The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

I’ve heard them call us “undocumented workers” as a euphemism, as if there was something uncouth about being just an undocumented person standing with your hands clasped together or at your sides. I almost wish they’d called us something rude like “crazy fuckin’ Mexicans” because that’s acknowledging something about us beyond our usefulness—we’re crazy, we’re Mexican, we’re clearly unwanted!—but to describe all of us, men, women, children, locally Instagram-famous teens, queer puppeteers, all of us, as workers in order to make us palatable, my god. We were brown bodies made to labor, faces pixelated.

I think every immigrant in this country knows that you can eat English and digest it so well that you shit it out, and to some people, you will still not speak English.

I crossed the desert four times to see my children.” The border was more porous at the time, and his children were in Mexico, so he headed home during the New York winter. He still needed a coyote for the crossing. At night in the desert it got so cold, he thought his skin would shatter like hard candy. During the day it was so hot, he thought demons had possessed him. He carried with him four gallons of water and a backpack with food. He wore construction boots, and his feet were covered in blisters. Once, he stayed behind with some people who’d gotten sick and the coyote just left them. “The coyotes are always drugged and drunk because they’re afraid to do what they do sober,” Julián explains. They survived by eating cans of peppers and drinking puddles. Two of them died. They threw up something green, then collapsed. He tried to help the living, but also didn’t want to join the dead, so he did what he had to do.

The storm caused $62 billion in damages in the United States, killed 125 people, and left 7.5 million people without power. The city had not prepared for that kind of devastation and was slow to provide aid. Day laborers were among the first people on the ground to help. “In times of crisis, day laborers are often the first responders,” one labor organizer told me.

Can we imagine that he was capable of kindness, even as he was drinking? That he was capable of courage, even as he was wounded? What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?

The first responders were firemen and EMT workers. The second responders were undocumented immigrants. Lucero Gómez is a social worker who runs informal group therapy sessions with mostly undocumented, all-Latinx former Ground Zero cleanup workers. Lucero tells me that almost immediately after 9/11, undocumented immigrants started getting phone calls “from a very underground kind of network of people who are undocumented and need work. They called at night. They said, ‘Tomorrow there is work, come work.’ ” The city hired contractors—Americans, Anglo, white. The contractors hired subcontractors, many of them bilingual Latinx people with the golden ticket of American citizenship who could present themselves as friendly faces to other immigrants—“We look like you! We speak like you!”—and would make the eventual abuses unexpected.

Contractors have mastered a plantation model in their line of work, exploiting whatever sense of community that might exist among Latinx people. The workers think there are people along the chain of command who are watching out for them, but melanin and accents are ineffective binding substances.

September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the target of hate crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia. The Secure Communities program would require local police to share information with Homeland Security. Immigration detention centers began to be managed by private prison groups. And New York State, as well as most other states, axed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

He collapses onto me to cry into my neck. I’m little, but he does. Collapse, I mean. My father the dictator, heaving full-throated sobs. He hands me a letter. The letter says, in English, that Governor George Pataki had suspended driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants as part of a national security measure. My father had just lost his job as a taxi driver. He had also lost his state ID. Over the next two decades, he’d lose many more things,

You learn those numbers young. The jet-fuel smell thick in the air, the flame and smoke surrounding you, you can only get to 011 and that’s enough to make you foreign, to make you other, to make you Mexican. You take out your wallet and put an ID between your teeth so they can find you when it all collapses. Your flesh may burn but your teeth will remain and the ID will be there. It’s a fake ID. Nobody will ever know you died. Nobody will ever know you lived.

Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches.

So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there’s a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others—like those who are in internment camps right now—and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?

ICE stops Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains to ask travelers for proof of citizenship. The #MeToo movement erupts. We buy special glasses for the first solar eclipse since 1918. (I stare directly into the sun because I’m drawn to self-harm.) White nationalists and neo-Nazis terrorize Charlottesville, Virginia, with motherfucking tiki torches and run a car into a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer, killing her. Trump says there were “some very fine people on both sides.” My father starts disappearing on weekends, supposedly to go watch volleyball games at a local park, and my mom is too tired to deal, until he doesn’t come home one weekend, and she and my brother call asking me to intervene.

My mother took me aside and asked me who the first man on the moon was. Neil Armstrong, I told her. Now name the second man on the moon. I don’t know, I said. Nobody does, she said. If you’re not number one, you’re nothing.

Salome knows the naturalist’s treatment didn’t cure him, but she thinks it gave him a better quality of life during his final three months. “We put faith in the natural,” Salome says. “We had to. Some people choose between the medical and the natural, but we didn’t have the funds for the medical. We could not even go to the hospital for his convulsions. So we chose the natural.”

I come back to Flint almost a year later, after Governor Rick Snyder announces that the state of Michigan will stop providing free water to Flint residents because lead levels have not exceeded federal limits in two years, even though they’ve replaced only sixty-two hundred pipes affected by lead and have about twelve thousand to go. In addition to the high water bills they have to pay to the city that poisoned them, they will now have to buy their own clean water.

Salma has a son with autism, Felipe, who is twenty-three years old now. He was eligible for DACA but she didn’t sign him up out of fear that his information was going to be used against him. He doesn’t speak Spanish, and she lives in fear that he’ll be deported. What would he do in Mexico? “People over there would be cruel with kids like him,” she says.

Salma has a date at immigration court because an ICE officer followed her around looking for a reason to arrest her. She said she protested and it was fruitless. He took her to a detention center. She was detained for a month, alongside women with theft and drug charges, all of whom complained that they thought she had been unfairly detained. She didn’t have a lawyer then and she doesn’t have a lawyer now. No one has wanted to take on her case. She’s making phone calls. She begins to cry and admits she doesn’t have much hope but doesn’t know what will happen to her son. “I don’t know what’s going to happen at my court date. I don’t know what god wants.” But I know what god wants. God wants to see her in the motherfucking gown, unrepentant, with no captain.

when she was eleven, and moved to Flint after he bought a house there on eBay in 2009. She is a single mom. She had a baby, Lidia, when she was twenty-one. During her pregnancy, which was during the water crisis, doctors responded to any health concerns she had by telling her to drink more water. “I would tell them I had fever and vomiting and they kept saying I needed to drink more water, everything was me needing to lay off the Coke and drink more water; it was a constant dismissal. But I didn’t have money for anything other than tap water so that’s what I drank.”

Ivy remembers, in vivid detail, the day she realized the water was dirty. “I remember taking a shower one day, and when I ran my hand over my skin there was a sticky layer all over my body that hadn’t washed off. It was like jelly. I felt dirty. My neighbor brought a water jug to our house wanting to know if our water was like hers. It was yellow with some brown film in it. Yet we got letters from the city saying it was fine, that they were taking care of it. So what can you do?” Ivy developed hives and rashes, for which she was prescribed steroids while she was pregnant. The doctors never performed any tests to determine the origin of the skin irritations. Then her baby girl was born. Over time, Ivy noticed the baby did not react to her or to motion, crying constantly and piercingly as if she was in tremendous fear, and when she took her to the doctor, he told her they’d just have to wait and see. “They did the exam and said we were going to have to give it a couple of months. A waiting game.” The doctor waited four months before determining the baby was blind from the lead poisoning.

“Her first seizure was when she was three months old. I always put her in her own bed at night, but for some reason, on this one particular night I brought her over to sleep with me, and all of a sudden I saw her shaking violently in a terrifying way. I picked her up, screaming, and ran her to my father. I have never felt such regret or guilt. They say breastfeeding is the safest, best thing you can do for your child, but it was after the fact that they said that if you have lead in your body and you breastfeed, you pass it on. When I heard that, my heart just dropped. I don’t know if it happened when she was in my womb or after. If she has any delays or any problems down the line, I couldn’t begin to apologize to her enough. I feel so much guilt.”

What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity.

I write down a list of rules for the boys. I write them a card. I set up the password to their computer. It is studyhard. I tell them that school got me out, that it can get them out. Out. Out of what? The ghetto? I grew up poorer than I remember. But I grew up with two parents. I grew up with nightmares but they are living through nightmares.

There are no clowns in fields with machetes in America. There are white moms who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta’s mom will be deported too. There are no clowns in fields with machetes, but there are ICE officers who pose as nice people trying to buy a piñata off the Internet, meet you in a parking lot, and detain you. If we get good grades, will you take us to New York City? Is Connecticut near Cleveland? What’s the best college in the whole country? I’m going to go to Harvard. I’ll become an immigration lawyer, like Peter, so nobody’s dad will ever be taken away again.

Leonel is a forty-five-year-old Ecuadorian man holed up in a Methodist church off the Yale campus in defiance of ICE, which considers him a fugitive. He is in sanctuary. In 2007, a wrong turn during a family trip landed him in Canada and ICE took notice of him. A judge ordered his removal in 2009, but he managed to keep his head down and stay under the radar. In 2016, he was given a stay on the removal order as long as he checked in every six months. But under the current administration, the authorities have all but stopped granting stays, so in July 2017 he was ordered to leave within the month. Just like Javier. The day of his scheduled deportation, he claimed sanctuary in the church, a space that Immigration and Customs officers do not enter. He has been living in the church for over three months.

Welcoming an undocumented immigrant with a deportation order into a church has to be done carefully so it cannot be misconstrued as harboring a fugitive. As a first step, the church makes clear to ICE that they are acting within their capacity as a sanctuary space in accordance with their beliefs as followers of Jesus Christ. They send a fax to ICE headquarters announcing that the immigrant is there once he or she arrives so nobody can claim they are “hiding” them. All parties are aware of the immigrant’s whereabouts. They’re wearing ankle monitors given to them by the Florida private company GEO Group. Sanctuary works because ICE has a policy against forcing their way into places of worship. Violating that policy requires special permission from ICE headquarters, but so far that hasn’t happened, and one immigration lawyer told me he thinks that if it did happen, “all hell would break loose.” It would certainly be bad PR. The image of armed men in uniform forcing their way inside a church door being physically blocked by priests, rabbis, or imams is dramatic to think about, and although it hasn’t happened, it feels imminent. The activists and religious leaders involved in the sanctuary movement think it’s enough of a possibility that they have a plan for it. If ICE tries to force their way in, members of the congregation would rush to the church and try to block the door with their bodies.

In the United States, the tradition of immigrants claiming sanctuary in churches dates back to the 1980s, when a network of churches took in nearly five hundred thousand refugees fleeing the death squads in Central America. An underground railroad of sorts moved people through Mexico to more than five hundred places of worship across the country. After sending in undercover informants to infiltrate the movement, the federal government charged two Roman Catholic priests, a nun, and a Protestant minister with conspiracy to smuggle aliens, and they faced jail time of up to twenty-five years. They got probation instead. But the tradition of sanctuary is even more ancient than that. In the Old Testament, Mosaic law determines that some cities should be set aside as “cities of refuge,” where an individual who accidentally killed someone could be protected from prosecution. Saint Paul taught that any stranger who asked for help could be an angel undercover, and medieval churches would establish a range outside their walls within which refugees could not be arrested. There was an ancient Greek belief that someone turning away a supplicant ran the risk of turning away Zeus himself.

Leonel is in the middle of telling his family about the South African photographer Kevin Carter and the picture he took of a large vulture approaching an emaciated toddler during the Sudanese famine. He scared the bird away but did not touch the child. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. A few months later, Carter committed suicide. “That photo cost him his life,” says Leonel. This anecdote comes up naturally during a discussion of starving children, which is part of a larger discussion of how fortunate we are in relation to the people all over the world who really do suffer. It’s not hard to see why Leonel is intrigued by Kevin Carter. He doesn’t understand how someone could visit a tragedy but not actively work to alleviate the suffering they witnessed. He doesn’t understand how people could choose to watch a good man waste away in god’s own house while the seasons continue their course and the church empties out of family each night, leaving him alone, with his thoughts, in the darkness. I don’t say anything.

I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an “unjust law” as being “out of harmony with the moral law.” And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?

The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them.