The Making of a Dream Read online

  Later, Josh sat her down. She needed to tell her story again, but with more emotion.

  If she needed to cry while telling it, she should cry, he and others gently suggested, because if she wanted to convince US senators, she would have to touch their hearts. Then Marie did cry, in anger and frustration. Why did she need to show those officials weakness? Josh probably saw her as some petulant teen, she figured. But when she allowed herself to imagine losing her country, her friends, her life, her heart started beating so fast she could barely breathe. Reciting what was happening to her family as if it were happening to a stranger was the only way she could get through it. That’s why she did it in such a flat matter-of-fact tone. That’s why she forced herself to sound more like a robot than a high school senior.

  That night Marie couldn’t sleep as she wondered how on earth she would get up the next day and speak in front of hundreds of people. Later, after practicing with Josh, more interviews and a speech to immigrant advocates, she donned a royal blue cap and gown she planned to wear at her high school graduation the following month and spoke at a mock version of graduation as the honorary “valedictorian.” It was all part of an action Josh had helped the Center for Community Change organize on the US Capitol grounds.4 There she met other burgeoning leaders, like Walter Barrientos, a young Guatemalan from New York, who was already recognized among the small group of young, undocumented activists in cities like Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. She was amazed to meet teens from Bangladesh and Trinidad, even Germany, all without immigration status. They sang the national anthem. One student read Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” whose opening lines seemed prescient more than fifty years after he penned them.

  But few apart from Marie were willing to give their names or speak about their own cases. They were still mostly flying under the federal radar, wanting to participate but terrified of the backlash they might draw against themselves and their families.

  Josh helped write her speech. “Like any normal kid, I went through the daily routine of school and extracurricular activities. . . . I’ve worked hard to become the person I am, with good grades, athletics, Christian service, and other community involvement. . . . I was even honored by being named to the homecoming court of 2003,” she told the crowd of reporters. “What makes me angry is that our nation’s immigration laws don’t take any of that into account. The DREAM Act would change that. It would give 65,000 young people like me the opportunity to prove we can give back to our communities, communities like mine that have been incredibly supportive.”5

  Even as Marie begged the audience to recognize her ties to Missouri, she felt torn, adding “Even if the DREAM Act passes in time for me to stay, I am faced with the difficult fact that my parents would have to leave. They have been my support through my whole life.”

  The older advocates kept emphasizing that she and the others had come to the United States through no fault of their own. But that clearly laid blame on someone else: her parents. She thought of the long hours her parents had put in at the restaurant and her father’s terror at opening the envelope of white powder while working for the governor. She thought of how frustrated he now was at home, unable to find work because of his notoriety. It was true: she wouldn’t even be in Missouri if it weren’t for them, wouldn’t have her friends, wouldn’t have lived in the small brick house on the leafy street that always seemed to her out of a picture book. How could she fault them or even insinuate they were guilty of some crime?

  She could because that was what was needed to win reprieve from deportation. She was a “Show Me State” girl, and she wanted to remain one. And if she could convince officials to exercise discretion in her case, she could set a precedent for thousands of other teens. Still, she felt as though she was betraying those she loved most.

  On that trip and subsequent ones, Marie told her story again and again. At one such meeting, a senator suggested, perhaps only half joking, that she was already sixteen and ought to marry to get her green card.

  Marie looked the man in the eye. “Do you have a daughter, sir?” she asked.

  Another senator threatened to call immigration officials and have Marie deported from his office, not realizing that it was precisely because the government had already requested her deportation that she was brave enough to be there.

  Marie returned from Washington with a newfound understanding that she was not alone. There were thousands of teens like her. That helped somewhat as she watched her friends go off to college in the fall while she devoted her time to her family’s deportation case. And despite everything, Marie was in awe. If Uncle Sam didn’t throw her out, she vowed, someday she’d return to Washington, not to defend her family but to work for the US government, which simultaneously terrified and captivated her.

  IT TOOK MONTHS for staffers to resolve the details of the DREAM Act bill. Lawmakers received hundreds of calls from well-organized opposition for every one call of support for the bill. Even immigrant advocates were split: if they helped only the DREAMers or the field workers, what about everyone else?

  By the time the bill’s supporters reached an agreement on the wording around barring students from receiving federal financial aid, opponents had built enough opposition that Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee refused to bring the bill to the floor. Even if he had, it would have had an even tougher road through the Republican-led House. The DREAM Act wouldn’t make it out of committee again as a stand-alone bill for the rest of the decade.

  With the failure of the DREAM Act, Marie refocused her efforts in Missouri and doubled down on her own case. By now she had come to the attention of many of the nation’s top immigrant advocates. Marie embodied everything they were looking for: positive energy, academic achievement, a churchgoing family, and a willingness to speak up in that soft midwestern twang that somehow seemed to make lawmakers in Washington stop and listen.

  Immigrant rights leaders came up with a national campaign: “We Are Marie.” In the pre–social media age, local groups created a listserv around her case, one of the first real national immigrant advocacy online media campaigns. And they encouraged Marie to keep a public blog, a precursor of the Facebook posts that would later transmit the DREAMers’ stories nationwide.

  THE FIGHT TO SAVE MARIE from deportation heralded a quiet revolution among advocates. It was beginning to dawn on them what they had in their corner: young, American-raised immigrants like Marie, whom the rest of the country could more easily relate to than their less assimilated relatives. But it was also becoming clearer what they lacked. They needed more than caravans, big demonstrations, and marches. They needed sustained pressure from outside Washington. Yet, unlike the 1960s civil rights movement, which had relied on historic institutions such as black churches as bases for organizing across the South, or labor groups, which had union halls, undocumented immigrants had few central hubs where they could meet. The very nature of their immigration status made many of them wary of, or ineligible to join, established organizations and fearful of publicly associating with any group particularly dedicated to their issues. They needed a safe physical space before they could create a political one. They needed a ground game.

  Strong immigrant rights coalitions existed in the big cities, but Cecilia Muñoz, an outspoken policy advocate for the National Council of La Raza, began to push other Washington advocates to bring in the community organizers. Yes, it was messy, but it was essential.

  Cecilia, who would later serve in the Obama White House,* and others realized that the parts of the country where grassroots immigrant networks were most needed were precisely where such coalitions were weakest. Los Angeles immigrant groups were important in mobilizing and fighting for reform, for example. Yet to get anything passed in Congress, they would need grassroots pressure in states with burgeoning immigrant hubs and in swing states, such as Wisconsin and Tennessee, and Florida. As Cecilia pushed her fellow immigration advocates to look beyond Washington, Deepak Bharg
ava, the head of the Center for Community Change, began reaching out to nonprofits in those areas, helping provide training to young immigrants to organize around local issues like college tuition.* Marie’s case to remain in the United States became one of its first national immigration campaigns.

  The Center’s support was important for the development of the immigrant rights movement, but so many members of this new immigrant network’s local members were scrappy local advocacy groups barely getting by just attending to the daily needs of their clients. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day or enough money for the big-picture work. Into this void stepped New York philanthropists Taryn Higashi and Geri Mannion, who in 2003 had begun to sow the financial seeds for what would eventually become a national youth-led immigrant network. Taryn worked in the Ford Foundation’s human rights division, which oversaw its immigration grants. Following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the foundation had provided money to groups defending due process for immigrants, particularly Muslims and Arabs at risk of being rounded up and deported as potential terrorism suspects. Geri worked at the Carnegie Foundation, which had a long history of backing efforts to integrate immigrants into American ways of life.

  The two women saw how the 9/11 attacks had silenced even those immigrants living in the country legally. But the big foundations weren’t set up to reach down to small grassroots organizations and help them develop a base willing to speak out. They needed intermediaries. Taryn and Geri set up the Four Freedoms Fund, a grant-making conduit, which carefully chose a handful of regional groups around the country to seed. The foundations had started in traditional immigrant hubs like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, and later Boston, and they added newer immigrant communities in states such as Tennessee, Oregon, Washington, and Nebraska. These nonprofits in turn could funnel the money to even smaller initiatives, spreading the roots of the modern immigration rights movement.

  It was out of these roots that the Florida Immigrant Coalition sprouted as one of the crucial DREAMer incubators. Founded in 1998 and officially incorporated six years later, the statewide coalition was the brainchild of Miami-based immigration attorney Cheryl Little. She had opened a local legal advocacy center in 1996 that was now occupied morning to night with Haitians, Cubans, Central and South Americans, some legal, some not, all in need. The Four Freedoms Fund provided start-up money for a spin-off organizing group while the CCC lent training. And in 2004, the Florida Immigrant Coalition stepped out for its first big fight: in-state tuition for undocumented students. California and Texas had been charging their high school graduates matriculating at state universities the same tuition, regardless of immigration status, since 2001. Half a dozen more states had since passed similar legislation. It seemed natural that Florida, another immigrant-heavy state, would join them. A young dynamic Cuban American state lawmaker from South Florida named Marco Rubio championed the bill in the Tallahassee legislature. Rubio’s mentor, Governor Jeb Bush, threw his support behind the effort as well. The fledgling Florida Immigrant Coalition sent university students to the state capital to offer personal testimonials.

  In the end, Florida’s Northern lawmakers balked, and the bill didn’t pass. But the Florida Immigrant Coalition marked the in-state campaign as a breakthrough. Although the coalition hadn’t won, the students had left an impression and an opening. And Cheryl and the other advocates had glimpsed what Josh Bernstein and grassroots groups around the country were beginning to see as well: the moral authority these young immigrant students wielded before lawmakers was unmatched.

  AT THE TIME of the first in-state tuition debate in Florida, Felipe was a junior in high school and just beginning to think about college. It didn’t occur to him that he might have to pay roughly triple the tuition rate of his classmates because of his immigration status. Felipe and his sister’s family lived in a blue-and-white apartment complex, just over the line north of Miami in Broward County. Carolina was helping with her husband’s business selling computer parts to Brazil and across Latin America. The family was doing better financially, but at night the couple increasingly argued. Felipe felt responsible, that his presence had placed undue stress on the union.

  One morning, as he walked to school, a classmate from a neighboring apartment drove past and offered him a ride. Her name was Laura Figueroa. She was the daughter of immigrants, and her mother worked long hours. Like Felipe, she was often on her own. They quickly became confidants. Laura began to spend the weekends with Felipe’s family while her mother worked, her presence a welcome distraction from the tensions at home.

  Both teens found escape at Laura’s church, an evangelical congregation and a far cry from the formal Catholic services Felipe had attended as a kid. The G12, as the church was known, was built around a constantly expanding set of twelve-person “cells,” all connecting back to its founders, the Columbian couple Cesar and Claudia Castellanos, whose daughter Lorena led the church’s Christian indie pop band, Soulfire Revolution. The G12 sermons were almost terrifying at times, with lights and video projections. It was almost like attending a rave. It was unlike anything Felipe had experienced before, and he loved it. Best of all was Lorena, bouncing up and down onstage, black boots, jeans, and a tank top, long blond hair swaying to stadium pop melodies as she sang.

  Through the church, Felipe learned to proselytize, to listen to strangers, to find out what mattered to them, and to earn their confidence. He learned how to inspire Latin American immigrants in Miami to raise money for children seeking education in war-torn Uganda. He led three Bible study groups in three different parts of the city. Each week was a call to concrete action, and as long as he brought in new congregants and followed church rules, he saw a clear path ahead, a place to belong.

  One night, as Felipe and Laura sat in her car, the moon rising over the palm trees and stucco apartments, air-conditioning blowing on their faces, they debated what Heaven and Hell were really like and what would happen on Judgment Day. They both wanted to be pastors and mapped out ways they could help save the world with the sorts of grandiose projects they were too embarrassed to share with their other friends. But Felipe’s yearlong tourist visa had run out, and despite having grades that qualified him for state college scholarships, he was ineligible for in-state tuition. He didn’t even know if he could legally apply to college.

  “God is going to take care of it,” Laura assured him, urging him to talk with the pastors. When Felipe told them about his status, they didn’t condemn him for breaking the law by overstaying his visa, as he had expected. They hugged him and prayed for him to get a green card. It was a response that stemmed from biblical scripture, Leviticus 19:34: “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

  It was also a practical response. By the late 2000s, about 20 percent of Latinos identified with Christian faiths other than Catholicism or mainstream Protestantism.6 As more Latino immigrants joined the politically conservative evangelical movement, the institutions naturally responded to their new congregants’ needs, including support for immigration reform.

  The church was less forgiving about rule breaking in other areas. The pastors frowned on secular music and on congregants’ associating with those who’d left the church. Sexual love between two men or two women was intolerable. Felipe wanted to follow all the rules, but increasingly he had to admit he was failing. The thing he’d spent years trying to ignore could no longer be ignored. He found himself attracted to other young men at school, at work, even at church. It didn’t matter, he told himself, because he was also attracted to girls. Yet as much as he tried to discipline himself, he couldn’t will it away. Too frightened to tell Carolina or even Laura, once more Felipe turned to his church mentors. This time they did not embrace him.

  Felipe had the Devil in him, they said.

  Felipe panicked. “I have the Devil inside me!” He had to fix himself, to rid his body of this offense. If he could have paid for the sessions with therapists
that some in the church talked about, sessions they said could cure people, he would have. But he was broke.

  His church mentors told him to fast and pray. He followed their advice. At first he fasted one day, then two. It didn’t help. He tried ten days and passed out. He felt like a failure. He would have to try harder. He dived further into Bible study and church meetings.

  In the spring of 2005, Felipe graduated from high school. And while everyone else chattered incessantly about their future plans, Felipe saw only a dark blank path. At a career counselor’s suggestion, he went to work in a warehouse at his sister’s company. When high school friends asked why he wasn’t going to college, he pretended that despite his 3.75 GPA, he preferred the freedom of warehouse work. “I hate school,” he lied.

  Another friend from church tried to lift his spirits and mentioned one afternoon that Miami Dade College had begun accepting a small number of undocumented students, thanks in large part to one woman, Maggie Aguiar. The Cuban American international student admissions counselor, whose own family had fled Fidel Castro’s revolution, had a soft spot for the undocumented teens and guided them through the application process and to the limited financial aid that was available. Not long after his friend gave him the tip, Felipe applied to Miami Dade College’s honors program. He could barely speak when he received a letter of acceptance months later. That fall he took a job as a server at a nightclub in the suburb of Aventura to pay the $2,500 a semester he owed.