But this really wasn’t supposed to be a letter about him.
It’s about this year’s campaign. It’s about wanting to say that $15 means something these days and deserves a moment of pause (and some words on paper) for this girl and her family of Obama fans.
$15 is a special pizza dinner at our local pizza stop (Poppy’s in Wynnewood).
It’s 1½ tickets to see the newest film at the old-school cinema we walk our daughter’s to.
It’s getter fresh fruit, instead of frozen; fresh veg, instead of canned.
It’s tickets to the Franklin Institute in the heart of Philly. (We’ve never been)
It’s all these things to a family like ours.
I’ve listened with curiosity, mostly frustration, as the nation debates Citizens’ United and the string of new laws that now allow the bellowing voices of private interest to drown out the sounds of tiny voices (like ours/mine). Our pebble-in-the-ocean support feels almost pointless. “Leave the campaigns to the rich,” I think to myself, “get your daughters a pizza instead.”
But I refuse to allow new laws to stop us/me from being A PART of this campaign. After all, I will never be a “player” (in the political sense), but I still want to believe I can play a part.
Then, out of the blue, there you are—shooting a jumpshot on my (Facebook) wall—and asking for “players” to join you on your home court. I had to smile, and then I couldn’t resist. And so, I have relinquished those $15. Please know that they count. To us. Please stay in Washington. Do, in this second term, what you were not assisted/supported to do during your first term. Get this country moving/working/hoping again. I’m hoping the next pizza will be on you.
Wishes to your brave wife and beautiful daughters from another brave wife with two beautiful daughters.
All good things,
Sandy Swanson
p.s. if you’re looking for a hard-working, All-American boy from Iowa for your pick-up game, I know a guy…my husband. His name is Steven.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Sandy—
Your letter inspires me so much.
Thanks,
Barack Obama
Ms. Sandy Swanson
Merion Station, Pennsylvania
CHAPTER 6
Bill Oliver,
June 20, 2012
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Some of this will have to remain vague. Bill Oliver does not want anyone to know where he or his family lives, not the town, not even the state. MS-13, the most violent street gang in the Western Hemisphere, has a presence even in this sleepy city, and if gang members want to find someone, they can.
Needless to say, this has been an education. He is not the person he once was. He just turned eighty.
The reckoning for Bill Oliver began in 2011 when he was on a trip to El Salvador. He had long since retired from teaching, had raised two kids with Sandra, his wife of nearly a half century, and they had fled the Snowbelt for the Sunbelt. He signed up to teach a few courses at the local college to keep his mind active. Taking students on a study abroad trip to Central America was about waking them up. Showing them how the other half lives. “Appreciate what you have.” They were international business majors studying things like finance, predictive analytics, and best practices in marketing management strategies. Bill was a lifelong Republican who believed in things like small government, low corporate tax rates, and tight border security.
The dinner the villagers put on was cooked in a big pot boiling over an open flame. Bill wanted his students to see that. The coconut milk came out of the coconuts that they had seen the boys pull off the trees. Real coconuts. Before they ate, the local kids challenged Bill’s students to a soccer game. Those kids had bare feet. Bill took his students aside. He said, “Now, don’t be rude. Make sure you let them win.” The local boys completely demolished the American college students. “Well, there you go,” Bill said. “Would you look at that? Look at that. Look at these people; they have no shoes, they have nothing, and they appear happy!”
After dinner, Bill got to know a man who said he was the father of several of the boys. His wife had cooked. Bill and the father stood in the kitchen, and the floor was dirt. The roof was corrugated metal, and the father didn’t have a shirt on. He was talking about his six sons, telling Bill all of their names, and he said one of them was not there. That one had just turned seventeen and his name was Quique. Key-kay. The father told Bill about MS-13, about the violence that was rapidly turning El Salvador into the murder capital of the world. He said Quique’s school was across the river, a good distance from the village, and that’s where the gang was. Gang members had been recruiting Quique, a lonely kid who needed friends and who made the mistake of listening to them. Soon he had found himself caught in a tragic dilemma. Gang members threatened to kill him if he didn’t join, and the price of admission was that he murder someone in his own family.
Quique’s only hope for survival was to flee. So the father put him on a bus with enough money, he hoped, to pay the coyote to smuggle him across the U.S. border. The father never heard from him again.
Bill is a kind and polite person, and any kind and polite person standing on a dirt floor in El Salvador under a corrugated metal roof with a grieving father would have said the same thing. “Well, if there is anything I can do…”
There was nothing Bill could do.
Two weeks after he got home, Bill told Sandra, he said, “Well, I made a promise to the father that I would look for his son.” He can’t say for sure when or how the notion of a promise kicked in. He hadn’t promised anything. His students were finishing the semester, and they would soon move on to MBAs and careers in big banks. Bill was not a busy man, not the way he used to be. If he took a shot at looking for the boy, perhaps he could be the man of honor he believed himself to be.
There was no way he’d be able to find the boy.
Bill started in Texas. He started in Houston. “I’m looking for a boy,” he said. Needle in a haystack. He could have stopped there, and his soul would have been at peace because, after all, he did try. He can’t say for sure when the compulsion to keep going kicked in, but if he’s honest, he’ll say at first it was about winning. Like you’re doing a crossword puzzle, and this one is not going to beat you. “I’m looking for a boy,” he said. “I’m looking for a boy.”
By 2012 more than 150,000 kids had been caught crossing the U.S. border, having run from countries in Central America, principally El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, to escape MS-13. They get picked up, detained, and designated as “unaccompanied minors.” The Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, screens the kids for gang ties and holds them in shelters while attempting to place them with relatives or sponsors as they await hearings in immigration court.
New York is where Bill found Quique. The Office of Refugee Resettlement had sent him to a relative of some sort; this part is sketchy. Bill wrote a letter to the district court that Quique had been transferred to. He got no response, so he kept writing. He wrote so many times the judge finally called him. You have to get an attorney and file motions if you want to do anything for the boy, she told him. Bill went online and learned about motions, and he wondered what, exactly, he wanted to do for the boy.
He thought about the father and the metal roof and the dirt floor. The conversation with the father that had been redrawn in Bill’s mind as a promise had bloomed into a full-blown test of character. He looked around his house at the display of pots, furs, masks, and other beautiful items crafted by villagers he had met on his various travels to remote parts of the globe. People who came by could see he was a worldly man who knew the taste of food cooked in pots over open flames.
To file the motion in district court, you had to ind
icate certain things. “I have the means to take care of him,” he wrote on the form. I have means.
When the motion was granted, they put Quique on a plane, and Bill went to the airport to pick him up. He recognized Quique because he was brown. Bill is big and round with a white beard, a Santa Claus look, not by choice. Quique went to him, and they walked together to Bill’s car. Bill spoke no Spanish, and Quique spoke no English. Bill didn’t know if Quique was coming for a day or a month or a year, and neither did Quique. Bill took Quique to a Salvadoran restaurant to make him feel at home. They ate pupusas, and the waitress had enormous breasts spilling exquisitely out of her shirt, and that was the only common language, and so that’s what they talked about with their eyes and their embarrassed laughter.
There’s an app you can get on your phone that translates. You speak English into it, and it comes out Spanish and vice versa, so for weeks at the kitchen table, that’s what they did. Bill asked Quique about his journey. In the beginning it had been exhilarating, Quique told Bill. His first time out of El Salvador. On a bus alone to Guatemala. He’d felt like a man. He felt the freedom of someone escaping death. In Mexico, with the strangers, in the back of trucks, he didn’t make friends. The Rio Grande was so shallow you could walk the first part. When it got deep, he took off his clothes and held them over his head and swam, and here’s where having grown up next to the ocean helped. Some of the others couldn’t swim. He put out his arm to help one of them, and that’s when he gave up trying to keep his clothes dry. It looked like the coast was clear, but none of them had ever been there before, and so they didn’t know where to look. The coast wasn’t clear. The person who grabbed him was not rough. He put Quique in a truck. The detention center was clean. You could earn points if you followed the rules. Points bought you candy, toothpaste, and time in the videogame room. He had never seen a videogame. He spent all his remaining points on candy on the last day and then gave it to the other kids because you weren’t allowed to take it with you.
Bill told Quique about the promise he had made to Quique’s father.
“Mi papá está muerto,” Quique said. My father is dead.
The news had come from the relative in New York. “Tu padre está muerto.” They said it was a heart attack.
“I’m sorry,” Bill said.
Bill gave Quique his choice of bedrooms, and Quique picked the one in the corner. Bill said he would have to go to church on Sunday and eat dinner with him and Sandra, and he would have to go to school and learn English. Quique said he didn’t want to go to school. At the school Bill told them; he said, “I’m going to be honest with you. He doesn’t want to be here, and he’s illegal.” They said they would figure something out. Bill hired a tutor. Quique discovered the Food Network, and that’s what he did after homework. He helped Sandra in the kitchen.
Bill and Sandra decided to adopt Quique. The lawyer said they were too old, and so was Quique. Bill could remain his sponsor until his hearing in immigration court when they decided what to do with him.
Quique got a girlfriend, Rebecca, a sunny, college-bound woman with sleek brown hair who said Quique was so much more mature than American guys. Quique made a lot of friends. He and Rebecca were in the back seat when the other car sped through the intersection. They were wearing their seatbelts. Rebecca was fine. Everybody was fine except Quique, whose bowel was severed by the seatbelt. At the hospital Bill told the ER surgeon; he said, “I’m going to be honest with you: He’s illegal.” The surgeon said he would figure something out. When the people at church heard about the accident, they said they would figure something out. Rebecca’s parents said they would figure something out. It was a community coming together. The question of citizenship, papers, race, who belongs or who doesn’t—who is deserving and who isn’t—never came into it. It was people helping people, paying for the surgery, nursing Quique back to health.
Bill had no idea where immigration court was or how it worked. He bought Quique a pair of dress pants and a blue shirt. At the hearing Bill made the point that Quique had cost the American taxpayer nothing. People were helping him out. Quique was doing everything right. He had followed the rules. He was in school, and he was learning English. Bill had letters praising Quique’s conduct from teachers and from church and even from the mayor, because Bill did know how to pull some strings.
The judge said there was no immunity for a kid who made an illegal crossing on account of MS-13. She said Quique had to go back to El Salvador.
“I’m sorry,” Bill’s attorney said. Bill told her he was going to appeal. If Quique were to go back to El Salvador, he would have to face the gang he had fled that wanted to kill him and that would almost certainly kill him now.
Bill’s attorney hung her head and looked at her shoes. Everyone, she said, appeals. Everyone had the same story.
That same week, on June 15, 2012, President Obama was in the Rose Garden announcing a policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). It allowed certain immigrants to escape deportation and obtain work permits.
Bill was desperate. He was not an Obama supporter. He was the opposite. But he felt like a changed man. Would that make a difference to the president?
Bill reflected on what, exactly, about him had changed. The entire saga could be summed up in one sentence: Bill had gotten to know a person who was in America illegally, and he had grown to love him.
Bill needed his letter to sound important. Just saying “Help!” seemed undignified.
June 20, 2012
President
Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington D.C.
20500
Dear Mr. President:
I have always been a strong Republican. I have disagreed with you on many issues, especially immigration issues.
I believe myself to be an objective person, and because of that I could not understand your tremendous focus on immigration. I disagreed with almost everything you identified.
However my objectiveness “kicked-in;” I decided to personally incorporate some of the immigration beliefs you espoused over and over, identifying your determination in “making things right.” Honestly, I didn’t even believe a difference could be made!
As a retired university provost and chief operating officer, I continue to do adjunct work as a professor ——. I take International Business majors to Central America on a regular basis.
My last trip, while exposing students to a different culture, a life of poverty for many families, I had the opportunity to interact with one family in particular. This is a family of six boys, father, mother, plus another relative. Father’s monthly income is about $140.00. They live without the any of the comforts we know, such as electricity and running water. Their “home” has dirt flooring, and corrugated metal walls and roofing. Cooking is done over an open fire and washing clothes in a wash tub.
* * *
—
His letter went on another page and a half, single-spaced; he told Quique’s story, and at the end he wrote:
Now what? What can we do?…
How can I help the young man of which I speak, and others like him?
He signed it, “William C. Oliver, Ph.D.”
At the White House, the OPC machine was in motion, just as it was always in motion. Like probably every other person who wrote a letter to the president, Bill had no idea that interns and staffers with pencils were busily making their marks.
Sample/Immigration Hardship
Bill had no idea that Obama, too, was making his marks.
“Reply,” Obama wrote, on the top, in blue ink. And then along the right side he scribbled: “Can we find out from Cecilia what the best options for this young man would be—does he qualify for deferred action?”
* * *
—
Bill was surprised
when he got a personal note back from the president on a white card, handwritten. It’s here somewhere. If he finds it, he’ll show you. Frankly, the personal note didn’t mean nearly as much to him as the phone call he got from a White House staffer who instructed him to call a certain number at a certain time; the person he reached was with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and she asked Bill questions about Quique’s situation.
Among other requirements, to qualify for deferred action, you had to be younger than thirty-one on June 15, 2012, and you had to have come to the United States when you were younger than sixteen, and you had to have lived in the United States since June 15, 2007. The Pew Research Center estimated that as of 2014, up to 1.1 million people were eligible.
Quique wasn’t one of them. He was too old, and he hadn’t been in the United States nearly long enough. DACA was of no help to Quique.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bill said.
Bill told Quique to make sure his shirt and dress pants were clean and ironed for whenever the appeal hearing came up, and he called his attorney for an update.
She said something happened. She said Quique’s case had been abruptly closed. “Prosecution discretion,” she said.
Bill would prefer not to disclose the details of Quique’s immigration status, especially given the current climate, but the news is good: “He has the lowest status you can get for someone to stay in this country legally, but he’s here legally.”
To Obama Page 10
