Only days before, a pickup truck on a narrow road in Maine had slammed into a car carrying Tam Tran, who had shown her videos and testified before lawmakers in 2007, and Cinthya Felix, an undocumented activist originally from Mexico. The two had been killed in the collision. The desire to do something in Tam and Cynthia’s honor had emboldened the small group. They stayed in the office all day, and when the offices closed, they refused to move.
In the end, authorities arrested everyone but Tania. At the last minute, she and the others had agreed she should leave. She was good with the press and could serve as their spokeswoman. She also was the most vulnerable when it came to detention because she had already been paroled back into the United States in 2001, which meant that under the law, an immigration judge wouldn’t have the same discretion to allow her to post bond if immigration agents detained her; thus, unlike the others, she would have to fight her case from behind bars. Tania wasn’t sure she wanted to risk that.
Instead she did countless interviews that evening, talking not only about undocumented youths but also about other struggles, including equal rights for those in the LGBTQ community. She wasn’t making a random connection; besides their immigration status, there was something else four out of the Tucson Five had in common: like Felipe and Juan, they all identified with the LGBTQ community.
A surprising number of young immigrant activists identified as queer. It wasn’t a coincidence. For some, it meant that from an early age, maybe before they had known they were undocumented, they had felt the emotional and mental burden of having to hide part of their identity. Coming out in one part of their lives—often as queer in their teens—had made it easier, more familiar, to come out again as undocumented and made doing so feel all the more urgent. Some of these young men and women also felt as though they had less to lose than other immigrants because they were already viewed by their own community as outsiders or even as troublemakers. And some queer activists were drawn to the movement’s emphasis on telling and respecting each person’s individual story. They had been rejected so many times that once they found that rare safe space in which to tell their stories, they clung to it.
That’s not to say it was easy for them to come out. For Felipe and Juan on the Trail, it had felt safer to be public about their immigration status than about their sexual orientation. For Tania, who’d come out as a lesbian in college but kept her immigration status quiet for fear of losing her humanitarian parole, the opposite had been true.11
Many had witnessed the growing number of states rule in favor of same-sex marriage. The queer community’s battle to be treated as fully human and with dignity under the law felt familiar, and the pressure tactics the LGBTQ activists used to get lawmakers to their side—telling their personal stories, engaging in filmed confrontations—were easily transferable. The LGBTQ rights movement was in many ways the foremost civil rights movement of these young activists’ generation. They had seen the 1960s civil rights movement only in black and white, and farmworker boycotts had also faded away more than a generation before.
The cross-pollination between the groups would only continue to spread. By the end of 2010, with the health care reform fight mostly over (at least for the rest of Obama’s presidency) and the nation slowly finding its way back from the great recession, the push for the DREAM Act heated up, just as did the fight to end the ban on same-sex marriage and the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allowed the discharge of individuals if their sexual preferences became public. America’s Voice, which had begun helping United We Dream disseminate its message, brought on board one of the chief LGBTQ political strategists in Washington.*
In a 2008 campaign letter, Obama supported repealing the federal 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as the union between a man and a woman. Now once again, after the bruising economic and health care fights, it seemed there wasn’t the appetite to do so. The LGBTQ community was furious. But like the young immigrants who had refocused on the DREAM Act, they quickly pivoted. If they couldn’t get marriage equality yet, at the very least, they wanted an end to “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”*
Many soldiers had been outed despite their precautions and forced to leave the military. Others, like the young immigrants, were simply tired of hiding their identity. LGBTQ advocates worked to publicize sympathetic stories of heroic soldiers discharged over their sexuality and of officers unable to get medical coverage for an ailing partner. In April, days before the Trail of Dreams ended at the White House, several LGBTQ activists shouted down the president at a California fund-raiser.12 A month earlier, a group of military veterans organized by the activist group GetEQUAL chained themselves to the White House fence to protest.13 The young immigrant activists took notes. The LGBTQ rights movement had more money and access than the undocumented groups had. But even wealthy white gay men who could vote needed allies, and many now saw value in Latino political and cultural support to effect policy and social change. The two movements increasingly shared not only strategies but protagonists, as youths such as Felipe, Juan, and Tania were no longer willing to choose one fight over another.
IN JUNE, Obama finally agreed to meet with a member of the Trail of Dreams. He invited Juan, the only one with legal status, to the White House. Juan looked around. Part of him still couldn’t believe he was there, not just at the White House but standing among some of the most powerful players in the immigration rights movement: the labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, Eliseo Medina of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Angelica Salas of the powerful Southern California Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), and Janet Murguía of the National Council of La Raza.
Juan wore a yellow dress shirt, one of many his father had left behind on his way to Canada. He tried to tuck it in, but it was so baggy. He wanted to look right. He wanted to look like he owned a formal shirt of his own. He kept thinking about what Gaby had told him: he was there representing not himself but people who weren’t allowed to be part of the conversation, people who weren’t allowed to sit at the table.
As he looked in the mirror, he thought of his father. “I always thought of my dad like the Great Gatsby. Whenever he could, he tried to create these grand extravagances. Whenever he could, he would try to make us feel like one day we would be important people in the world. I don’t think my dad ever imagined me to be a politician or anything, but it felt like my dad would always have wanted me to be an important enough person that the president would want to meet with me.”
Juan knew he would have a limited time to make his case to the president. He’d talked it over with Gaby, Carlos, and Felipe. Gaby, who’d had the most experience in Washington, said that almost everything in the meeting was likely to be scripted. As the youngest and least experienced in the group, Juan was unlikely to get much if any time to talk. Anything he did would have to be physical, a visual demonstration of how he and so many other young activists felt.
Juan also felt guilty. They should have invited the undocumented: Felipe, Gaby, and Carlos. What he didn’t know was that not only was it risky optics for the president to invite in a group of undocumented immigrants but on at least one previous visit, Secret Service agents had nearly detained undocumented White House visitors after running the standard background checks on them. That was the last thing the president’s staff wanted.
Juan was ushered into the White House and eventually into the small dining room and waited along with the advocates, Cecilia Muñoz, and other White House staffers. The president entered and walked around the table, shaking hands with the visitors. Juan was among the last. He willed his hands not to tremble. The president put out his hand. Juan clasped his hands behind his back.
It’s not the president of the United States that’s greeting me, he told himself. It’s just a person, and he’s the person in charge of enforcing policies that are dividing families.
Juan looked up at the president. �
��I can’t shake your hand,” he said.
He barely had time to explain more, that this was personal. The president got the message.
Then what was supposed to be a friendly meeting turned tense. The president complained that the immigrant groups were constantly attacking him.
Juan remembered the president saying he understood the immigrant story, the vulnerability and fear, but that he could find millions of stories from people around the world who wanted to come to the United States. His job, essentially, as the nation’s chief immigration officer, was to decide who would be allowed to come—who would end up earning $300 a week, not $300 a year.
The immigrant advocates wanted to keep a united front, show that the president was committed to moving immigration forward, that it was something he cared about personally and could get done, so as to keep up the energy in the field and the pressure on Congress. Juan initially agreed not to talk about the handshake moment.
And he didn’t for a while. But he left the White House feeling torn. He understood the president didn’t like being constantly attacked by his allies, but wasn’t taking the heat kind of his job? Yet he appreciated that Obama hadn’t tried to snow them. He was grateful to have had the opportunity to meet with a president who was so honest and raw.
Then once more he reminded himself that they weren’t just a group of friends coming by for tea. This was the man responsible for breaking up so many families he knew, for separating parents from their children because they hadn’t been able to get a driver’s license and had driven anyway, or because they had been waiting for a train without proper ID on their way to school.
“If it were any other setting, I would have cried.”
It felt once more as though no one had really listened to what he and the other members of the Trail had been asking for.
But the Obama administration had begun laying the groundwork. In June 2010, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary John Morton issued the first of a number of memos—the so-called Morton memos—outlining the agency’s priorities when it came to immigrant detentions. Terrorists and violent criminals were at the top of the list. Young undocumented immigrants who had grown up in the United States did not even make the list.
The memos were part of a broader effort within DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to establish priorities for enforcement, “and actually have those priorities carried out by those agents, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was revolutionary in the ICE world,” Napolitano would later recall after leaving the agency. “They really did not differentiate between the types of backgrounds of the people who were in the country illegally.”
AT THE SAME TIME, a split was widening within the United We Dream coalition. Everyone was now focused on the DREAM Act, but some, including Mohammad Abdollahi, felt that the group wasn’t doing enough to pressure lawmakers and the White House. They worried its leaders were being swayed by what they only half jokingly termed the immigration industrial complex—the mix of well-established Washington-based nonprofits, whose funders supported broad immigration reform but not necessarily broad structural and socioeconomic change. And then there was the Democratic Party, which Mohammad and others felt wanted to make sure whatever happened with immigration would benefit the party first and foremost. Among the Democrats’ considerations: the fact that legalizing undocumented immigrants without giving them citizenship wouldn’t do much to bring new voters into the party.
Simmering tensions had begun to show. On the one hand were the young activists like Gaby, who had become increasingly accustomed to the pace and style of Washington, even as they pushed for change. On the other were organizations and activists from the middle of the country, like Tania, and those in the Southwest and in California, who did not feel their voices were sufficiently heard in Washington.
In July 2010, young activists upped the ante by holding a silent protest in the offices of Democrats, including Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Others sat outside the office of Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Bob Menendez, the tough Cuban American from New Jersey. Another group of activists held a protest in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building, while still another camped out in McCain’s Washington office.
The sit-ins infuriated some Democrats, who saw themselves as the young immigrants’ champions. Both Menendez and Gutiérrez took particular umbrage at the young activists’ recriminations. Both men had cosponsored versions of the latest comprehensive immigration reform bill. And they hadn’t been afraid to challenge the Democratic Party when they felt it wasn’t looking out for their constituents or was disrespecting fellow Latinos. Now they were being told by a bunch of kids that despite their years in Congress, they were out of step and too cautious?
As the students sat in Reid’s office, again in caps and gowns, they spoke with Gutiérrez by phone. The Chicago lawmaker, born to Puerto Rican parents, encouraged them to leave. It did not go well. Mohammad Abdollahi recorded the call and later posted it online,14 a hardball tactic that proved effective in embarrassing his target in the short term.15
“For you guys to walk away from there, what has to happen?” Gutiérrez asked them. The students’ political inexperience showed as they struggled to articulate exactly what they wanted the majority leader to do. They gave mini-speeches. Finally they clarified what they wanted; they wanted Reid to put the DREAM Act onto the Senate calendar for a vote.
“What if it fails?” Gutiérrez asked.
“La vida es un riesgo. Life is a risk,” one young woman answered, unfazed.
“You know something. You guys are all adults. You know exactly what you’re doing,” Gutiérrez responded in the exasperated tone of a parent. He resented being attacked when he was one of the few lawmakers willing to engage directly with the students in the first place.
It was not a tone the students wanted to hear. They huddled around the phone. Now they were angry. They accused Gutiérrez and other lawmakers of endlessly debating, pointing fingers, but failing to act. They understood that Gutiérrez had put himself on the line with his party on comprehensive reform, but that effort seemed to be going nowhere. The students promised the DREAM Act would only be a first step, that they would come back to fight for comprehensive reform. Their proposal was a foot in the door.
“We are tired of waiting,” one student said, “we have people [who’ve been undocumented] here for ten years, for nineteen years, since they were one year old.”
Gutiérrez said he was sympathetic but disagreed. “I’m not quite sure your getting arrested and possibly deported actually advances [things],” he warned. The congressman reminded them of who had gone to jail during the White House rally at the end of the Trail of Dreams. It was the older allies, including himself, who’d been arrested, not the students or any other undocumented youths.
The rejoinder felt like a low blow.
His arrest had been symbolic, they shot back. As a sitting congressman, Gutiérrez had little to lose.
“Every time somebody says the whole thing can’t pass, only part of it, it weakens us. It divides us. It confuses us,” Gutiérrez tried again. “We once had a united movement for comprehensive immigration reform. Now we don’t.”
Gutiérrez went on to remind the students that there were families that had been waiting decades for reform and had seen loved ones deported. Mohammad interrupted, reminding the congressman that as a result of the sit-in at McCain’s Tucson offices, he and others from that group were now in deportation proceedings.
“So for you to sit here and talk to these five, six youth that are sitting in this office and to put them down . . . instead of supporting them is a shame!” he said, his voice shaking.
It wasn’t just Gutiérrez. The young activists would have a tough time convincing lawmakers to go for the DREAM Act as long as the veteran advocates, with whom the Democrats had close ties, pushed for comprehensive reform. In a July interview with Los Angeles’ bigges
t Spanish-language newspaper, Reid said as much, telling La Opinión that he was waiting for the “immigration advocates” to give him the green light to pivot from a comprehensive reform effort to the DREAM Act.16
Those advocates were, for the most part, still urging Reid and Gutiérrez to go for another stab at comprehensive reform. Some, such as SEIU’s Eliseo Medina and Angelica Salas of CHIRLA, saw supporting only the DREAM Act as equivalent to selling out: forget about the gardeners, the nannies, just take care of some privileged kids who couldn’t go to college.
“You’re saying we should pivot from fighting for eleven million to one million and we’re not even going to win because the votes aren’t there?” they questioned.
By then Frank Sharry had become a convert to the potential power of the undocumented students, if not the DREAM Act itself. “Yes,” he answered. He was thinking about the movement. It wasn’t so much 11 million versus 1 million. “These young people are emerging as authentic leaders of their own struggle. We need to support them,” he insisted.
Frank also had a bigger strategy in mind beyond the DREAM Act. These youths were clearly going to go ahead on their own anyway. And even if the DREAM Act failed, which still was more than likely, the campaign to pass it might at least turn the screws on Republicans to put something in its place. It was a way to advance the legislation, he believed. For him, backing the young undocumented activists wasn’t so much a policy play as it was part of a cultural and political battle.
By continuing to attack the Senate majority leader, the young immigrants could have pissed Reid off enough that he would have given them the cold shoulder. Everyone wanted the Senate majority leader’s attention, and Reid could have spent his political capital on any number of bills that year.
Except that he was fighting for his political life in Nevada in a race against the Tea Party–backed GOP candidate Sharron Angle. Since 2000, the number of Latinos in the state had grown from under 20 percent to more than a quarter of all residents.17 Angle was already running ads describing Reid as “the best friend an illegal alien ever had” and even had one ad targeting the DREAMers. If the longtime senator were to have a chance, he’d need Latino voters, and the energy and determination of the undocumented youths would help. Reid, too, was coming around to the idea of the DREAM Act. A young woman named Astrid Silva had begun showing up at many of his events, handing him slips of paper with bits of her story on it. She’d come to the United States from Mexico as a four-year-old, crossing the Rio Grande with her mother on a rubber raft. “I have never, ever as much as stolen even a piece of gum, but I feel like a criminal,” she wrote in one letter. Reid also met with Roman Catholic cardinals, including Los Angeles’ Mahony. His wife, the daughter of a Russian Jewish immigrant, also urged him to act.
The Making of a Dream Page 15
