'This is a story about how we came to understand and experience immigration law — what it’s like to feel the awful weight of the state in your daily life, pressing suddenly on the most intimate of choices.' DebChasman writes
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Courtesy Deborah Chasman Twenty years ago, on April 13, 2001, my husband crossed the Mexican border into California with a few other Brazilians and a Mexican smuggler. It was Good Friday. In the dark, mountainous desert, he felt thorns brush his skin. He worried that with one misstep he would fall in a crevice and die there.
Discretionary leniency characterized the law’s enforcement in its first years. Indeed, in the late 1990s, broad immigration reform seemed possible, as even business leaders and Republican elites called for open borders on the grounds that the U.S. needed immigrant workers. September 11 changed all that, as immigrants were recast as national security threats. My husband and I learned firsthand that the crackdown in enforcement would be swift and brutal.
In 2003, we married in a sanctuary city that grants marriage licenses regardless of status. We had a daughter the next year. Anyone I dared tell about our situation expressed disbelief: But you’re married! they’d say. We consulted several more lawyers; they all felt that our case was too hard. That year, the Department of Homeland Security had released a ten-year strategy document, Endgame, with the goal of 100 percent “removal of all removable aliens.
The catch was that the definition of extreme hardship specifically precludes the obvious: that family separation, or leaving the life you’ve always known, creates hardship.“If you had a terminal illness, you might have a chance,” she said. Meanwhile, in 2005, President George W. Bush was pushing hard for comprehensive immigration reform. He supported a bipartisan bill, the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, sponsored by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy, that would have given millions of immigrants, my husband included, a path to citizenship.
We lived with the threat of deportation hanging over our heads for ten years. It never came. The state denied us any path forward but apparently felt no urgency to remove my husband. But I felt its presence all around us. It was impossible to experience family life without that stigma. Meanwhile, across the room, another agent was raising his voice. “Your lawyer lied to you,” he shouted. A young Brazilian woman wept while her American husband tried to comfort her. Unscrupulous lawyers can take your fees and let you exit the country with the belief that everything will be okay, all while knowing that it’s unlikely you’ll be back to complain. As we left, the couple sat crumpled in the corner of the waiting room.
I had to request my own medical records and our daughter’s school records. I asked for letters from college friends, colleagues, employers, and therapists. We included family photographs and drawings by our daughter. The private details of our lives, especially the worst moments of mine, were packaged up for a file that would last forever at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services . But I couldn’t stop digging up more.
The fact remains that even within more lenient processing guidelines, the fates of families depend on whether their particular story satisfies the whims of the state . As the most recent USCIS guidelines explain, extreme hardship is “not expressly defined” and is subject to change: If an undocumented immigrant has left their U.S. family to see a sick family member and then returns across the border, no arguments about hardship will be considered. Not even a remote path for legal status exists.
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