"Lupita was stopped in traffic. They have her at the jail. They said she has to speak to immigration tomorrow."
They have already deported her son, Cristian. That happened around the holidays two years ago. She has never met her first grandson, born in Mexico because her son's girlfriend was not going to have the baby without him and returned before the birth.
"We need to call the lawyer. Waiting does NOT help. We have to find out where she is being held. Is it an ICE county? Should we gather the troops? Get all the petitions going pleading her case? It almost worked with Cristian. We have to find out if they plan to move her to an immigration facility. If she should ask for voluntary or involuntary deportation..."
All of the wheels started moving, almost involuntarily. Weird knowledge and contacts that have been lying below the surface...dormant, waiting for it to happen again so they could prove they weren't just eating a hole in my stomach, they were willing to dig their way out. I thought about sitting across from Cristian's lawyer two years ago, when he said it was too late. Or three years before that standing less than a mile off the border, watching the helicopter carry a dehydrated man into the sky while Border Patrol kicked his friend's legs apart on the ground, hoping that Cristian had made it back across again. The buses. The nondescript buses that carried long lines of men to the no man's land between the U.S. and Mexico border in Tijuana. The men at Casa, trying to be nice to me but suddenly ranting at me in English about all the PINCHE MOTHER FUCKING PROBLEMS WITH YOUR STUPID MIGRA HUNTING DOWN FAMILY PEOPLE INSTEAD OF CRIMINALS. I HAVE BEEN THERE TWENTY YEARS. MY WIFE AND KIDS ARE THERE. MY ASS IS GOING BACK ACROSS TOMORROW. Sitting on the other side of glass speaking to Alejandro on a telephone while children cried and rubbed on the glass that separated them from their fathers. The sound the shackles made when all of the men in the Streamline trial stood up after entering pleas in group responses of 'sí' or 'no' or 'face a fucking felony'. Sitting in a parking lot in the middle of the night hiding from Border Patrol while 4th of July fireworks covered the sky, waiting for the coyotes to meet my passenger. Or passengers.
"If they keep her, we have to get money to her commissary account. It's cold in those detention centers, she will need money to buy overpriced clothes from the commissary to keep her warm. And buy phone cards....she has to be able to communicate with her family...."
Her family. An elementary aged son that is an American citizen. A nineteen year old daughter that was so proud to receive papers through Deferred Action and immediately began enrolling in college. Another daughter in her early twenties that still doesn't have papers, but comes with Lupita to clean houses, helping from her wheel chair, legs forever inoperable.
"No matter what happens, if she gets released tomorrow, if they hold her three days, if they....if they deport her, we have to do the things we can do to make this more comfortable for her...."
Then I thought of the deportation bag. I saw it when Alejandro was locked up in the detention center three years ago. They never really tell you when someone will be deported. Even if you're family. They won't even tell you where they will be deported to. Tijuana? Reynosa? Laredo? They can be dropped off anywhere, hundreds of miles from wherever they know anyone in Mexico, without money, and often at night, to fend for themselves and get back to a place where they know someone. Some of them know no one, having been brought as children to the United States. They are completely reliant on family members still in the U.S. to make random phone calls to Mexico City, Oaxaca, any part of the Republic...hey, my kid, you met him when he was three...well, he's is twenty-two now and stuck at the border....can you help? He's big now but man, he's a child in Mexico.... I remember the buses pulling up in the middle of the night at Alejandro's deportation center...the bad buses, the ones that take them away. It was as if they knew what they were doing was so disgusting that the sun should not see it.
"I remember those flat trees in the desert...." Irena told me one day after school, in private.
"I still have the scars on my back from where they tried to take me under a barbed wire fence..."
We were sitting in a well respected American high school. She was my student.
"I go back and forth..." another told me, "but my mom can't. She doesn't have papers."
"I don't see the point of any of this crap." a third told me.
"Everyone tells me that I need to go to college, but I know I can't because I don't have papers. What the fuck is the point of graduating from high school? You know us Mexicans, can't even play 'Uno' because we only want the green card."
And about that bag. It is a horrible thing. When families finally realize that there is nothing that will stop the deportation, they bring a bag to the center and leave it there for whenever the inevitable happens so that their loved one will not be dropped, empty handed, in an unknown area in the middle of the night. You see people sitting in cars in the parking lot, afraid to come inside because they don't have papers, but still willing to take the ride and sit outside for hours. The officers search the bag when you bring it to the center. No money allowed, not even Mexican pesos. No phone cards, U.S. based or Mexican cards, or a fucking Timbuktu card if you felt like dropping that in there. No letters, phone numbers, addresses. No belts. No Mexican ID cards. Pants and t-shirts, that 's it. No recuerdos, things to remember any one by or things that might help or comfort you. No fucking anything.
That's when I knew I was about to cry. I hate that fucking bag. If she is deported, her young American son could easily be placed in foster care. He could visit her in Mexico when he's older, on his American passport with a Mexican visa stamped in it. Her daughters would have to make a choice between returning permanently to Mexico or never seeing their mother again.
"Angel, tengo que hablar con Angel....." I remember my friend whispering into the phone in the middle of the night while Migra trucks whizzed by and fireworks lit up the sky.
No comments:
Post a Comment