The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  There was no answer. Juan ran into the bathroom. He yanked open the medicine cabinet, and spotted a Tylenol bottle. He shook it—not quite empty but with far fewer capsules than he remembered.

  How many pills had Felipe taken? Four? More?

  Felipe said he couldn’t remember. Juan turned on the lights. Felipe was pale. Juan knew then it was definitely more than four.

  He carried Felipe to the restroom and told him he had to throw up. Felipe couldn’t. He just wanted to sleep.

  Juan took a deep breath. He could handle this. The idea of a Tylenol overdose seemed almost laughable, but he remembered reading somewhere that it wasn’t.

  “I can’t let you sleep. You might not wake up,” Juan said. He could feel his anger rising. How could I have left Felipe alone? How could Felipe have done this?

  His mind flashed to his own suicidal thoughts after high school graduation, when, despite being valedictorian, his status had meant that the only job he could get was in a warehouse. He’d talked friends down from hurting themselves before, other young immigrants worried about coming out, facing deportation, or the deportation of their families. But he’d done so mostly over the phone, a neutral aide who could put them in touch with friends or family nearby. He tried to think clearly. He had a license but no car. If he called the police or 911, maybe they would help—or maybe they would start asking questions about Felipe’s immigration documents. He wondered if calling medics would start the wheels of Felipe’s deportation.

  Juan asked himself, “If Felipe dies on me, will I hate myself more if I didn’t call the police, or if I did?”

  Finally, Juan decided to call his friend Subhash Kateel, a local labor organizer, who had been at the forefront of the effort to protect the rights of Muslim immigrants in New York following the September 11 attacks. Subhash was a decade older, and his calm gaze from behind his black wire-rimmed glasses often defused a situation. Subhash immediately agreed to come over. But Felipe wasn’t having it. He refused to go to the hospital, pulled on his shoes, and walked unsteadily out the door.

  By the time Subhash arrived, Felipe and Juan were sitting on the curb at the corner of the block. Felipe was too weak to flee. His friends carried him into the car, and Subhash drove to Mercy Hospital, the city’s only Catholic acute care hospital, hoping the Church’s history of aiding immigrants would ensure no one called ICE.

  Even after the doctors pumped Felipe’s stomach, and even after they told the young men that if they’d waited any longer for help, Felipe would have suffered severe, irreparable liver damage, Felipe refused to speak to Juan. He was furious at having once again failed at something big, ashamed to have ended up in the hospital and to have put himself at risk of deportation.

  Before he left, Subhash called Maria Rodriguez of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. She met them at the hospital and sat by Felipe’s bed, singing softly to him just as she would to her young son.

  Felipe would later remember something else about that night, a nurse who came to check on him. Neither Juan nor Subhash nor Maria would recall her. Maybe she was a dream, but she seemed so real at the time. All he wanted to do was sleep, and Juan wanted to stay the night, but the nurse insisted visiting hours for anyone but immediate family were over.

  Juan explained in Spanish that he was Felipe’s brother. The nurse asked where he was from. Colombia, Juan responded. The nurse raised an eyebrow. Her patient was from Brazil.

  She gazed steadily at Juan. What’s your name?

  Juan Rodriguez. The nurse glanced at Felipe’s listed name.

  She looked from one frightened young man to the other.

  Okay, he’s your brother, she said finally and let Juan curl up in a chair.

  At first Felipe was grateful. But then, the more he thought about it, the more he wasn’t grateful. He was angry.

  I am tired of having to depend on others’ kindness, he thought.

  The hospital agreed to let Felipe go home only after his sister found him a therapist. Felipe and Juan didn’t talk much about the hospital, or even about his depression. In some ways, it was a relief for both of them.

  But the fear that Felipe would disappear again into depression, or worse, kept Juan up at night; it was a fear he didn’t dare share with many friends or organizers. For the first time in a long time, he felt at a complete loss.

  That fall, Felipe received a scholarship to attend St. Thomas University in Miami. As he recovered, Juan threw himself into organizing for the student group SWER. A few weeks later, a group of the students decided to do something big to generate the same energy they’d felt marching through downtown the summer before: they would stage a protest outside the Broward Transitional Center, some forty miles north of Miami. The innocuously named facility housed hundreds of South Florida immigrant men and women facing possible deportation. The fate of most would be decided by immigration judge Rex Ford,6 whose courtroom lay behind the detention center walls and who was known as being among the toughest immigration judges in the nation, deporting people at a rate higher than many judges even along the US-Mexican border.

  The young activists brainstormed ways they could draw attention to what they were only beginning to recognize as a nationwide stepped-up deportation policy. President Obama was supposed to be their champion. But now they were seeing more forced departures of friends and relatives, including students like themselves. They argued back and forth but finally decided to set up empty desks and chairs outside the center’s walls and to hold up signs and use a bullhorn to call out their message: education, not deportation. It was their new catchphrase, a slogan that would later become the name of one of the first national immigrant youth campaigns.

  As Felipe threw himself back into school, it was a relief to Juan to get away for a few days to attend a conference in New York. There he met Rico Blancaflor, a Filipino American and leader of the Posse Foundation, a nonprofit group that provided support to help at-risk youth succeed in higher education. The two hit it off and began talking about the informal social networks or “posses” necessary for first-generation students to make it through college. Those networks seemed to overlap with the informal ones immigrants in the United States relied on, regardless of whether they made it to college. For Juan, these networks felt like a modern-day “underground railroad” of people like Subhash, Maria, school counselors, and sympathetic classmates.

  The two men joked about organizing an immigrant underground railroad relay walk to raise support for the nation’s most vulnerable immigrants. But soon they grew serious. Rico suggested a corporate marathon-type event with teams and T-shirts. If they started organizing now, they could maybe pull it off in a few years, with events in every major city across the country.

  Juan listened. Three years? We don’t have three years, he thought. I could lose Felipe before then.

  On his way home from New York, Juan got a call from the young protesters in Broward. They had followed their action plan to the letter. A handful of local TV cameras came out to record their protest at the detention center. But when they stood up on their makeshift desks to peek over the detention center walls, they discovered that not only was no one on the other side paying attention but workers were constructing a new wing, adding new beds. Soon Broward Transitional Center would be detaining even more immigrants. All the weeks of planning, the transported school desks, and the guerrilla theater seemed pathetic.

  By the time Juan got home to Miami, he had made his decision. He was going to walk, all right, just as he and Blancaflor had discussed; he’d walk from Miami to Washington to make his case in person.

  He explained his plan to Felipe.

  But what are you asking for? Felipe wanted to know.

  Juan wasn’t sure. Congress didn’t seem to be in any hurry to tackle broad immigration reform, and yet the veteran activists weren’t likely to give it up and just put their support behind the DREAM Act.

  Felipe stared at Juan. This all sounded crazy, but it was just crazy enough that i
t might work.

  Juan started lacing up his blue Nikes and walked out into the rainy night. Felipe turned back to his studies. A little while later, he dialed Juan’s cell phone. No answer. He dialed again. Nothing. Felipe’s heart began to pound. Finally Juan answered.

  Wait, did you mean you were leaving now? Felipe demanded.

  Yes. Are you in or out?

  Yes, yes, okay. They would do it. But they would do it right, Felipe insisted. I want to be able to say good-bye to my sister!

  Juan stopped. Maybe there were others who would march with them. They needed a posse. Okay. Juan agreed to turn around and return home.

  It was Felipe who came up with the idea of starting the walk on January 1, 2010: a new decade, a decade in which immigrants would tell their own stories. As the two began brainstorming, Juan could see the light come back into his lover’s eyes.

  They started calling friends.

  Gaby picked up the phone on the second ring.

  “Where are you?” Juan asked. Gaby was driving home from downtown. Come over now, they told her. They had an amazing piece of news, but they had to share it in person.

  She didn’t hesitate.

  When Gaby arrived, the young men wasted no time.

  “We are going to walk to DC, and we want you to come with us,” they told her.

  “Great,” she told them. “I’ve been wanting to do this for years.”

  Gaby had been wanting to do something big ever since the day three years before, in the dawn hours of July 26, 2006, when federal agents knocked on the door of her home.7,8 They came with police officers, surrounded the house SWAT team style. Terrified, Gaby’s older sister let them in, even though she wasn’t required to. Gaby was protected because of her student visa, but her parents, pastor Gustavo Enrique Pacheco and Maria de Fatima Pacheco Santos, and her two older sisters, were hauled off and questioned for hours.

  Gaby had come with her family from Guayaquil, Ecuador, at age eight on a tourist visa. Her parents had even bought property before they came, hoping it might give them the option of staying and eventually earning permanent residency. But by the time of the raid, they had tried and failed to get legal status, and most of the family was in the country illegally. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials claimed that they chose the house and the aggressive entry because they were looking for a similarly named “fugitive.” The officers never found the fugitive they said they’d come looking for.

  The Pachecos insisted the raid was retaliation against Gaby’s activism. The Miami Dade College student had been the president of the Florida Association of Community Colleges, representing more than a million students statewide,9 and she had frequently met with legislators in Tallahassee, urging them to approve in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants in Florida, and had even organized a student rally at the capitol earlier that year, which had been covered by local media. Meanwhile, her father had spoken out in his role as a pastor on behalf of undocumented immigrants at a rally only months before.

  Gaby’s older sister Erika later told her lawyers that one officer said he’d seen her on TV, confusing Erika with her activist sister, while Gaby testified that another officer told her it had been a bad idea to go around speaking on TV and that yet another officer had an entire file folder on her. She maintained that officials had agreed to release her family temporarily only if she would remain quiet.

  The US government didn’t exactly refute the family’s claim. Immigration judge Carey Holliday wrote on March 18, 2008, that Gaby Pacheco “freely chose to draw unwanted attention to herself and her family,” adding “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”10

  Gaby thought over the risks. Walking to Washington would mean she would likely lose her student visa and thus her legal status. But it would also raise the profile of her case and might help her and others win more permanent protection.

  Many other friends turned Felipe and Juan down. Some held immigration status through school and, unlike Gaby, were afraid to lose the only security in their world of uncertainty. Others had to support their families and couldn’t quit their jobs or simply didn’t think it wise to miss so much school. Many were wary about what would happen as they marched up the eastern seaboard, through the heart of what had once been Ku Klux Klan country.

  A couple of nights after Gaby agreed to join them, they called their friend Carlos Roa, an architecture student whose family had fled the regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

  Carlos’s mother had just died, and he could barely focus on his studies. Walking away from his life didn’t sound too bad. It made perfect sense. His own life was in turmoil. He didn’t have a place to live. He was working, taking two classes, and paying out-of-state tuition, barely eating.

  But with the family still distraught over his mother’s death, Carlos wanted to explain the plan to them and win their support before he officially agreed. His father was on board, but Carlos sought the blessing of his aunt, the family matriarch, who had achieved legal immigration status and owned a comfortable home in the Miami-Dade suburb of Weston, known colloquially as Westonzuela for its fast-growing Venezuelan exile community.

  Carlos wasn’t keen on going alone but worried that Felipe and Juan might antagonize his conservative relatives. He turned once again to Maria Rodriguez, who agreed to tag along with Carlos and his father for the meeting.

  The meeting did not go well. They sat on the formal mustard-colored sofa and quietly sipped coffee as Carlos’s aunt called him crazy and predicted the “rednecks” would get him.

  Carlos’s older sister was angry, too. Like their aunt, she was already a resident, and she hoped one day to sponsor Carlos, never mind that it might take decades.

  That is still better than putting yourself at risk, she told him. Carlos looked to his father for help, but he remained silent. Carlos was crushed.

  Outside, as they left, Carlos let his anger spill out. But his father stopped him. They don’t understand. They’ve never been in our shoes, he said, adding, I’m proud of you, hijo. That was all Carlos needed.

  Now there were four.

  VETERAN IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY Ira Kurzban shuffled briefs at his desk in his small law office on Coral Gables’ elegant Miracle Mile, a cool escape from the South Florida sauna outside. Never mind that it was already October. It was one of those days when he missed the seasons of his native Brooklyn. His secretary buzzed him. The students were here.

  Juan, Carlos, and Gaby entered Ira’s office, taking in his numerous awards, the Haitian art decorating the walls, and the photo with Haiti’s former populist president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

  Ira waited until they sat down. “So, what kind of trouble are you going to cause this time?” he asked with an impish smile.

  Three years before, Ira’s phone had lit up with an inquiry from Eduardo Padrón, the balding, dapper president of Miami Dade College, asking for help in Gaby’s case.

  Ira hadn’t let the college president finish. He was in. It was precisely this combination—undocumented young immigrants with connections to sympathetic high-powered lawyers, academics, and civic leaders—that was beginning to make Florida such a powerhouse on immigration reform.

  Despite Florida’s poor showing during the 2006 protests and its reputation as mostly a place to launch spaceships, to party, and to develop liver spots, the Sunshine State was fast becoming a breeding ground for these young activists. A complex and at times combustible combination of hemispheric turmoil, hope, opportunity, and political calculation set the stage. Cuban exiles; South and Central American and Caribbean immigrants and asylum seekers; Puerto Rican transplants;* the growing Spanish-language media empire; and those famous Electoral College votes—all helped make Florida the right place at the right time.

  But it wasn’t just about the large number of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants who’d made their home in Florida. It was also advocates and activists such as Cheryl Little, Maria Rodriguez, and Subhash Kateel. It was also Ed
uardo Padrón, a Cuban immigrant, one of the “Pedro Pan” children sent to the United States alone by their parents to escape the communist government, who had risen to power cultivating close ties to the city’s conservative Cuban and Anglo elite.

  It was also Ira Kurzban, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, who had managed to build a successful career as one of the nation’s top immigration lawyers, even as he often championed the politically unpopular, and who had written the book on immigration law: a six-inch-thick tome used in universities across the country and emblazoned with his name.

  Kurzban had mentored Cheryl Little and Esther Olavarria. And back in the 1980s, he and his colleagues had won landmark judicial rulings on behalf of Haitians fleeing on rickety rafts from the decades old repressive regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, which had given him an unusual confidence among immigration attorneys.

  In a harsh 1980 opinion siding with Ira’s clients, South Florida District Court judge James Lawrence King wrote that the US government had a “systematic program designed to deport [Haitians] irrespective of their asylum claims.”11

  Ira later successfully argued on behalf of some 1,700 Haitian immigrants before the Supreme Court,12 alleging that Haitians were being unfairly locked up as they awaited their political asylum hearings. Or, as he bluntly put it, if you were black and seeking political asylum in South Florida, you ended up behind bars.13

  His success with those cases made him believe anything was possible. So when Felipe’s group visited him, Ira once again envisioned the beginning of a David-versus-Goliath battle.

  He looked at the students. They weren’t people who had many years of experience. They weren’t professional advocates. They weren’t politicians. Yet he saw himself in their determination.

  He wrote them a check for $1,500 on the spot.

  The money helped pay for the first of half a dozen pairs of shoes they would wear on the walk and other supplies. And it afforded them the confidence to know someone of Ira’s caliber believed in them.