The Making of a Dream Page 8

  IN THE WAKE OF THE 2006 PROTESTS, the Senate version of the Sensenbrenner bill never made it to the floor. The marchers had won, but their victory had exacted a price. They had made themselves visible and also vulnerable. Employers cracked down on those who sought to miss more work for subsequent protests. The demonstrations became smaller.

  The Sensenbrenner bill may have generated the most controversy, but it was never the only proposal on immigration up for consideration during that time. Throughout much of 2006 and 2007, lawmakers and activists remained hopeful of a bipartisan compromise on comprehensive immigration reform. In the House, a Republican from Arizona, Jim Kolbe, who unlike the Milwaukee-raised Sensenbrenner had grown up along the border and now represented it, tried to pass a more balanced bill, along with a fellow Arizonan, Jeff Flake, also a Republican, and a Democrat from Illinois, Luis Gutiérrez.

  Kolbe wanted to find middle ground: add security to the border, help adjust the status of those who’d been working in the United States for years, and make it easier for people to come legally and work for short periods of time. The congressional veteran had seen the immigration crisis coming for decades, and nowhere was it more evident than in his home state. He remembered as a kid watching Mexican men pull back a few barbed wires early in the morning to cross over for work. It was that easy. Kolbe was a freshman congressman when they passed the last big immigration bill in 1986. Along with a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, it had included provisions to crack down on the demand for undocumented workers—mainly penalties for companies that relied on their cheap labor. But the sanctions had ended up as mostly a wink and a nod.

  “I said at the time it’s going to fail because you’re going to create a one-time thing, and then you’re going to get another wave that says ‘When are we going to get our amnesty?’” Kolbe later recalled.

  The 1996 immigration law a decade later did add sanctions. But the sanctions, coupled with tougher penalties for the immigrants who sought to reenter the United States, meant not only did fewer immigrants dare to leave, but now they saved up to bring over their spouses and children instead of returning home. The handful of men living in one apartment next to a factory morphed into immigrant families spending Sunday at the mall and enrolling their children in local schools.

  “People said, ‘Oh my God, what is this flood?’ Well, the flood was people bringing in their families,” Kolbe said. “That is the most fundamental change that has taken place.”

  For Kolbe, it didn’t help that lawmakers in California and Texas had put up such a fuss that they were able to beef up border security in San Diego and El Paso, funneling more people across the rocky Arizona desert, where building a wall was virtually impossible. By 2006, Kolbe’s own brother was giving him grief about immigration. He lived on a private tract of land within the Sierra Vista, along the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, a rare desert waterway. The land, overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, was a favorite crossing spot for those coming into the United States illegally. It had become littered with discarded backpacks, empty water jugs, and other trash left behind by the immigrants.

  To make matters more complicated, when the Border Patrol apprehended immigrants who needed medical attention, first responders complained that the agents would often call them rather than transport the wounded,9 even when the injuries were the result of a Border Patrol chase. Whichever agency transported the sick and wounded would likely be stuck with the bill. Health care providers and first responders chafed at the added burden.

  Local residents were not feeling inclined to generosity toward the people they saw incurring these costs for their community. In 2006, Arizona voters had opted to end years of providing in-state college tuition to undocumented immigrants living there. Not long after that ballot initiative passed, the state legislature toughened sanctions against companies that knowingly hired those in the country illegally. In Washington, Kolbe’s compromise bill never made it out of committee. During the 2006 midterm elections, he opted not to run for a third term and was replaced in the primary by a state lawmaker well known for his hard line on immigration (who promptly lost to newcomer Democrat Gabrielle Giffords).

  Even so, in the Senate, Kolbe’s fellow Republican Arizonans, veteran lawmakers John Kyl and John McCain, along with Ted Kennedy, pushed on for a compromise, understanding that a pure enforcement approach would never address the number of people who had already made their home in the country without legal status. To shape the bill, Kennedy tapped the staffer he trusted most on immigration: Esther Olavarria, a native of Cuba raised in Florida, who had worked with Cheryl Little at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center a decade before.

  Esther had been waiting years for lawmakers to pay enough attention to get something passed. Both the House and Senate had flipped during the 2006 midterm elections, and Democrats, who were more likely to support the legislation, had a majority. Time was of the essence. Now was her chance.

  While lawmakers sought a legislative solution, DHS had meanwhile stepped up large-scale work site raids across the country. Among the businesses raided: a factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Kennedy’s home state, where undocumented immigrants were making backpacks for soldiers in Iraq.10 The raids were meant to signal to Congress and the nation that the Bush administration was serious about enforcement. They also served as a warning for businesses of what they could expect going forward under the legal status quo. By December 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had tripled the number of work site raids it had conducted the year before to roughly 4,400. Operation Wagon Train, as it was called, was the largest work site crackdown in the nation’s history.

  In the end the businesses suffered little. They mostly faced minimal fines and hired new workers. Those hit hard were the immigrants themselves.11 In some cases, DHS agents rounded up and deported parents without giving them time to arrange care for their children.

  The federal actions were soon replicated in some places at the local level, most famously in Arizona. That year, local Spanish-language radio hosts began warning undocumented residents about stepped up raids by Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, who liked to brag that he was “America’s toughest sheriff.” Arpaio had already garnered media attention for building an outside overflow tent city at the local jail, where prisoners stayed even during the scorching 103-degree Arizona summer nights. He boasted his dogs ate better than his inmates.

  Arpaio would make his next big splash the following year by testing out a new law that prohibited businesses from knowingly hiring an “unauthorized alien.” He sent his agents to raid the Arizona corporate offices of a major Maricopa employer, Golfland Entertainment Centers, which ran several water parks.12 Rumors swirled that some 100 employees might be undocumented, and deputies collected records on about 400 of them, but ultimately fewer than a dozen of the 1,000 workers were detained. The raid was billed as a crackdown on illegal business practices, though in the end, Golfland never faced any penalties since it had participated in the federal government’s new, voluntary E-Verify program to check whether potential hires were eligible to work. It was essentially off the hook for anyone who managed to slip through the system.13 As with the federal raids, so it often went.

  IN KENNEDY’S OFFICE, Esther continued to work on refining the bipartisan, comprehensive bill, reaching across the aisle and building support among veteran immigration advocates.

  During that time, the advocates increasingly turned to the young group of “DREAMers” to promote both the DREAM Act and the broader legislation, regularly reaching out to students such as Walter Barrientos and Ecuadoran native Cristina Jiménez in New York; Julieta Garibay from Texas; Carlos Saavedra of Massachusetts; and Gaby Pacheco, Juan Rodriguez, and later Felipe Matos, from Florida.

  Marie Gonzalez was often called on as well. Her case had become so well known that she was often the first person other students contacted when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came knocking on their door.
It was Marie whom Gaby Pacheco called when her home was raided. The two had met at a conference, and Gaby immediately felt Marie would know what to do. She would understand. Marie tried to help where she could. Yet the travel, combined with the responsibilities of school and work, took its toll. She wanted to help people like Gaby, but increasingly she demurred at the speaking invitations. She ceded the public space to others, like twenty-four-year-old Tam Tran, also a so-called DREAM elder. Born in Germany to Vietnamese refugees, Tam had come to California as a young child with her parents, who had sought asylum in the United States. But, as in the case of Tereza Lee, the United States wouldn’t take them, nor would Germany. She’d never been to Vietnam, and her parents refused to return. Tam, an aspiring filmmaker and recent University of California, Los Angeles, graduate, had begun to film some of the DREAM Act-eligible students telling their stories. In May 2007, she flew to Washington to show one of her films at a House Judiciary Subcommittee immigration hearing, crashing at Josh Bernstein’s house the night before and staying up till dawn to write her speech. In the film, she had to blur the faces of the teens who’d spoken to her.

  I hope one day I can show this film without them hiding their identity, she told lawmakers.

  The young leaders were in high demand. But their stars were on the rise just as the light was dimming on the broad compromise immigration bill Esther had worked so hard to draft. Many US labor leaders weren’t happy with the legislation’s increase in the number of temporary workers, whom they worried could sabotage wage guarantees and other protections they’d fought hard for, and they made it clear to their champions in the Senate, including Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, who had recently moved over from the House. Meanwhile, hard-liners such as Sessions, who had sought to kill the DREAM Act back in 2003, continued to fight anything that would even resemble amnesty. As summer 2007 rolled around, the decade’s last big push for comprehensive reform fell by the wayside.

  With broad congressional immigration reform essentially dead, groups whose support had directly and indirectly nurtured the young undocumented immigrants began to turn their attention toward a very different kind of campaign, that of freshman Illinois senator Barack Obama. The Harvard-trained lawyer and Hawaiian-born son of an anthropologist from Kansas and a Kenyan scholar, who’d been raised in Indonesia, was now running for president. Like Sanders, Obama was wary of the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, but in the end, he had voted in favor of bringing it to a full vote. He seemed the most sympathetic presidential candidate that immigrant rights proponents had seen in their lifetime.

  It wasn’t long before the lines between the immigration reform movement and that of the nascent Obama campaign would begin to blur. Obama had cut his teeth on community organizing in Chicago and had already won recognition from the Center for Community Change. He understood the power of his volunteers lay not just in sharing his story with potential supporters but in sharing their own stories and in developing the same leadership skills he had learned as an organizer on the streets of Chicago.

  The Obama campaign received a hand from Harvard Kennedy School Professor Marshall Ganz, whom the senator had met while in law school. Ganz, the son of a rabbi, had marched with the farmworker activist and hero Cesar Chavez in the 1960s. Ganz’s class required students to develop personal stories or “narratives” through which they could better connect with people and ultimately achieve political and social change. He began to train Obama campaign workers. Eventually he invited in a few local young activists to audit his Harvard class, including Carlos Saavedra, who had attended the NCLR conference in Philadelphia two years before. Telling their life story was what the undocumented activists already did instinctively. Now they would learn to hone that skill not just to inspire others, but to inspire them to action.

  As the young activists were shaping their stories and beginning to take them to the streets, something else began to change, something part of the natural course of life and of political movements: teenage rebellion. At first, the young leaders were happy to receive invitations to speak from veteran activists. But increasingly, they felt as if the older activists viewed them as props, trotting them out to pull at the heartstrings and then sending them back to their seats.

  In the winter of 2007, the Center for Community Change’s Fair Immigration Reform Movement organized a meeting of its member groups on the campus of Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. The goal was to plan a strategy in response to Bush’s last, lame-duck push for immigration reform. The students asked for a meeting room of their own to exchange ideas. The organizers of the conference were taken aback. Meet alone, without the adults? The idea hadn’t occurred to them. They scrambled to find a space and came up with an overflow room packed with coats and bags. Julieta Garibay, Juan Rodriguez, Tam Tran, and the other students looked around and almost laughed. They had literally been relegated to the coatroom. The next day, they declared independence.

  Jose Luis Marantes, a mentor to Juan and Felipe at SWER, was among those who addressed the older advocates.

  How many of you believe in the youth movement? he asked. The veterans, including Josh Bernstein, applauded.

  How many of you believe that this movement can’t be won without the power of the youth? he asked, again to applause.

  How many of you are willing to give up your jobs to make way for youth to lead this movement forward? This time the room was quiet.

  The students wanted to split off from the veterans to create their own group, an organization that would focus on the passage of the DREAM Act. They would call the new coalition United We Dream, in a nod to the campaign Josh had with Marie Gonzalez and in honor of a smaller, similarly titled initiative in Massachusetts. As they made their case, Josh stood off to the side. In many ways, his work with these students was done. He would step back as they stepped forward to fight for the DREAM Act on behalf of other young immigrants like themselves.

  HARETH WAS A SOPHOMORE in high school when the presidential election heated up in 2008. She had been so inspired by marches two years before that she eventually volunteered for the campaign of a fellow Bolivian running for the Arlington County school board, Emma Violand-Sánchez, or “Dr. Emma,” as Hareth called her, but that was as far as her political activities went. Like Felipe, she fiercely guarded her own immigration status, looking after her sisters while her parents worked. She worried about her parents. Her father was exhausted all the time and talked about a slowdown in construction. He still helped Hareth with her math homework, complaining about the newfangled ways teachers taught geometry. But increasingly, she noticed that his beer with dinner became two or three. Hareth tensed when he came home with alcohol on his breath, but she shoved away that fear. Her father was fine. They were fine.

  Along with her parents, she watched TV in May 2008, when, during an interview with Univision nightly anchor Jorge Ramos, Obama promised that if elected, he would make comprehensive immigration reform a top priority during his first year in office. In fact, the senator’s promise followed that of his rival and fellow Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton, who’d promised to present Congress with a bill during her first hundred days in office. But to Hareth, Obama seemed fresher, more believable. Maybe this guy was worth watching.

  In Miami, Felipe also cheered after hearing Obama’s promise. He, too, was worried that Clinton’s promises were political, given the tough 1996 law that had passed on her husband’s watch. And he liked Obama’s background in community organizing.

  This was a campaign Felipe could get behind, an election they might actually have a chance to win. He and Juan spent months canvassing and getting out the vote, even if they couldn’t cast a ballot.

  But their main focus remained local. Jose Luis Marantes from SWER had been pushing Felipe to speak out about his status, but he had demurred. It wasn’t safe. He just wanted to be a regular student. Still, the idea of stepping forward gnawed at him.

/>   But as he watched Gaby’s relatives fight a looming deportation case, Felipe decided he had to come forward. Here I am, the student government president, he thought. If I say who I am, I can really change people’s minds. He helped Gaby organize a march in the spring of 2008 from Miami Dade College to DHS’s downtown office. During the march, Felipe finally went public with his immigration status.

  They dubbed it their “undocumented and unafraid” march, a phrase that felt more of an aspiration than a declaration. Yet the words inched further toward truth each time they uttered them.

  On the day of the march, Felipe wore a pin with the question Undocumented? He and the others covered their mouths with black duct tape, silently protesting the constant fear that kept so many immigrants silent. Maybe they would be arrested, maybe they would be deported, but at least it wouldn’t happen in the shadows while the rest of the country slept or went about their breakfast routine.

  Dozens of the participants left their identification cards and other documents in their cars in solidarity with friends who had no valid immigration papers. Looking at the group, it was impossible to tell who was or wasn’t documented. Felipe was terrified and thrilled all at once.

  They walked past discount luggage stores and fashion outlets, merengue music blaring from the open storefronts, just as it did in Central and South America, where many of the area’s small-business owners hailed from. They walked past vendors selling hot dogs and empanadas and toward the cluster of state and federal court buildings.