When Hector was around three years old, and his brother was just a baby, their parents decided to take the children north, from the little town in Durango, Mexico, where they lived, to the United States. They crossed the border through the unforgiving desert, and ended up in Tucson, Arizona. The boys’ mother put in long hours as a chef; their father worked for a company that made water fountains and concrete benches. To all intents and purposes, the children grew up American.
More than three decades later, Hector—who told me that he has never once returned to Mexico, and whose entire family (his wife and their four children, who are U.S. citizens) and business as a personal trainer are Tucson-based—still lacks paperwork. Like millions of others, he is trapped within the shameful dysfunction, and congressional stalemate, that pass for U.S. immigration policy.
Years ago, the young man had status under DACA , which provided a degree of protection from deportation, along with the right to work, for undocumented immigrants who had been brought into the United States as children. But a minor drug charge, for solicitation to possess marijuana, brought him to the attention of immigration officials. In early 2019, shortly after his two years’ probation was up, armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped him while he was driving with his children. The agency brought him to a federally run immigration detention facility in Florence, Arizona, and two weeks later sent him to a privately operated facility at Eloy, where, he said, he remained, in squalid conditions, for nearly three months.