Ripped Apart
The Cost of Americafs Immigration Crackdown
Nation
Bye Dad, I Love You
Americafs Immigration Policy Is Splitting
Families and Spreading Fear
'No One Is Safe.' How Trumpfs Immigration
Policy Is Splitting Families Apart
By Haley Sweet land Edwards | Photographs
by Michele Asselin for TIME
March 8, 2018
Just before 7:30 one Friday morning last
March, Alejandro said goodbye to his wife Maria and his two small daughters and
headed off to work. He didnft make it far. Four blocks from his home near
Bakersfield, Calif., two unmarked vehicles, a white Honda and a green Mazda
pickup truck, pulled up behind him at a stop sign. Plain-clothes Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents spilled out. They wore vests emblazoned
with the word POLICE.
Alejandro dialed Maria from his cell phone
and told her what was happening. Her heart dropped. She said later that she
knew it wouldnft matter that Alejandro had no criminal record, not even a
speeding ticket. Or that hefd driven these same roads every day for the past
decade, picking grapes, pistachios and oranges in Californiafs Central Valley.
Since 2006, when Alejandro overstayed his visa, he had been considered a
gfugitive alien,h in ICE parlance, and therefore subject to immediate
deportation to Mexico. Now he was arrested on the spot.
A few days later, he was given an ankle bracelet and allowed to return home to say goodbye. He was gone by the end of spring—before his eldest, Isabella, began talking, before Estefania took her first steps, before Maria gave birth this winter to their third baby girl.
The familyfs experience—including the fear
of being targeted if their names were not changed in this story—has become
increasingly common during the Trump Administration. While President Obama told
ICE to focus on violent offenders and recent border crossers, among others,
President Trump has cast a much wider net. In early 2017, his Administration
issued a series of edicts to ICE agents, prosecutors and immigration judges:
any and all of the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally are now
a priority for deportation. gTherefs no population thatfs off the table,h
Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, told reporters in December. gIf
youfre in the country illegally, wefre looking for you.h
The new approach has led to a surge of new
arrests. Between 2016 and 2017, apprehensions of undocumented immigrants jumped
by a third. That increase was driven primarily by arrests of people like
Alejandro with no prior criminal record. In 2017, President Trump deported more
than double the number of noncriminals than Obama had
the previous year. The detainees prioritized by Trumpfs approach included
community leaders, doting parents and children: a 10-year-old girl with
cerebral palsy in San Antonio; a grandmother described as the gbackboneh of a
Navy veteranfs family; a father of two in Detroit who had lived in the U.S.
since he was 10 years old.
A major consequence of this new policy has been an explosion of fear among immigrant communities, which are reacting not so much to the spiking number of arrests but to the apparent randomness of the roundups. gWhen everyonefs a target, no one is safe,h says Luis Zayas, dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. He cites instances of ICE agents arresting people who had just filed paperwork for a green card, left church or dropped off their kids at school. gThe arrests feel arbitrary, and thatfs different,h he says. gThe fear is worse now than Ifve ever seen it.h
Which may be the point. gQuite frankly,
illegal immigrants are supposed to be afraid of detection,h says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies, a group that presses for significant immigration controls. gTheyfre
illegal, theyfre breaking the law, why shouldnft they live in the shadows?h
Immigration hard-liners say the policy is working. In 2017, the number of
people caught sneaking over the U.S.-Mexico border had fallen to its lowest
level in 46 years, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report.
gThatfs not a coincidence,h Homan said.
But the new policy doesnft affect only
those who are in the country illegally. It upends a broad swath of American
society, including the communities and families of undocumented people, many of
whom are U.S. citizens. More than 4 million American kids under the age of 18
have at least one undocumented parent, and nearly 6 million live in so-called
mixed-status households, sharing bedrooms with family members, like brothers
and sisters, who are now targets for arrest. Every year, tens of thousands of
American kids see at least one parent deported, according to the Urban
Institute. Itfs an experience that, studies show, pushes families into poverty
and leads to higher rates of PTSD and struggles at school.
For Maria and her daughters, the fear has only begun. Like Alejandro, Maria is undocumented; all three of their daughters are U.S. citizens. Which means every day contains the prospect of the children becoming separated from their mother as well. gItfs a cruel way to live,h says Maria, wiping away tears with the heel of her hand. gYoufre always asking, Whatfs the worst that could happen now?h
In Maria and Alejandrofs neighborhood, news
of his arrest went viral. His Facebook feed, already a portrait of a
communityfs anxiety, began to accrue up-to-the-minute reports on ICE sightings
in town and rumors of planned immigration raids at warehouses nearby. Donft go
to the Walmart, an ICE truck was seen parked nearby.Plainclothes
agents are watching the park. In a phone interview from Mexico, Alejandro told
me that many of his old friends now avoid leaving the house, limiting necessary
errands to blitzes after dark, when agents are thought to be less active.
Sitting in a folding chair on the patio outside her home, Maria describes a
similar drumbeat of distress. She doesnft use the word miedo,
fear, but a more visceral term:pavor.
Dread.
The disquiet seeps into daily life. In
Orange County, California, for example, dozens of undocumented adults have
chosen to un-enroll their U.S.-citizen children in benefit programs like SNAP
and school lunches, because they fear having their names in a government
database, says Teresa Smith, executive director of the local Catholic
Charities. gThese are families that very much need that food,h she says. gThis
isnft a decision made lightly.h
Immigrant advocatesf offices, meanwhile,
are swamped. At a recent gKnow Your Rightsh session for undocumented immigrants
at the United Farm Workers Foundation in Bakersfield, the line to enter snaked
around the corner and down the block. At the Coalition for Humane Immigrant
Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), the waiting room is papered with posters,
pamphlets and worksheets with advice on what undocumented people should do if
theyfre pulled over, their workplace is raided or ICE agents show up at their
home. One handout advises undocumented parents of minors to follow a numbered
checklist to be ready in the event that they are picked up. Tip No. 3: gPrepare
a letter giving legal power to someone trusted, to care for your children in
case youfre arrested.h
Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the communica-tions director at CHIRLA, says much of that
advice is easier to offer than follow. Many parents donft have a trusted friend
or relative capable of taking on their children in case theyfre deported, he
explains. In South Florida, Nora Sandigo, an
immigrant advocate, has assumed power of attorney for roughly 1,250 children of
undocumented parents in case the adults are sent away. Thomas McCoy, an
assistant superintendent in the Oxnard (Calif.) Union High School District,
which serves a large immigrant population, says administrators have asked
parents to file guardianship instructions with school administrators. gThey
need to know where to send a kid home,h he explains.
In the grimmest cases, kids whose parents
are arrested or deported are orphaned. According to a 2015 Urban Institute
report, an estimated 5,000 children in child-welfare custody had a detained or
deported parent.
Some advocates advise parents to leave
information not just about their childrenfs guardians, allergies and
medications, but also about their personal details. Whatfs your toddlerfs
favorite stuffed animal? What lullaby helps your baby sleep? gIf your mom was
just deported, having a caregiver know where to find your special blanket isnft
going to fix it, but it helps,h explains Fatima Hernandez, programs director at
the United Farm Workers Foundation, a nonprofit serving agricultural workers.
Others advocates offer tips on talking to older children about what to do if
they come home from school and find the house dark.
Those in favor of hard-line
immigration enforcement sometimes roll their eyes at media reports of families
broken up by deportation. gThe parents can just take the kids back with them,h Krikorian says. gNo families have to get broken up.h But
when pressed on specific cases, he sighs. gLook, when it does happen, itfs not
a great situation. Ifm not delighted to see it,h he says. gBut itfs not our
problem. These immigrants are adults; they have to be responsible for their
actions. Kids sometimes suffer from the bad decisions their parents make. If
Mom and Dad stop paying their mortgage and get evicted, the kids donft get to
stay in the house.h
The undocumented parents I talked to in
California were more conflicted. Sara, who asked that TIME not use her last
name because she is worried about being targeted, came to the U.S. from
Honduras in 2001. She has a 13-year-old son with a mild learning disability. He
is small and fragile-looking, with glasses and birdlike hands. Sara canft
imagine taking him back to Honduras, a country he has never even visited, and
especially to her hometown, San Pedro Sula, which has one of the worldfs
highest murder rates. Even if she felt she could keep him safe there, she says,
she doesnft know if his U.S. citizenship would prevent him from accessing
health care or other benefits once they arrived.
I asked Sara about Tip No. 3 on the CHIRLA
checklist—if she is arrested, who would she list as her sonfs guardian? She
considers the question for a long time, pressing her palms together as if in
prayer. I tell her Ifve heard of other families that have left young children
in the care of older ones. In Bakersfield, an 18-year-old woman is now the sole
guardian for her 9-year-old brother. In Queens, New York, two college-age siblings
are now the sole caregivers for their 15-year-old sister, who has a severe form
of autism. gI donft know,h Sara says finally. gWhat would you do?h
Luis Urrieta, 16, and his mother Rosa donft have a plan either. Rosa, who is undocumented and works as a pastry chef, came to the U.S. from Mexico nearly two decades ago. Luis, who is a U.S. citizen, has awoken in the night with a pounding heart after nightmares about Rosa being taken away. Wearing red mesh basketball shorts and a striped shirt, he struggles to describe the anxiety and instead lists all the reasons he needs his mother to stay around: she cooks dinner for him and encourages him and pays the bills. gShe is my whole life,h he says quietly. But then he raises his voice, as if to dispel the fear. Theyfll be safe, he says, because they live in San Francisco, a so-called sanctuary city where local law enforcement doesnft partner with ICE. In the days and weeks after our conversation, ICE arrested roughly 400 people across Northern California and in Los Angeles in a series of raids that included sanctuary cities. On March 6, the federal government sued California over its sanctuary-city laws.
A number of recent research papers have
reported that the prospect of losing onefs parent can inflict psychological
damage on a child. gThese kids are under constant, extreme levels of
psychological stress that other children donft have to endure,h says Zayas, whose academic research on the American-born
children of undocumented immigrants is included in his book Forgotten Citizens.
gIt affects the childfs educational performance, their developmental
trajectories, how they achieve things. It affects the entire neurobiology of a
child.h
A 2015 Urban Institute study found that
many children of detained or deported parents became depressed, showed signs of
deteriorating health and performed poorly in school. And a January 2017 study
by University of Michigan researchers found that such distress can manifest
physiologically in unborn children. Latino babies born in the 37 weeks after a
2008 federal immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, were 24% more likely to have
low birth weights than those born a year earlier. One common characteristic
shared by children of undocumented parents, Zayas
says, is ghypervigilance.h Without looking at a clock, an 8-year-old girl will
know exactly how long it takes her mother to go on a groceries run. gIf shefs
two minutes late, therefs extreme anxiety,h he says. Even very young kids, he
adds, are keenly aware of how quickly their parents could vanish.
The architecture of all this fear is not
incidental. Itfs the result of policy. The agents who pulled over Alejandro
were acting within the bounds of U.S. law. So the question surrounding his
arrest is not whether it was legitimate; itfs whether it was a good use of
resources. Why choose him, a family man with no criminal record, over any of
the 11 million other undocumented people in America?
Even operating full tilt, ICE has nowhere
near the manpower or money to enforce U.S. immigration laws against everyone in
the country illegally. Experts estimate that the agency has the capacity every
year to deport roughly 4% of all undocumented immigrants. So the real challenge
is to establish clear priorities about who should be at the top of the list. In
theory, all DHS employees, from ICE officers on the street to prosecutors in
immigration court, have the power— known as gprosecutorial discretionh—to
determine when and whether to enforce immigration laws. But in reality, those
decisions are shaped from the top. Presidents determine what immigration policy
will look like.
Both the Obama and George W. Bush Administrations assumed this responsibility. They directed DHS employees to use their prosecutorial discretion to prioritize the deportation of certain criminal groups. They also outlined clear factors like old age, U.S. military service or a lack of criminal record that might mitigate enforcement.
The Trump Administration has not issued
similar prerogatives. In January 2017, Trump signed an Executive Order calling for
the enforcement of immigration laws against gall removable aliens,h and in
February 2017, DHS rescinded all previous Administrationsf priorities and
restrictions. Then DHS Secretary John Kelly replaced them with new guidance so
broad that employees were effectively instructed to gprioritizeh the
deportation of all undocumented immigrants. The only listed exception were
those who qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a now uncertain
program shielding those who were brought to the U.S. as children.
gProsecutorial discretion shall not be
exercised in a manner that exempts or excludes a specified class or category of
aliens from enforcement of the immigration laws,h wrote Kelly in a memo to
staff. The Administration also eliminated Obama-era moratoriums on certain
types of enforcement, including whatfs known as gcollateral arrests,h which is
when ICE agents detain not only an intended target, but also anyone else
gdeportableh nearby.
Immigration hard-liners, like Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, have cheered the change. The new policy, they say,
restores the enforcement of U.S. immigration law gas written.h But critics
argue that this doesnft track. Congress has not given DHS more money or
enforcement officers, so there canft simply be more enforcement. The difference
is who is being enforced against. Despite the Presidentfs frequent talk of
grapists and murderers,h the most influential shift in 2017 was that ICE agents
arrested 146% more noncriminals, compared with the
year before. In 2016, 14% of the people whom ICE arrested had no criminal
record. In 2017, close to 26% were. gTherefs the sense that theyfre just going
after low-hanging fruit,h says Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a constitutional and immigration law professor
at Santa Clara University.
The effect is an implied war on all
undocumented immigrants. Itfs a move that unravels decades of state, federal
and local policies designed to establish a level of relative security among
immigrant communities, experts say. That security, in turn, encourages broad
social benefits—like people reporting crimes to police, rather than avoiding
all officers, or enrolling children in government health programs. Under Trump,
thatfs all up for grabs.
Take Amenul Hoque, for example. The Bangladeshi father of three, who
overstayed a visa in 2005, had lived in Newark, N.J., with his wife and three
kids for the past 14 years. In 2011, ICE officials granted Hoque
a temporary stay of removal, requiring that he check in regularly with ICE,
which he did. His next check-in was scheduled for March, according to local
news. But on Jan. 17, ICE agents showed up at the fried-chicken restaurant
where he works, detained him for nearly a month and then loaded him onto a
flight to Bangladesh. Hoquefs wife Rojina Akter, who is also undocumented,
is now in deportation proceedings as well.
This decision to create ga culture where
enforcement appears to happen randomly,h Gulasekaram
says, is not an accident. It has the effect of discouraging new immigrants from
coming to the U.S. and encouraging existing ones to leave. The Trump
Administration deported fewer immigrants last year largely because fewer people
were attempting to cross the border.
In a statement to TIME, Danielle Bennett,
an agency spokeswoman, said that gnational security threats, immigration
fugitives and illegal re-entrantsh remain priorities for deportation. The
agency has also said that it does not gunnecessarily disrupt the parental
rights of alien parents and legal guardians of minor children.h In its 2017
report, ICE also stated that 92% of its arrests in 2017 were criminals. Its
definition of criminal includes those with civil offenses, like non-DUI traffic
stops, and those whose only crimes are immigration-related.
Undocumented immigrants in communities
across the country are struggling to gauge the threat. Maria, who is now caring
for three U.S.-citizen children on her own, feels trapped. She can take her
kids back to a country where she has citizenship rights but where they have
none. Or she can stay in the U.S. and live in fear. Because shefs already here
illegally, she has no easy path to legal status. Trump uses terms like anchor
babies and chain migration to describe how families supposedly bring their
relatives into the country, but it doesnft actually work that way, says Laura
St. John, legal director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
gItfs a myth.h
St. John says Mariafs American-born
children canft petition DHS to give her legal status until the eldest turns 21.
Thatfs in 2036. Someone in Mariafs position would need to obtain a federal
waiver, a process that often takes up to 10 years and could require that she
return to Mexico to wait it out, St. John explains. Mariafs brother, a U.S.
citizen, could also petition for her, but that too would likely require Maria
to return to Mexico, for an even longer period of time. The State Department is
so backlogged that itfs currently processing visa requests for Mexican siblings
filed on Nov. 15, 1997. gTo people who practice immigration law, eanchor babiesf
and all that just sounds ridiculous,h says Erin Quinn, an attorney at the
Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco. gTherefs really no legal
mechanism for people like [Maria] to leave and come back legally. It just
doesnft exist.h
For now, Maria will stay in the U.S., pick
grapes and care for her children in the country of their birth. But when she
imagines raising her girls without their father, tears slide down her cheeks.
gItfs the worst thing that you can do to a family,h she says. Every day, when
Alejandro calls on FaceTime, Isabella, whofs 2½, lights up. gPapi?h she asks, reaching for Mariafs iPhone. A thousand
miles south, in Sonora, Mexico, Alejandro holds his screen close to his face. gPapi!h Isabella squeals. gI love you!h