New York Times
By Rebekah Zemansky and Julia
Preston
June 11, 2013
Three young immigrants had a
jubilant and painful reunion here on Tuesday with
parents who had been deported from the United
States, sharing hugs through the steel bars of the
border fence that separates this American town from
its Mexican twin.
The young adults are part of the
movement of immigrants who grew up in this country
without legal status who call themselves Dreamers.
Their parents traveled to the Mexican side of the
fence from Brazil, Colombia and Guadalajara, Mexico,
seeing their children in person for the first time
in many years.
The meeting, under a searing
borderlands sun, was a new piece of the highly
personal political theater that young immigrants
have used to dramatize their support for a bill in
the Senate to overhaul the immigration system. Hours
before the encounter here, President Obama spoke at
the White House to urge Congress to move quickly to
pass the bill. Suggesting the growing influence of
the youth movement in the debate, the president
framed his remarks — both literally and politically
— with Dreamers.
A young woman from Nigeria, Tolu
Olubunmi, introduced him, and during his speech he
singled out another young immigrant, Diego Sanchez
from Argentina. Evoking the sympathetic narrative of
young people who found themselves in this country
illegally after coming as children, Mr. Obama said
opponents of the legislation had no rationale for
blocking them from a path to citizenship.
“This is not an abstract debate,”
Mr. Obama said. “This is about incredible young
people who understand themselves to be Americans,
who have done everything right but have still been
hampered in achieving their American dream.”
Organizers of the Nogales reunion
said it was a coincidence that it happened on the
day of the president’s speech, since they had been
raising funds for the parents’ airplane tickets for
two months.
“This is not about the president,”
said Carolina Canizales, a leader of United We
Dream, the national group that organized the family
meeting. “Today is about reunifying families and
what that really looks like to us.”
Following a prearranged plan, just
before 10 a.m. the parents and their children
approached, from opposite sides, a section of the
fence on the edge of Nogales where the poles are set
a few inches apart. After deportation, the parents
cannot enter the United States, and the young people
— who traveled to the border from Seattle, Boston
and Orlando, Fla. — do not have legal status that
would allow them to leave and return.
Reaching their arms through,
parents and children embraced, wept and laughed.
The mother of Renata Teodoro, 25,
passed family photos to her, as well as a soccer
T-shirt from Rio de Janeiro and a letter from a
younger sister who also returned to Brazil when the
mother was deported six years ago. Ms. Teodoro, who
had come from Boston, gave her mother a bottle of
nail polish, a joke between them, and displayed the
card showing that she had received a deportation
deferral under a program Mr. Obama started last year
— her first official immigration document.
Her mother, Gorete Borges Teodoro,
52, was overwhelmed with emotion, but quickly
reverted to maternal mode.
“I pray for you guys to get the
papers, go to college,” Mrs. Teodoro said in
English. Her daughter said she had arrived in the
United States when she was 6 years old and had
refused to return to Brazil with her mother in order
to finish her undergraduate studies at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston. Mrs. Teodoro
was ordered deported after her husband’s asylum
petition was denied.
The mother of another young
immigrant, Carlos Padilla, 21, from Seattle, said
she was “glad and sad at the same time: glad to be
here next to him, sad because the fence is between
us.” Mr. Padilla said his mother, Josefina Hernandez
Madrigal, went to Mexico in 2008 to take care of
ailing relatives and had not been able to obtain a
visa to re-enter the United States.
A Border Patrol vehicle parked
nearby, and an officer stayed to observe but did not
intervene.
The Senate bill would offer
significant gains for young immigrants like those in
Nogales, but not for their parents. It includes a
version of the Dream Act, the measure from which the
young immigrants take their name, which would give
them an expedited five-year pathway to American
citizenship. Young immigrants like Ms. Teodoro and
Mr. Padilla who had received deportation deferrals
would have a faster application process for
provisional status, the first step along that
pathway.
The Senate bill would also allow
some deportees to return to the United States,
including children, spouses or parents of United
States citizens or legal permanent residents, and
youths who would have been eligible for the Dream
Act. It does not have any measure allowing the
return of deported parents of unauthorized
immigrants. Several Republican senators have raised
strong objections to any return of deportees, and
that provision is considered one of the most
endangered in the floor debate.
According to a recent study by
Colorlines, a news Web site focusing on racial
issues, about 205,000 people who were deported
between 2010 and 2012 had children who were American
citizens and living in this country. There are no
solid estimates of the number of deportees’ children
who are not citizens.
Ms. Teodoro said the re-encounter
with her mother was frustrating. “When you get
awards, you graduate from high school, it makes me a
little angry to have to show her these through the
fence,” she said. “Really angry, actually.”
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