For two undocumented mothers in Delaware, the risk of deportation is worth the chance to help give their families a better life. Wochit
Ana's children watched their Papi dragged from their doorstep two months ago, and they are still asking her when he's coming home.
Leticia shuttles her kids to school and goes to a job as a maid, but she no longer takes her girls to the park or movies. She prefers to stay behind the door of her home, where she doesn't feel as vulnerable.
Both are undocumented immigrants who asked to keep their full names and faces secret. Immigration police might be watching, they say, especially after the nationwide U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids two weeks ago.
The women agree: They may have been somewhat invisible to the community at large, but if they have to, they'll hide in the shadows to stay here and support their families.
They are not alone.
Adriana Viveros has permission to live and work in America, thanks to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but with its status up in the air, she's just as uncertain as Ana and Leticia about her future and just as determined to stay, even if it's illegally.
Viveros must wait to see whether Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell makes good on his shutdown-ending promise to tackle DACA in the coming weeks.
While they've always lived with uncertainty, the women have become fearful throughout the first year of the Trump administration, even more so than under President Obama, known by many in the Hispanic community as the Deporter-in-Chief. Trump's barnyard language describing African nations and Haiti didn't help.
“One can’t have the life that we once had before, where we could go outside or do some shopping,” Leticia said. “Because what happens if I’m stopped for some reason and immigration takes me away? What will happen to my daughters ... The girls depend on me.”
"It's a reality that many of these individuals who are undocumented are working, family-oriented, looking for the American Dream just like all previous immigrants who came to this country," said Rosalía Velázquez, executive director of the non-profit La Esperanza in Georgetown. Her organization is dedicated to keeping the local Hispanic community afloat.
Part of that job is providing services, like securing work permits or the increasingly popular paperwork bestowing guardianship of children in the event of deportation. Immigrants roll the dice on being caught by immigration police. If they don't work, they don't eat.
Doug Hudson doesn't deny there are good reasons to seek a life in America. But for him the issue is whether that life is obtained in an American way.
"We have to have laws, and the laws we have on immigration, they're tough," said Hudson, a retired Delaware State Police trooper with 27 years of enforcement under his belt. "There are great people who are here and they work very hard, but they have to come here in the proper way."
Invisible life
For now, Viveros is in line with the law. But she insists she won't go back where she came from without a fight.
She was born in one of Mexico's most violent states, Veracruz, where last year officials there reported recovering 253 skulls from what was believed to be a drug cartel burial ground.
"They have a curfew. They're not able to go out at 7 p.m. because they're just killing everyone," Viveros said. "We're not here because we're trying to do bad things for the U.S. We're just here because we're trying to have better lives for ourselves."
Viveros didn't have a choice in the way she arrived. In part, it was her fate, and the fate of nearly 800,000 young people brought illegally to America as children, that kept the government shut down for days as politicians fought about DACA.
"In 2019, if it doesn't renew, I will be one more of the undocumented people here," Viveros said. "DACA recipients don't do small jobs. We have nurses, people in transition to be doctors, social workers, people actually contributing to the United States."
If Veracruz is on Trump's list of terrible places, Viveros wants to know why she should go back.
"This is my country, from the heart. It's just paper saying I'm not naturalized or not a citizen," Viveros said. "I was raised here."
Leticia's day is a routine she's too afraid to change.
She wakes up and takes her kids to school. She goes to work cleaning homes for cash, hoping this time being undocumented doesn't lose her the job. It's happened before, she said.
Then it's back home again with the kids. Her fear has rubbed off on her 9-year-old girl, who's asked Leticia not to bring her to school anymore.
“What’s going to happen to me when you’re not here,” Leticia said her daughter asks.
Ana — another mother without papers — has a hard time explaining to her kids why her partner, their only father figure, isn't around anymore. The children's birth father returned to Mexico.
In November, Ana says immigration police took their Papi off their doorstep, after he returned from seeing parents in Newark.
“They saw everything that happened so it’s not easy to fool them,” she said. “But I tell them that their father is working. When they ask when he’s going to get out, I tell them the police are not giving him permission to get out."
More: Immigration raids send loud message across Delaware
Ana works prep in a restaurant, sometimes picking up an extra shift after she's picked up her kids from school. Like Leticia, her life is tense repetition.
Ana said she doesn't plan for five years in the future. She thinks about today and tomorrow.
“I’m not one of those persons who can think of things out of my grasp,” she said. “For me, it’s work, support my children and give them more than my parents were able to give me. I also need to help my parents."
Fear and the law
Leticia has lived in the United States for a dozen years; her daughters have their whole lives — red-blooded American citizens, both.
In Delaware, she's found a place that's tranquil and safe. She came for the same reason immigrants always have.
“The American Dream,” Leticia said, breaking into a sheepish smile. “One wants to have a better future, a better living, so much for me as for my daughters. This country offers a better education for my daughters, more security."
Having her children north of the border, she said, was worth breaking the law.
"I’m from Mexico, but lamentably Mexico is in a difficult situation," Leticia said. "A lot of violence, a lot of drugs. It's ugly.”
Now the community talk says immigration police are picking people up in Wilmington. ICE agents wouldn't comment on that. They do not discuss active investigations.
On Jan. 10 federal immigration police sent a nationwide message that Trump's expectations for stricter controls on undocumented workers will be met. ICE raided 98 7-Eleven stores to demand managers prove their workforce is legal.
Two of those stores were in Delaware. ICE wouldn't say if any of the 21 arrested were from Delaware.
“ICE will enforce the law, and if you are found to be breaking the law, you will be held accountable,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan said that day in a statement.
At least 4 percent of the Delaware workforce is undocumented immigrants, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center report. Though the ICE raids were ostensibly aimed at employers, there's no doubt those working off the books in America heard the message.
"It's about scaring not so much the employers but the immigrants themselves," said Roger Horowitz, who's studied Delaware's immigrant community since the '90s.
But they're breaking the law, something many find intolerable in itself.
"A common sense human being understands we are a country of laws," said Sussex County Councilman Rob Arlett. "For those that continue to foster and encourage the breaking of the law, I question their motive."
Janice Gallagher is part of the grassroots conservative organization 9-12 Delaware Patriots. She has great sympathy for people like Viveros. Gallagher's afraid they've been used as pawns in Democrats' political games, and she hopes a common sense solution soon presents itself.
But protecting DACA kids can't slide into general amnesty for illegal immigrants, she says.
"Everybody needs to be vetted," Gallagher said. "We need to find out who are law-abiding citizens, where the criminal element is and are there people who have substituted themselves as immigrants here that are really part of a terrorist movement."
Question of color
No one outside the Oval Office on the morning on Jan. 11 yet had heard what the president had to say that day about immigrants from certain countries. Reportedly, he called African nations "shitholes" and suggested Haiti was no better. The president denied he said those things and proclaimed he's not a racist.
Maria Matos, president of Wilmington's Latin American Community Center, was calling him one before that news even broke.
"This country is being run by bigots, by racists, by people who do not like brown people. They're scared that this country is turning brown and they're losing their country. They want America back. The only way to get America back is to make America white again," Matos said, reacting to the pre-dawn 7-Eleven raids from the day before.
For Matos, the ICE raids were only the latest example of a national top-down racism.
"They're separating families from children," Matos said. "How can people be so cruel? These are people that are working. They're taking care of their families. They're not criminals."
Living in the United States without documentation is a civil infraction, not a criminal one. There are penalties, including deportation, but federal law does not prescribe jail time and states can't supersede that with their own laws.
Getting caught crossing the border illegally can carry a jail time penalty. Employing ineligible workers or working without documentation can be penalized by fines and criminal charges.
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udson rejects race as a defense against legal standards he said should apply to everyone.
"Laws weren't made to pick one race over another," Hudson said. "Laws aren't made to be racial. They're for everyone to follow."
He was in Sussex for the Hispanic boom of the late-'80s and '90s. While he points to violent crime as a reason hard immigration laws are necessary, he also said there was no spike in major crimes associated with their arrival.
He said he understands the issues are complex, that they involve families and futures.
But the law is the law, he says.
"I kind of feel sorry for them. They want to come here and make a better life for themselves and their families. A majority of them are very hardworking people, especially the DACA people," Hudson said. "They need to get some mechanism so they can make themselves legal."
Contact Adam Duvernay at aduvernay@delawareonline.com or (302) 319-1855 or @duvINdelaware.