at their house. Marie demurred. After that, though, she seemed to run into Chapin everywhere. The only thing Chapin knew about immigrant visas was that his uncle had married a woman from Ukraine and easily secured her a green card. He didn’t understand why Marie’s parents had been deported if they’d paid taxes and bought a home. He didn’t understand why Marie had been given only a year’s deferment when it was clear little would change her immigration status in that time. Chapin asked Marie to tell him her story. She’d told already it so many times. Yet somehow she found the words tumbling out to Chapin. And he listened.

  She spoke with her parents every day, and in time, the blue-eyed boy with the wavy wheat-colored hair found his way into their conversations. Marie wondered how she could be so happy when her heart was still cracked open, how she could dream about Chapin and also wake up sobbing for her parents. The two realities seemed to brush past one another each day and return to their separate universes. But with Chapin, she could have fun. She didn’t feel like the immigrant girl on TV.

  Marie began to get more emails and calls from other teens asking how to save themselves and their families from deportation. She tried to give advice, referring them to the lawyers and advocates who had been essential to her victory. But she couldn’t respond to them all. There were too many. And it seemed crazy to suggest each student mount a national campaign to win a reprieve. Still, she flew back to Washington to advocate for herself and others, and when there was no money for the flight, she took the bus. She continued the blog. She tried to shield Chapin, but one afternoon, in tears, she showed him a series of online comments posted by people suggesting she be both deported and killed.

  Chapin’s mouth dropped open. “Don’t ever read that stuff again,” he told her.

  In the fall of 2005, Marie was among the first to receive what would become the Center for Community Change’s annual Change Champion Award. Her fellow recipients included an actress, a philanthropist, a media pioneer, and a charismatic freshman senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

  3

  A WAKE-UP CRY

  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants demonstrate in downtown Los Angeles, California, May 1, 2006. (DAVID S. HOLLOWAY/GETTY IMAGES)

  On Monday, April 10, 2006, teachers at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Arlington, Virginia, stood in front of nearly every exit. They had heard the rumors, seen the scattered headlines over the weekend. The demonstrations had arrived in the nation’s capital, and although marches were nothing new across the Potomac River, school administrators sensed this one was different. For days, whispers floated through the teacher’s lounge about students planning to cut school.

  Hareth was one of those students. Now an eighth grader at Thomas Jefferson, she mingled with the offspring of K Street lobbyists and congressional staffers. Many of her classmates were also foreign born, yet Hareth knew without being told that her immigration status was different from her friends born in Argentina, Mexico, or even Bolivia whose families held permanent residency or citizenship. She and her parents did not discuss it much at home, but Hareth knew not to cause trouble, not to miss school.

  This day was different. Spanish-language TV and radio had been airing news around the clock, encouraging turnout at the marches. Hareth’s mother had to go to work at her nanny job, but Hareth’s father planned to take her now three-year-old sister, Claudia, to the rally. Even her Tía Eli was going. Hareth and her friends planned their outfits the night before. Through the radio, they knew participants were supposed to wear white. Purity. Hope. An effort to avoid controversial slogans? Hareth wasn’t sure of the meaning. She was just excited to be part of this thing bigger than herself, than her friends, than even her family.

  The teachers were fast, but the kids were faster, having honed their escape skills with midday snack runs to the 7-Eleven across the street. One teacher spotted them and yelled down the hallway, but Hareth and several of her friends kept running. They found an unguarded exit and sprinted toward it, not stopping until they’d pushed open the heavy meta
l doors, spilled down the steps, and finally reached the bus stop across the street. Hareth’s heart was still pounding when a bus finally wheezed to a stop and opened its doors. Inside, she collapsed onto the cool plastic seat. They had made it.

  By the time they arrived at the National Mall an hour later, it was teeming with people yelling chants in Spanish and English, banging drums, and blowing horns to a tropical beat. From their windows and office balconies along the demonstration route, men in suits and women in starched shirts looked down at the demonstrators with a combination of surprise, awe, and shock.

  “The people, united, will never be defeated!” the crowd chanted. Above the sea of white shirts floated thousands of signs. Many were homemade. Many others were professionally printed, subtle calling cards for the organizations behind the rally, like the blue “We Are America” sign from a new coalition cofounded by the Center for Community Change; “Justicia y Dignidad para Todos Los Immigrantes” (Justice and Dignity for All Immigrants); and the signs from the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, a group started nearly eighty years before by Hispanic World War I veterans.

  And then there was the simple message “Today we march. Tomorrow we vote.”

  Senator Kennedy addressed the crowd. The veteran lawmaker had steered the 1965 immigration bill through Congress in the wake of his brother’s murder as part of a package of civil rights–related laws. He still considered immigration reform more of a civil rights issue than an economic one. That day he promised those gathered a broad immigration bill with a path to citizenship. “We will never give up! We will never give in!” he thundered.1 The crowd roared back, “¡Sí se puede!”