Local lawmakers were also sympathetic. South Florida Republican representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, and later his younger brother Mario, long championed the rights of legal immigrants and also supported the DREAM Act activists early on.* For them, it was not only good politics in their immigrant-heavy districts, and what they viewed as the moral thing to do, it was also personal.
Both Ros-Lehtinen and the elder Díaz-Balart had fled Castro’s Cuba with their families as young children. (Castro had actually been a close friend of Díaz-Balart’s father prior to becoming a revolutionary and had even been married to his aunt.14) These lawmakers knew about starting over in a new country and about escaping political upheaval and repression.
The immigrant story also hit close to home for the recently termed-out former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Marco Rubio, who would soon run for the US Senate. His own parents had left Cuba initially for economic reasons but made the United States their home for good following the revolution. He, too, understood firsthand the breadth of immigrant stories. He had grown up the son of working-class immigrants not only in the protective Cuban-exile bubble of Miami, but also in the heavily Mexican American immigrant communities of Las Vegas. And later he married into a family of Colombian immigrants.
“My dad was 30-something years-old when he came to this country and had to start his life brand new. So my generation in many ways inherited a lot of dreams and hopes,”15 he recalled. He seemed to understand that but for the grace of God, Fidel Castro, and the Cold War, his parents might not have made it into the United States legally, either. Rubio would, of course, later shape-shift on immigration as he struggled to win consensus for reform within his party in Washington, but in the Florida legislature, he was known as someone who not only had tried to provide in-state tuition for the young immigrants but had also kept harsher enforcement proposals from reaching the state Senate floor.
Felipe and the others calculated that they would have at least some cover from these local politicians. Secretly, they began to meet at Felipe and Juan’s tiny apartment in Miami’s Little Havana. Despite having lived there nearly a year, the couple had barely furnished it. Gaby made a table out of a wooden crate, hemmed a wine-colored tablecloth, and made matching cushions. Now they could get down to business. The four sat around the low table each night as they discussed the plan.
They would walk 1,500 miles up the eastern seaboard in a meandering path that would allow them to pay homage at key 1960s civil rights sites. They called their walk the “Trail of Dreams,” referencing their moniker as DREAMers, but also as a nod to the Cherokee Nation’s forced 2,200-mile “Trail of Tears” from the eastern South to Oklahoma more than a century before.
They had yet to settle on what they would actually ask for when they got to Washington. They argued back and forth: comprehensive immigration reform? The DREAM Act?
Gaby thought of what Marie Gonzalez told her when she’d first called her right after ICE raided the Pacheco home. Gaby needed community support to help her win deferred action, Marie explained. She needed to convince the government, just as Marie had, to use its discretion not to deport her or to “defer action” on her case.
Once the US government initiated deportation proceedings against a person, Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities could at any time use their discretion to recommend an immigration judge close a deportation case. That wouldn’t give the person legal status, but it would take him or her out of the government’s crosshairs. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could also ask a judge to reopen a case, which would allow the immigrant to argue his or her case for asylum or another path to legalization. But such successful cases were rare, and if the person lost that case, his or her deportation was all but guaranteed.
Deferred action was different. Immigration authorities didn’t have to go to a judge for that. They could use their own discretion, and though the action was temporary and could be revoked at any time, it meant the immigrant would have some legal protections and could then apply for a work visa.
Ever since Marie had told Gaby about deferred action, Gaby had begun to see it as the best available option for cases far beyond her own.
It became, she joked, “like My Big Fat Greek Wedding response, where the aunt wants to put Windex on everything.” Every time she heard something about any undocumented immigrant, her response was “deferred action, that’s your solution.”
Their friend Subhash Kateel took it one step further. They should ask for a blanket deferral for anyone the government did not view as a high deportation priority, starting with the youths. Such an executive action wouldn’t need to go through Congress since it was temporary and merely an expansion of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement was already doing on an individual basis. Subhash had worked in New York to help individuals who had been wrongly incarcerated or who had lacked due process during deportation proceedings, work that had intensified in the wake of the September 11 attacks. His experience had taught him the power of executive intervention, and he believed that much more could be done by the president, even if legislation was stalled. Tapping into the power of that branch of the government might be the immigrants’ best chance.
Subhash’s argument made sense to Felipe, Juan, Gaby, and Carlos, and it helped the group avoid having to choose sides between the limited DREAM Act legislation and the broader push for comprehensive reform.
For now, Felipe and the other students agreed that they would press Obama and his administration to protect them, rather than focusing on Congress, which seemed unlikely to act. They wanted the president of the United States to end deportation of families and to use his discretion to allow people like themselves to stay and work in the country at least until Congress took action. They also wanted to ask that the president provide similar protections for the parents of US citizens.
Once the foursome agreed, they took their plan to the larger movement. The reaction was not what they had expected.
“You can’t just walk!” Maria Rodriguez insisted. “You don’t even have coats. It’s warm in Miami in January, but not up in the Carolinas.”
Others worried about an undocumented gay couple walking through the heart of what had once been the Confederate South.
“Do not do this,” cried Cheryl Little, whose organization provided legal support for the students during one meeting. “I can get you released from jail, but I can’t resurrect you!”
As their attorney, Cheryl advised against the plan, yet she couldn’t help but admire the group, just as Ira had. After all, she thought, if the 1960s civil rights activists had listened to their lawyers, they might never have marched on Selma.
In Washington, the fledgling United We Dream coalition was somewhat more enthusiastic, if a little dubious. The group wanted the four students to use their platform to raise awareness about the DREAM Act.
But the greatest pushback came when they announced their plan to the broader immigration reform community at a conference in Las Vegas. Their plan met a mix of disbelief, dismissal, and outright hostility. In what would become a harbinger of the tensions to come, some veteran Washington advocates believed the group would put too much of a spotlight on the DREAM Act, rather than on broader immigration reform
One activist suggested they go and organize in Iowa, where one of the biggest raids had occurred the previous year. Several advocates called the walk a suicide mission, echoing Cheryl’s concerns about their safety and the fruitlessness of such an endeavor.
“Everyone thought they were crazy,” Jorge Ramos later admitted.
Still, Felipe, Juan, Gaby, and Carlos were undeterred, determined to do the walk with or without the support from the Washington establishment.
In November, Cheryl and Maria helped organize a press event at a local church in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. The four announced their plans alongside a group of farmworkers who agreed to fast in support. A dozen local reporters and national correspondents, ac
customed to the farmworkers’ protests, filled the church pews. As Juan began to speak, the journalists sat up in their seats. Who were these kids who spoke English so well, who dressed like typical college students, and who carried themselves with confidence, even a sense of entitlement? They began to take more careful notes.
Maria also reached out to the group Presente.org, co-led by the journalist and activist Roberto Lovato, who agreed to do media outreach. Presente.org had recently generated enough of a public outcry to help oust anchor Lou Dobbs from CNN following years of the anchor’s hyperbolic rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, including linking them to falsely inflated leprosy numbers. The group was ready for a new campaign.
As Felipe and his friends prepared for their walk, they read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and watched the old black-and-white footage from Eyes on the Prize, the documentary series about the 1960s civil rights protests.
They didn’t expect the snarling dogs or tear gas African American marchers had faced in the 1960s. Still, they planned to march through areas where the recent influx of undocumented farmhands and construction workers was often viewed with a mix of fear and frustration, a part of the country where only six years before anal sex had been a felony. They wanted to better understand the region’s history.
They asked each other the hardest questions they could think of. “Are you okay with getting punched but not punching back?” That one seemed relatively straightforward. “Are you okay with one of us getting raped and not attacking back?” They pushed further: “Are you okay with dying?”
And each time Felipe or Juan would say, “If you’re not okay, you need to leave.”
They also asked themselves what they would do if they didn’t achieve their goals. But for Felipe, that was a question he couldn’t answer. He didn’t know what the march would bring. He just needed to march. Whether one person reacted or a hundred thousand did, this was now his mission.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, they trekked to the massive outdoor Sawgrass Mills factory outlet mall in Broward County, buying matching white Nikes, the first of three pairs of shoes each would go through on their 1,500-mile journey to Washington.
5
A TRAIL OF TEARS AND DREAMS
Carlos Roa, Gaby Pacheco, Felipe Matos, and Juan Rodriguez link arms as they near the end of the Trail of Dreams in Arlington, Virginia, April 2010. (COURTESY OF ISABEL SOUSA-RODRIGUEZ)
On January 1, 2010, just as Felipe had envisioned, he, Juan, Gaby, and Carlos stood on the steps outside Miami’s historic Freedom Tower, across from the Miami Heat’s basketball arena in the heart of downtown. About a hundred family and friends gathered, as well as reporters from the New York Times, the Miami Herald, its Spanish-language sister El Nuevo Herald, local TV reporters, and other journalists looking for an alternative to the traditional Miami Beach New Year’s hangover story.1
Felipe tried not to let his nerves show as the noon sun rose high over Biscayne Bay, and he looked to the small crowd that had gathered, but his usual smile was absent. The elegant, sand-colored tower that Miami Dade College had agreed to let them use had been built during Prohibition and modeled after the bell tower on the cathedral of Seville. It had served throughout the 1960s and 1970s as a reception center for Cuban exiles.2 Now it was a gallery and cultural center for the college. But older Cuban Americans still sometimes referred to the building as “El Refugio” (the refuge), a place where the US government had first welcomed them with open arms.*
The symbolism wasn’t lost on Felipe.
“People want liberty, economic liberty, political liberty, but the opposite is happening,” Felipe told a correspondent for the Mexican paper La Jornada. “With this walk we are announcing to the world that we are coming out of the shadows.”3
The four walkers wore blue sweatpants and long-sleeved white T-shirts emblazoned with “Trail of Dreams” and “Fast for Families.” The latter was the motto of the group of farmworker activists who had driven up nearly an hour from the nation’s winter strawberry fields in and around the Southern Florida agricultural town of Homestead to show their solidarity. Many of the farmworkers were accompanied by wide-eyed young children, clasping their mothers’ hands. One woman had lost her husband to deportation. Another wore a DHS tracking bracelet around her ankle as she waited for the US government to determine her fate. They weren’t new to protests. They had fought for immigrant and farmworkers’ rights for years.
But unlike the students, they couldn’t afford to take off work and walk for months at a time. And unlike at least Felipe and Juan, who could pass as white and addressed the media in fluent English, the farmworkers’ indigenous heritage was clear. They spoke mostly in plain Spanish sentences as they described their barely livable wages, abuses in the field, and the constant threat of immigration raids.
The farmworkers’ presence was essential as the students kicked off the Trail. The farmworkers couldn’t walk, but through their fast in solidarity with Felipe and his friends, they would activate their network of other farmworkers across Florida to provide the students support. A couple of the women fussed over the group, giving them hugs.
As they stood with the students, the farmworkers also anchored the call to action in the broader story of the 11 million immigrants who had yet to come out of the shadows. And they anchored the moment in history. Nearly half a century earlier, farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez’s fledgling union* had joined Filipino grape pickers in a protest and a more than 300-mile march from Delano, California, to Sacramento to demand better wages.4 That walk hadn’t changed things overnight, but it had set the stage for a massive California grape boycott that ended after five years with a collective bargaining agreement for some ten thousand agricultural workers.
The Florida farmworkers might not join the Trail, but the four students weren’t walking alone. Cheryl Little’s group, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, had donated $3,000 for a refurbished RV that would accompany the walkers for emergencies. The center would also provide pro bono legal support. Maria Rodriguez’s group was running logistics, helping map out the trek and setting up places to stay along the route. Half a dozen women and men would keep track of the walkers, coordinating stops at churches and other solidarity groups along the coast.
Maria found a volunteer driver for the RV, a former associate instructor from Indiana University named Felipe Vargas, who could also provide first aid—and an extra set of eyes on secluded stretches of road where rattlesnakes and alligators still roamed. Other volunteers would join up for stretches of the walk. The RV would provide a safe place to sleep when church basements and volunteers’ couches were scarce.
Despite the precautions, Felipe’s sister, Carolina, worried about her little brother’s safety. She drove forty-five minutes on New Year’s Day to attend the rally and see him off.
Promise me you’ll come back, she whispered to him in Portuguese.
Felipe wondered if he could really promise that much, but he nodded and hugged her.
In fact, the group would soon learn that Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not plan to arrest them—as long as they didn’t engage in illegal activity. A contact in the Department of Justice would keep track of them. But the day he left, Felipe had no idea what lay ahead.
As Maria had predicted, the four students weren’t well prepared. That winter was one of the coldest in the Sunshine State’s history. It was a balmy 65 degrees in Miami the day they left, but the temperature kept dropping. And while the students were busy contemplating life and death, none had thought to buy a winter jacket. By the time they reached Boynton Beach, some seventy miles north of Miami, the temperature had dropped to an extended record low high of 50 degrees during the day. The group made a quick shopping detour for jackets, balaclavas, and gloves.
For city kids whose experiences with nature generally involved a trip to the turquoise waters of Miami Beach, the pure physicality of the walk—often at least sixteen miles a day—and th
e intensity of the exposure to stretches of untamed Florida habitat were shocks to their systems. Their days frequently started at dawn and ended at midnight. Early on, they’d decided to give up coffee so as not to lose time in the morning. Everyone was cranky. Their feet were soon covered in blisters, and they quickly ran out of bandages, which slipped off halfway through the day anyway. Felipe took to protecting his feet with small pieces of duct tape. By day six, Felipe had to visit a Vero Beach–area podiatrist, who taught him how to pop his blisters with a sterile needle, and told him to change socks frequently and use moleskin bandages and antibiotics.
Halfway through January, Gaby threw her hip out and found herself flat on her back writhing in pain. A visit to a chiropractor arranged by the nonprofit group Voices of Justice, plus a couple days of rest, and she returned, but the pain in her hip and back meant she would ride in the RV on more than one occasion throughout the rest of the trip. So, too, would Felipe, who also suffered debilitating back pain. Only Carlos and Juan would walk the entire way.
To track their travel and boost their visibility, the group kept a blog. One of Felipe’s first posts was entitled “I Think I’m Pregnant . . . ,” with a tongue-in-cheek list of reasons, including “I am always hungry; I am always craving ice cream. . . . I don’t fit into my pants anymore. . . . I have swollen feet; I have lower back pain . . .”5
Their ranks swelled to well over a dozen at times. People would walk with them for a few hours or a few days. Some even walked for a few weeks. Others opened their homes for a night so the students had a place to stay. But as they headed north away from their friends, families, and longtime allies, the days got longer and sometimes quieter, the landscapes wilder.
“I kept telling myself to put one foot in front of the other and that’s it. I cannot deny that I feel homesick. . . .” Felipe wrote.
But Felipe was also captivated by the lush beauty of his adopted home.
The Making of a Dream Page 11
