This is a story about love and sacrifice in the shining city on a hill. It is about the wildest, blindest love story in America, the story of the devotion immigrants have for a country that wants to expel them. This love perseveres past heartbreak; past giving your body, mind, and youth to a country you risked your life to get to, then seeing your own tax money pay for immigration officials to pursue an ambulance carrying a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy on the way to emergency surgery just to detain her and send her to a detention shelter without her caretakers. The curly-haired father who faces violent gangs in his home country: gone. The 5-year-old American citizen who believed his father (who is hiding in a church to give his lawyers more time to fight a deportation order) is just at work and he’ll come home soon: ICE makes no exception for them either. They used to have the decency of knocking down our doors in the middle of the night. It was scary and humiliating, but it was tonally appropriate—it was violence that felt violent. There was the illusion that the reason they were getting away with it was because it was dark; polite society was asleep. Now they are disappearing us in the middle of the day, in front of schools and hospitals and courthouses. Many of the children of these targeted migrants are American citizens. Do you believe, under the circumstances, that this love story could be true?
For the past year, I’ve been researching my forthcoming book, Undocumented America, in which I recount the intimate stories of undocumented immigrants throughout the United States. Regardless of their circumstances, they all have one thing in common—the looming threat of deportation. In early 2017, John Kelly (now President Trump’s chief of staff, but then head of the Department of Homeland Security) issued memos doing away with many Obama-era enforcement priorities, meaning targets for deportation not only included criminals and security risks but overnight became anyone and everyone. Minors and the parents and spouses of American citizens were suddenly in the crosshairs—and it is no exaggeration to say that in this current moment, immigrants are being hunted like animals. Yet when we talk about who deserves protection from this policy, we only talk about Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who arrived in the States as children and who had been given safe harbor here under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). What about those children’s parents, the protagonists of that original love story?
I am one of those children. And I know that love story like the back of my hand.
[For more on this story by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO, go to https://www.vogue.com/article/...-daca-personal-essay]
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