One Hundred Days of Hiding
Four nights before Election Day, Brenda* sat in front of her Samsung Galaxy smartphone, swiped right across the main menu, and tapped on the camera icon. The screen showed her swollen, watery eyes, while her left hand was pressing her temple after wiping off the tears from her cheeks. Brenda is a mother of two, a wife, a domestic worker, and an unauthorized immigrant from Nicaragua. She has been living in the United States for seventeen straight years.
After a deep breath, Brenda pressed the record button. Her voice choked.
In an apologetic speech, Brenda used the word “please” countless times. She begged everybody to go and vote. But, at the end of the video, Brenda, scared, started to cry. “You really do not know how horrible it feels to go through this. I feel like I’m in a countdown to know what my future will look like in four days.”
The two minutes and thirty-two seconds-long video was immediately uploaded to Brenda’s Facebook page. It was watched by more than 7,000 times and shared by almost 100 people in just a couple of hours.
The alarm clock rang at 7 a.m. on Election Day. Brenda wore her “I’m undocumented” t-shirt and visited several polling stations around Miami to campaign for José Javier Rodríguez, a Democratic candidate for Florida’s Senate who is a strong advocate for immigrant rights in the Sunshine State. At around 8 p.m., Brenda and her family joined a watch party organized by a non-profit she volunteered for.
At 10:30 p.m., Donald Trump won Florida’s twenty-nine electoral votes. CNN, NBC, and the New York Times called the victory. Thirty minutes later, the family locked themselves in their house. They cried. Brenda shivered. They stood in the kitchen, hugging each other.
Brenda did not leave her house for three weeks. She did not drive her car for another two. After the election, she covered her front door’s circular window with a brown curtain. Brenda prays every time she leaves the house to get groceries, to go to work, or to drop Leah — her eleven-year-old daughter and the only U.S. citizen in the family — off at school.
The night of November 8th changed Brenda’s life. She deleted the video from her Facebook account, retreated into her own house, gave up activism, and never went in front of a camera again.
But Leah, her youngest daughter, had other plans.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, arrests of immigrants with no criminal records — such as Brenda and her husband — have doubled. From January to March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 35,147 immigrants in raids all across the country, 8,557 of which had no felonies or criminal charges on them.
This represents an increase of 230% in comparison to the same period in 2016.
Detainers — an order issued by ICE to local law enforcement authorities to hold a person who is suspected of being in the country illegally — have also risen by 75%. Between January and March, the agency issued 22,161 detainers.
Weeks after the election, however, Leah was standing up behind a microphone facing the White House. She had a message for the president.
“We’re not afraid of you,” she said.
Seventeen years ago, Nicaragua was recovering from a civil war remembered as one of the bloodiest throughout the Americas at the time of the Cold War. The conflict killed nearly 30,000 people on a battleground that pitted the Sandinistas — a socialist faction backed by the Soviet Union that ruled from 1979 to 1990 — against the Contras, a paramilitary right-wing militia supported heavily by the United States and the military juntas of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
Brenda lived in Bluefields, a town in the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, which lies almost eight hours by boat and car from the capital Managua. She was not a Sandinista. At 22, Brenda was the mother of a six-year-old daughter and about to graduate with a degree in Public and Computer Administration. She dreamed of a job, of opportunities in her country, even though Nicaragua still wasn’t back on its feet after the war.
The odds, clearly, were not in her favor. Brenda knew she was not going to get a job in her town’s local government, overshadowed by the Sandinistas. But even though Bluefields’ elected officials were not members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, most of the community and union leaders were. Factories were closing, and men, most of them working in the tourism industry, started to immigrate abroad. Destination? The United States.
Brenda’s husband Roy* worked for a cruise line company that navigated tourist routes from Central America and the Caribbean to Miami. The company he worked for was sold to a multinational at the beginning of the 2000s. They proceeded to fire junior workers. After docking in Miami, Brenda’s husband decided to stay. He never returned to Nicaragua.
“If you want to stay, stay. I can come later and start a new life, together,” Brenda said to her husband over the phone.
Seven months later, Brenda left her hometown and her six-year old daughter, Christell, behind. Christell stayed with her grandmother until Brenda could figure out what the next steps were.
The day she left Nicaragua, Brenda took an Iberia flight to Miami to meet her husband. She entered the U.S. with her Spanish passport — a nationality acquired by blood from her father — under the visa waiver program, a policy that allows citizens from high-income countries to enter the U.S. as tourists for 90 days without visas. In the year 2000 only 12,195 Nicaraguan citizens were granted tourist visas to go to the U.S., whereas other Central American countries — such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica — were granted between 50,000 and 75,000 visas each. The U.S. Embassy in Managua was aware that the unstable situation in Nicaragua was pushing people out of the country.
Four years later, Christell got her Spanish citizenship and took the same flight as her mom to Miami. The three of them were reunited, and Brenda started her research on how they could stay in the U.S. legally.
Here is when her nightmare began.
Before 9/11, immigration laws in the United States were obscure. Lawyers, notarios, and immigration clinics were mostly unregulated; they found an easy way to make money out of the massive wave of (mostly undocumented) immigrants coming from Central America and Mexico.
Between 1990 and 2000, 1.9 million immigrants came to the United States from Central America, mostly settling in California, Florida, Texas, and New York. Out of the 8.6 million immigrants that arrived in that decade, nearly half of them, 4.2 million, were thought to be unauthorized according to statistics published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The new millennium marked a cornerstone in American immigration history–for the first time since 1930, one in ten people living in the U.S. was foreign-born, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
Immigration clinics and legal services flooded the streets of Miami, and several other urban centers in the U.S. by the early 2000s. In 2004, four years after they arrived in the U.S., Brenda and her husband went to see a notario. These so-called consultants are unqualified to offer legal services or immigration counseling; they trick unauthorized immigrants into paying for procedures with the promise that they will eventually get legal status and remain in the U.S.
“There were many notarios advertising on the radio. They promised everything we dreamed of: a Social Security number, jobs, work permits. Everything. And so we fell into the trap,” Brenda remembers.
Following the notario’s advice, both Brenda and her husband filed for political asylum, paying more than $4,000 dollars in fees. But neither Brenda nor her husband were politically persecuted or had credible fear of returning to Nicaragua. They also failed to file a request for asylum within a year of entering the United States, as mandated by law.
The notario never told them that.
After filing the request, they got temporary work authorizations, but it only took a year for their cases to be rejected by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The letter Brenda and her husband received did not say anything about deportations or removals. It just said their asylum had been denied by immigration authorities. The letter stated that there was no option to appeal, and that the decision was final.
After the letter, Brenda and her husband decided not to do anything. They believed that, as long as they kept a low profile, they would stay out of trouble, just like before. Both of them kept working, Brenda as a caregiver at a nursing home for the elderly, and her husband in construction.
It wasn’t until 2009, four years later, that she went to seek legal advice from a licensed immigration attorney on Flagler Street in western Miami.
“Brenda, you have a deportation order on you,” the lawyer said.
“What? No, no. That can’t be happening. I don’t. No, no, no,” she replied frantically. “My asylum was just rejected.” But under U.S. immigration law, a final asylum denial is also a deportation order when the requester is, like Brenda, undocumented.
“It was horrible when I left that office. I felt like I was in danger, as if every single person in the world was looking at me. I felt like I had a sign in my forehead with the word ‘deportation’ stamped on it.”
Nonetheless, during the Obama years, Brenda felt safe, even though the administration deported more immigrants than any other. Between 2009 and 2016, the Department of Homeland Security deported 3,204,908 immigrants from the U.S., almost a million more than George W. Bush’s administration, and 3.5 times more than Clinton’s.
The difference was that Obama revised most of the previous immigration enforcement policies to focus on recent border crossers and criminals, rather than already established, settled undocumented immigrants across the U.S. His policy relied on removing immigrants before they integrated fully into American society.
Interior deportations — raiding and deporting immigrants already in U.S. cities — decreased from 181,798 in 2009 to 65,332 people in 2016. Meanwhile, border removals, expedited deportations for recent border crossers, stayed high, increasing from 207,525 people in 2009 to 279,022 in 2016.
Another major shift during the Obama administration was the introduction of the so-called priorities. Priority number one was for undocumented immigrants who posed a threat to national security, were gang members or felons, or were apprehended at the border. Priority number two included immigrants who were charged or convicted with three or more misdemeanors, those who re-entered the U.S. after being deported, and holders of visas who overstayed them. The last priority, number three, included all undocumented immigrants who had received a final deportation order on or after January 1, 2014.
Brenda and her husband did not fall under any of these priorities. Their visa overstay was not a problem anymore, as they had applied for asylum years ago — even if was rejected in 2005. Under Obama, Brenda’s oldest daughter Christell was protected by DACA — the administration’s famous Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy created in 2012, which granted legal status to all eligible teenagers and children who came to the U.S. before turning sixteen, prior to June 2007, and have no criminal charges, convictions, or serious misdemeanors. Since its implementation to 2016, 1,267,834 cases have been approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“With [Obama], I never felt afraid. I knew he was only looking for the bad people. And we, we are not bad people. We are good people,” Brenda says. After Christell got DACA, Brenda became an activist and joined several immigrants’ rights organizations in the Miami metro area.
But after Election Day, she decided to quit. “Don’t count on me anymore. I can’t,” she said to María Rodríguez, director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, one of the organizations where Brenda volunteered.
She decided to live in complete anonymity. She decided to hide.
Since January 20, 2017, Brenda’s front door has a sheet of white paper taped onto it. The paper features bold, black Sharpie-like words handwritten in Spanish. An underlined sentence is followed by three yellow-colored highlighted bullet points:
“Before you open the door
· Look through the window.
· Don’t open the door to strangers.
· Don’t answer to ANYTHING.”
ICE’s latest “enforcement action” in South Florida was conducted between April 18–21. Thirty-two immigrants were arrested in raids, sweeps, and at routine check-ins at the agency’s field office and ordered for expedited removal from the U.S. One of them was a Nicaraguan citizen, like Brenda. His name is Espilvio Sánchez-Benavides, a 25-year-old man whose asylum request was denied in 2015 for lack of evidence. Sánchez-Benavides, who had no criminal records, was deported to Nicaragua the day after he was arrested at a routine check-in with immigration authorities.
He is the father of a 3-year-old daughter who was born in the U.S., like Brenda. He also had an appeal pending on his asylum case.
President Trump’s immigration enforcement policy completely deviates from that of his predecessor. Executive Order 1378 — Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States — was signed only five days after Trump’s inauguration, and repeals all previous policies regarding removal priorities. There are no longer hierarchical categories indicating which undocumented immigrants are to be deported first. Instead, the executive order broadens the categories under which an immigrant can be labeled as a “criminal” and leaves it to ICE officers to decide who should be arrested and, ultimately, removed from the U.S.
On February 17, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued a memo implementing the Presidential Executive Order. It was directed to the key officers of his department. In it, Kelly informed them that the agency had initiated the expedited hiring of 10,000 new ICE officers in an effort to expand the removal procedures and immigration enforcement operations across the country. He also terminated the Obama-era Priority Enforcement Program and restored George W. Bush’s Secure Communities, which relies on local law enforcement agencies to identify removable immigrants and share that information with ICE’s Removal Operations office.
In the same document, Kelly instructed his staff to establish the Victims of Immigration Crimes Engagement Office, VOICE. This sinister new program allows victims of crimes allegedly committed by illegal immigrants to report them to Homeland Security. The policy has been widely praised by anti-immigration groups, but criticized by several think-tanks and non-profits as fundamentally racist and xenophobic. They also state that there is no statistical evidence that unauthorized immigrants commit more crimes than legal residents, or U.S. citizens.
Leah has a sweet voice. Over the phone, she sounds calm. Mature. She doesn’t sound, or speak, like an 11-year-old girl. She even refers to the president as Mister Trump. Her perfect English blends with some Spanish words as she answers Brenda, her mom.
Since Inauguration Day, Leah has been part of We Belong Together, a campaign sponsored by the National Alliance of Domestic Workers that aims to “mobilize women in support of common-sense immigration policies that will keep families together and empower women.”
The campaign was launched in Arizona on Mother’s Day, in 2010, as a response to the state’s anti-immigration bill SB1070, which made failure to carry an I.D. a misdemeanor. It also opened the door for racial profiling. The bill allowed local law enforcement authorities to stop and ask for identification without any reason other than “suspicion” that the person was in the country illegally. Individuals without an I.D. would be charged with a criminal misdemeanor, expediting their removal proceedings.
Leah and hundreds of other U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, arrived in D.C. on April 13 to rally in front of the White House for their moms and dads. Over 200 people gathered for The Kids’ Caravan, a convoy that started in Miami with fourteen kids and traveled through five Southeastern states in three days — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. All of them, except Virginia, were won by Donald Trump on November 8.
Leah’s activism is part of a new wave of children advocating for their parents after Trump’s inauguration. Their parents, fearing retaliation, have fallen silent, but their U.S.-born kids are speaking out. Leah has even publicly confronted Carlos Gimenez, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, after he vowed to follow Trump’s sanctuary city ban.
Since January 20, Leah admits that she can’t concentrate in school. She can’t do her homework. She can’t sleep at night. “Maybe I will never see her again. I don’t know how long it would take to see my mom if she goes back to Nicaragua.”
Sometimes, Brenda feels guilty about Leah’s activism. “It kills me. She’s just eleven. Sometimes I think that she should be playing, thinking of other things, and not about this torture, not about what we are going through. It hurts so much because I feel like I’m cutting off her opportunities just because I am undocumented,” Brenda says.
“And those opportunities belong to her by right, because she is American. If I go, she will have to eventually come to Nicaragua with me.”
Brenda has tried to talk to her family three times to come up with a plan if ICE raids her house. “But every time I begin, I can’t finish. I just can’t. I feel like I am hurting my daughter by bringing this to the table.”
Her chances to regularize her situation in the U.S. are low. She has received legal counseling from attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union’s office in Miami, who told her that appealing for a stay of removal would be the only way for Brenda and her husband to stay in the U.S. — if it were granted.
“Everything is so uncertain. I have made the decision not to do it. Appealing for that stay scares me so much because it means that I would have to regularly go and check in with ICE. Just look at what is happening — people are being arrested and deported at those check-ins. So I said no. I just can’t.”
After this, Brenda starts crying.
“If I had money saved, I swear, I swear I would go back to Nicaragua. Because living like this, like we are, is not easy. It’s not a life. It’s a constant fear. It’s torture.”
She pauses and breathes in. Leah is next to her. “It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay.”
“But how do I leave? How? I can’t. I just can’t. All my life is here. My family is here. This is a country I love.”
When asked what would she say to the president if he were in front of her, Leah sighs. She takes a breath and pauses before answering.
“I…I…I would say to him to please stop deporting parents. Because we need them. Because I really love my mom so much, and I don’t want her to leave. I know that other kids really love their parents too, because ever since I went to that caravan to Washington, I could see how they really love each other. I know that every kid wouldn’t want their parent to go back to their country. Because this is her country.”
I was about to continue with the next question, when Leah politely interrupted me.
“I’m sorry. Please, go on,” I said.
“I’m not asking for a favor from Mister Trump. I am telling him that I want my mom here. Here and now.”
I can hear through the phone that Brenda is moved by her daughter’s words. We finished the interview, hung up, and then spoke again over the phone a week later. On that occasion, I asked her whether she still has the video she recorded four days before the election.
“I may have it. I think it’s on a YouTube link. Let me find it,” she said. The link is hidden and protected from public viewers. Minutes later, Brenda texted it to me.
I waited for our conversation to be over. Then, I pressed play for the first time on Brenda’s video, and watched it all. I watched it several times. These are the last thirty seconds of it:
“My friends, please. Please go vote. If you know someone who’s a voter, who can vote, urge them to vote. Help us. Help us out, please.”
At the end of the video, Brenda exhales a hopeless, worried sigh. She still has her left hand still pressed into her temple, but now, her watery eyes look sharply into the camera as if she knew, deep inside, the exact outcome of what was going to happen four days later.
People did go out and vote. But they voted for Donald Trump.
*Some names have been changed in this story to protect the identity of the people involved in it.
