The story of a Cornell student caught in the deportation frenzy.
By Rachel EnsignSummer 2008
I met Juan (not his real name) in a Collegetown café, where I found him drinking a strawberry smoothie and playing around with his Motorola Razr phone, the way young people do when they are waiting or nervous or bored. He had sent me an e-mail a few weeks earlier telling me that he wanted to meet with me to share "a story of one of Cornell's very own students who was recently arrested, detained and awaits trial for being an undocumented 'illegal' alien."
Juan began our conversation by explaining to me how, although he loved the school, his time at Cornell had been difficult—not difficult in the way that a mechanical engineering major is difficult but difficult because sometimes it seemed like the he and the school just didn't just quite fit. He began as a freshman Fall 2003 and then proceeded to fail every single class his sophomore year. He was asked to take a leave of absence, and moved to Utah to live with his sister, returning to Cornell a year later with a new ability to handle the workload and a new Mormon faith. He remained another year then took the spring and fall semesters of 2007 off, spending time working at a local Ithaca restaurant before returning for the Spring 2008 semester.
Juan then made it clear to me that the story he wanted to tell me was his own—after his 5 years spent finishing three years of coursework, he will not be finally graduating in Spring 2009. Instead, if he complies with the Department of Homeland Security's order, he will book his own transportation to Mexico, a country that he left at the age of four, where he will remain indefinitely. If he chooses to violate this order, he will have to spend the rest of his time in the United States in hiding, and if found by authorities, will not be allowed to reenter the US for 10 years.
Juan was detained by border patrol on a Greyhound bus from Syracuse to Chicago, where he has lived with his family since coming to the US. At no point on this trip did he cross the border between the United States and Canada. Instead, a olive-uniformed Homeland Security agent boarded the bus he was on in Buffalo, New York, and asked to see proof of each rider's citizenship. Without any identification to indicate that he had governmental permission to be in the US, he was taken off the bus by the olive-suited agent and brought to a booking station where he was fingerprinted and entered in their system.
The officer who detained him was a Puerto Rican man with a Mexican wife who was extremely sympathetic, telling Juan "I don't want to know what happens to you, this is just my job." Although he set the bond as low as possible and allowed Juan to keep his cell phone and make calls, Juan still had to be taken to the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, New York, a small town halfway between Buffalo and Rochester.
I had to strip down," Juan recalled. "No matter how nice I was and they were, it was still pretty dehumanizing." He was given a baggy uniform to wear. The detainees were put in three different sections of the center and designated by their different colored uniforms- those wearing orange and red were being held on criminal charges while those in blue like Juan and a large number of mostly Hispanic men were only there for immigration detention and were subject to the least security measures of the three groups. Some of the men had only been in the US for a few weeks and had agreed to be immediately deported instead of waiting trial. "It was so depressing," said Juan, "I had no contact with the outside world. I was there for 25 hours and I didn't know when I was going to get out."
(art by Rob Ochshorn)
After his release, Juan had the help of a reputable attorney in Chicago, who aided him pro bono. Once his notice to appear in court arrived, the lawyer petitioned for the venue to be changed to Chicago, where immigration judges are more liberal than in Buffalo and people would be able to come to testify to Juan's good moral character. However, according to lawyer Amy Gottlieb, program director of the immigrant rights program of the American Friends Service Committee, who was not personally involved in Juan's case, "Buffalo has a terrible reputation for denying motions to change venue." The motion to change venue was denied.
The lawyer also tried to get the case closed administratively, meaning that Juan's record with the Department of Homeland Security would still exist, but he would not be told to leave the US unless he was detained on other charges at a later point. This motion was also denied.
An immigration case consists of two hearings. The first is an arraignment hearing, in which the person accused of being in the US without documentation is read a list of charges against them. Defendants can then file applications to remain in the country for a number of very specific reasons: if a parent, child under 21, or a spouse is a citizen; if you are seeking asylum; or if removal from the US would exert "unusual hardship," which, Gottlieb said, "is very hard to prove. Your child has to have some rare medical condition. Your wife has to be dying." Then, defendants attend a second hearing with their lawyer where they present their case to an immigration judge who has been appointed by the Department of Justice. There is no court stenographer and no jury in this hearing—a person's future in the US is left entirely up to the discretion of a single judge.
"Right now, if nothing changes, I'm basically set to be deported by the new year," Juan said. Juan's Buffalo court date was May 29, and his removal hearing resulted in an order to leave the US. Throughout the interview Juan retained the calm and matter-of-fact demeanor commonly put forth by Midwesterners; when he spoke about particularly emotional aspects of his story, like his time at the detention center, he would look away from me and down at his hands, speaking slowly and precisely, his enunciation revealing a quiet strength.
Juan talked about how the only remote hope for him to stay in the US was if he got married to his on-again-off-again girlfriend who attends Cornell, a route to citizenship that his older brother took. Juan said that although the two have discussed marriage, she seems to want to wait until the two are older to wed. But according to Gottlieb, a quick wedding would almost certainly not permit Juan to stay in the US. "A really important concept in immigration law is how you entered the US," she said. A new immigration policy implemented in early 2001 requires that if someone enters the US on a visa and stays past its expiration, then after they are married to a citizen, they are entitled to remain in the US as their immigration case is processed. But if someone enters across the border with no proof of entry like Juan and his family did, then they must return to their country while their application for citizenship is processed.
Juan also discussed the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) act, a bill that has been introduced in Congress multiple times. This legislation would put those who entered the US without documentation as children on a special track to citizenship if they attend at least two years of college or serve two years or more in the military. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama both support the act. Gottlieb's program used to officially support the act, but has since moved to having no official position, because "it's basically conscription for immigrant kids."
Searches of buses and trains are increasingly common in upstate New York towns that are within 100 miles of the US-Canada border. When I asked Gottlieb about Border Patrol searches of buses and trains, she held up a letter from Greyhound that was sitting on her desk. She had written them concerned about the searches occurring on their buses and they had responded saying that they do not have the ability to prevent Department of Homeland Security Agents from questioning their passengers in this region about documentation. "The searches are not new, but the increase has been very noticeable," said Gottlieb. In 2007, the agents at the Rochester station of the Department of Homeland Security detained 1,223 undocumented immigrants, more than any other station on the Canadian border. Searches of buses and trains in Buffalo and Rochester are especially fruitful because they are stops on many bus and train routes from the Northeast to the Midwest frequented by immigrants without legal status who cannot obtain drivers licenses.
Border Patrol agents boarded Juan’s train in the previous two instances in which he made the trip between Chicago and Syracuse. Necessarily obsessive in his law-abiding, because he "was raised knowing that if you get in trouble, you’re done," he made little effort to hide his citizenship status. When the agents asked him for ID on the Amtrak train he was riding, he showed them his Cornell ID. They then asked him if he was a citizen and he said that he wasn’t sure. They asked if his parents were citizens and if he was born here, he answered no to both.
But apparently confused by his honesty, fluent English, and Ivy League education, both times they let him stay on the train. In another instance, Juan was changing buses in Buffalo and, as he got off his first bus, saw Homeland Security agents waiting for people to get off so that they could board the bus and check for immigration status documents.
After he was released from the detention center in Batavia and continued on his way home, his Mexican Identification Card taken and a document "that basically said they already got me" in hand, the people on the bus were noticeably discussing the Border Patrol visit that had happened a few stops prior. Then, on his ride back to Syracuse from Chicago, agents boarded the train at both Buffalo and Rochester, and each time asked every single one of the hundreds of riders for immigration documents. They pulled a number of people off the train each time.
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"Hell yeah I’m American," Juan said. "Immigrants are a part of America too—without voting, driving, and consumerism—being without those privileges is a part of America too." Juan and his two older siblings came to the US in 1988 without a visa, three months after their parents had done the same. They moved to Chicago, a city with the second largest Mexican community in the United States. There they lived with uncles of the family and the children attended public school in the city until one day his older brother turned to their mother and told her "if you think I’m learning anything, you’re wrong." His parents then "made a very big sacrifice," putting four children (a younger sibling was born in the United States) through Catholic school on the combined income from his mother’s babysitting jobs and father’s home remodeling business. "They are the most selfless people I have ever met in my life. They always didn’t mention how little we had," Juan paused, then added, "and I always knew never to ask."
Their private educations led the siblings to elite universities. His older brother got accepted to Northwestern University but wound up attending DePauw. His older sister received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and then went to graduate school at Brigham Young University. Though his brother became a naturalized citizen through his marriage to an American, his sister, with an extensive education but no papers that allow her to work in the US, is a live-in nanny in a suburb of Chicago. Juan is in the same situation—while his peers seek summer internships, his only employment option is as a golf caddy, where he has worked for the last many summers.
His extraordinarily different choice of career options is not the only thing that has made him feel different than his peers at Cornell. The summer before his freshman year, he attended a six week long special program run by the Office of Minority Educational Affairs’ Committee on Special Education Projects (COSEP). He and other minority students took classes and lived in Risley Hall. Juan described the program as "kind of preparing us for the fact that the shit was going to hit the fan once school really started."
He was right—the fan was proverbially hit, and hard. Sometimes students would be startlingly unfriendly—once he was walking on Campus and a boy passing by him loudly commented on Juan’s "bad haircut" to a friend, but the bigger difficulty he experienced was more of a broader culture shock. While many in his prestigious high school were well off, Juan, who received full financial aid from the Arts and Sciences school Cornell (he would not have been able to receive financial aid from any of the three land grant Colleges, because those are federally funded), was not accustomed to certain casual exhibitions of wealth. "I didn’t know people got to charge things on a credit card and just have their parents pay the bill," he said, "I mean I knew it happened, but it was a shock when my best friend, this person who I’m connecting with on a real personal level, I find out that they’re living a completely different life than mine." But Juan’s discomfort wasn’t of jealously or envy, "it’s pretty nice not having anything," Juan said, "it’s a blessing in disguise. You don’t sweat the small stuff—like worrying about what kind of car you have. It’s nice to know that I made this or I got this."
At our interview, Juan was wearing an Ecko red denim jacket with a brown plaid collared shirt underneath. After telling me how he buys all of his own clothes, he looked down at his outfit and explained—"My style is urban preppy," Juan said, "I like it—I think it represents me."
His attire is quite emblematic of the fact that Juan (sometimes uncomfortably) inhabits two worlds, the one of the Ivy League university and the other of his urban Chicago neighborhood where he often finds, to his dismay, that "being smart is equated with being white".
But although Juan may have had a different education and outlook than his neighbors in Chicago, he still deeply connects with them. "I go home and my friends respect me. I freestyle with them. I was there two summers ago when my friend back home became a baby daddy, and there’s drama with that. He’s half black, half Latino, and he’s really cool, he’s the nicest guy, he sells drugs on the side, and he got fired from Best Buy, and that’s pretty much all he does," said Juan, "He ended up going to public school and not such a good high school. Those are the people who are left behind even in high school."
A lot of his Hispanic peers in Chicago believe that you should "work for your family," which he equates to the belief that one should grow up and "work for a bodega." But Juan was equally as critical of the relationship between those at Cornell and their families. "People see independence as the goal," he said, "but they see things like family as less important as I do. Putting your parents in a home when they become older is okay." He also questioned the nature of their ambition, "the people here are more career oriented, which is great. You’re driven to succeed in a world, but the question is, what world is it?"
Over the last few years, as Juan settled more comfortably into Cornell, getting good grades and learning to write off many of the offensive antics of his fellow students as "immaturity on their part." He has become accepting of his Cornell peers in the same way as he is of his friends at home.
With his deportation order looming, Juan has increasingly withdrawn from his ties at Cornell. "This whole semester I was just frazzled," he said, "even the friendships that I made were different. I didn’t even really do Slope Day. I only did half of the stuff because I didn’t want to get too attached and then have to leave." He is no longer listed in the online student directory.
When I contacted him over the summer to do a follow up interview for this article the same person who had first contacted me with a long and enthusiastic Facebook message saying that he wanted to share his story so that students could have a greater understanding of immigration issues hung up on my repeated phone calls and did not respond to my e-mails. According to Gottlieb, it is likely that Juan has gone into hiding and will attempt to remain in the shadows of the US, the only country he has ever really known.
The only traces of Juan that I have found have been on his Facebook profile, which he updates regularly. He recently changed his profile picture to a photograph of Heath Ledger’s Joker, in full makeup, darkly sitting in a jail cell.