To Be An American: My Parents Are Illegal

“I’m not an anchor baby.” Gabriela* was quick to clarify this from the start. Her parents, Francisco and Juana, are undocumented, illegal immigrants from Mexico. They came to the United States in 1992 and married in 1993. In 1994 they had Gabriela. “That’s not the idea at all.” Gabriela, a queer, Latina, first generation college student, is a sophomore at the University of Arizona. She just celebrated her 21^st birthday in October. That’s when her parents asked her to help sponsor their applications to obtain citizenship. But since we spoke in November, things have become more difficult for Gabriela and her family. “I didn’t realize how much different my life was going to be from theirs, because I was a citizen, just by being born in the United States.” That Brown Skin Gabriela’s parents grew up in Mexico. Her mother, Juana, was born into poverty in Guamuchil, in the state of Sinaloa. Her father, Francisco, was born into more stable economic circumstances in the city of Obregon, in the state of Sonora. The two met in Mazatlan. Years later, they obtained travel visas to follow Francisco's parents to the United States. Gabriela notes that they arrived legally. But eventually their visas expired. “So they were stuck. They were like, ‘Okay, well I guess we can’t go back.’” They’ve been here ever since. Gabriela now has two younger brothers, Alejandro and Pedro. The family has enjoyed a comfortable life. Francisco has his own business as a barber, and at one point he owned two shops. They had health insurance. They traveled on family vacations. They even drove an Escalade. “My story, I feel like, is very different from others’,” she explains, referring to other families in Phoenix, Arizona’s Latino community. “I was enrolled in a private Christian school, and I had a really great education, all while they were undocumented. Growing up, I was never really aware that my parents were undocumented. Or…I knew that they were, and it just didn’t—it didn’t really matter to me.” This was a luxury that many others in Gabriela’s community did not possess. Some of Francisco’s regular clients at the barbershop were police officers tasked with enforcing Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 law. Passed in 2010, the law makes it a misdemeanor for anyone to travel without proper documentation of legal status. During any routine traffic stop, arrest or detention where an official has “reasonable suspicion” that someone is in the United States illegally, they check for documentation. If someone doesn’t have the right papers, Customs and Border Patrol takes them into custody, where they face the possibility of being deported. Six years after SB 1070’s passing in 2010, the law has triggered fewer deportations than expected. But as Perla Trevizo of the Arizona Daily Star explains, it has eroded community trust in law enforcement. And critics of the law still argue that it encourages racial profiling. “That was really rough,” Gabriela recalls. When the law first passed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were stationed at checkpoints on high-traffic roads between Arizona and neighboring states like Utah and California, where the family took frequent road trips. Gabriela’s mom grew concerned for their safety. “My mom was just like, ‘well, what if I get caught? Them I’m going to get deported.’” The mundanity of everyday activities was suddenly replaced with a constant fear of being taken away from family, from home. “Even things like going to the grocery store. You just never knew…Things like that started to come up that we didn’t ever really question [before], which was scary for me.” As a child, it wasn’t easy for Gabriela to comprehend. “I was just so confused. I was like ‘but wait, I don’t get it. We’ve always been fine. Why would it change now?’ I was old enough to be like, ‘you guys pay your taxes, you know, the IRS—you do all of that, you pay bills, you have never had a criminal record. Like, why would that matter? Couldn’t they just be like, ‘well, you’ve done a good job so far’? I remember watching on the news, it was on every day. Just raids happening. And like, what if that happened to my dad?” But Francisco wasn’t worried. The police who frequented his shop confirmed that they did, in fact, racially profile people while enforcing SB 1070. People that didn’t look like him. “My dad would come back with all of these stories—still to this day, he does—of like, who they’re looking for. And the type of people that they want to arrest. That’s the only reason that I know that we had that on our side. Other people didn’t have that. They were literally afraid to leave their house.” She is referring to her family’s fair skin. “I think of my family as sort of this anomaly. Because, we pass. We don’t necessarily look like the rest of the Latino community here in Phoenix. I can look, you know, white enough for people when they want me to be. And that’s how it was for my family.” Francisco’s police clientele talked casually to him about the kinds of people they deemed “reasonably suspicious,” not knowing that he himself is undocumented, and therefore eligible for deportation. “You know, you talk to your stylist, you know your barber, whatever. He would hear the most racist jokes [from] these police officers. No, they’re not going to go after people like [my dad],” she explains. “They’re going to go after people that look like they fit that stereotypical, like, brown skin, driving a beat up truck.” Finding a Voice Before SB1070, Gabriela didn’t fully understand what her parents’ legal status meant. “That’s when [the topic of immigration] became close to me. Because that’s when I was like, oh, my parents are undocumented, therefore they could be deported. And what would that look like for our family?” “That was a starting point for all of the work that I do now.” Gabriela’s family was dropped from their health insurance after her youngest brother, Alejandro, was diagnosed with autism at age nine. Because they are undocumented, they cannot enroll in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). “Which is something that I didn’t know,” she explains. She needed a routine physical exam, so she went to Planned Parenthood, which provides health care to individuals with or without health insurance. That’s when she started volunteering for them. “That’s just some of the things that people don’t understand. Something as simple as a social security number, or not being able to get health insurance because you’re undocumented, that affects our life so much. It just makes it a little bit harder to live, you know. And these are things that citizens, people that have the privilege of being a citizen in the United States don’t realize. There’s this sort of, like ‘other-ing’ of us, when we’re just completely like them. I’ve met some people that are like, ‘your parents are undocumented? Oh, well I would have never guessed that.’ And it’s true. There are some things that just—they don’t take note of until we tell them. We’re not that different.” Today, she trains volunteers, attends conferences, and educates her peers to take action to improve health care for men and women. The Hard Part When I interviewed Gabriela, she told me that after turning 21 she was eligible to “vouch” for her parents to initiate the process for them to apply for citizenship. “My parents are doing whatever it takes to go ahead and start this process. Because they’ve been—they haven’t set foot in Mexico in over 20 years.” Because they are undocumented in the United States, Gabriela’s parents cannot leave the country. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to return, and she and her two younger brothers would be left alone. The gravity of their position became clear when Gabriela was a senior in high school, and her aunt living in Mexico was diagnosed with lung cancer. Over time the cancer metastasized. “The thought came to me months ago. Like, my aunt could potentially die, and my mom won’t be able to go to the funeral. And that made me so angry. And so, we just sat and watched my aunt get more and more sick. And she passed away two weeks ago.” Gabriela’s family wanted her to represent them at her aunt’s funeral, but she could not attend. “I didn’t ever think this was going to happen to our family, to where my mom literally had to watch her sister die, thousands of miles apart. And she couldn’t do a single thing. She couldn’t budge.” Experiences like this motivate Gabriela’s activism. “This should never happen. Families deserve to be together,” she says. “And when health issues come up, whatever it may be, if a family needs to be together, regardless of what your status is, these lines that we’ve socially constructed to keep people apart unless you have these papers to prove that you belong on that ground—to me that’s just ridiculous. That shouldn’t apply in those instances. After I found out about it, my aunt passing away, I was just like, I need to do something about it. This is part of my story.” After speaking with their lawyers, Gabriela’s parents were told that, although she is a U.S. citizen, she is not eligible to sponsor their path to citizenship as they’d hoped. “They wanted [an] aunt to do it, but she refuses, and we don’t know why. My grandmother doesn’t want to do it either, and those are the only people who are citizens in our family. So my parents are stuck right now.” Gabriela guesses that in order for her parents’ lawyer to begin their application process for citizenship, they’d need around $6,000. They can’t afford it. But she hasn’t given up yet. “More than ever, I’m just ready to be an advocate for [immigration reform],” she tells me. “Because my family lives it."   * Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.