When I met Fanny, it was almost by accident.
On a trip to Atlanta to write about a surge in immigration arrests in the surrounding suburbs in 2017, I’d heard about a woman, Rosario, who was in danger of being deported. She was a janitor and pizza-parlor waitress from Mexico, and she was hoping that being the single mother of an American citizen — her 12-year-old daughter, Fanny — would be enough to keep her in the country. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had already let her go once, releasing her from detention when she explained that Fanny had no one else looking after her.
A translator and I interviewed Rosario at her big dining table one afternoon in late August 2017. Fanny happened to be home, and she sat close to her mother, inserting details and edits where she felt Rosario had forgotten something or hadn’t been clear, occasionally even correcting the translation for me. (For their protection, we’ve withheld last names, and Rosario is identified by her middle name.)
As we said goodbye, I told her I might call her to check a few things. “Don’t worry,” Fanny said, showing me her phone. “I recorded everything we said.”
She stuck in my mind after that.
A few months after I met them, I heard Rosario’s reprieve had ended in deportation, and I flew back to Atlanta to see Fanny at the house where she had been living with another family. She didn’t have anywhere else to go; her father had left the family years earlier, before getting deported, and her older brother couldn’t look after her. I would end up following her for the next eight months.
Partly, I was interested in policy; I was an immigration reporter at the time, though I have since moved to Beirut to cover the Middle East for The Times. Under the Obama administration, Rosario’s lack of a criminal record and her status as the sole caretaker of an American citizen would most likely have protected her from deportation. But the Trump administration no longer gave those circumstances much weight.
Whenever I flew down to see Fanny, it was easy to forget the raw, impassioned debates over immigration that I was writing about back in New York. In Georgia, I spent hours watching Fanny doing her homework. Feeding her dog. Watching the same Disney Channel movie two nights in a row. Practicing her flute. The photographer, Melissa Golden, and I once spent three hours sitting around waiting for Fanny to wake up from a long after-school nap on the couch.
I sat through many afternoons of color guard practice and many hours of Fanny’s makeup routine. We went to the mall, the nail salon and Chick-fil-A again and again. Trying to get inside a teenager’s head, in other words, meant adopting a teenager’s daily routine. But it was important not just to report statistics and statements but also to see for ourselves how deportation was straining this family, day by day, month by month. Even if it didn’t always feel relevant in the moment. Even if it meant finding myself making toxic-blue slime out of Elmer’s glue with Fanny and her friends one night. (Their command of chemistry is frankly impressive.)
Rosario reentered the United States without documents and returned to Georgia at the end of 2017. In late March, after more than three months’ separation, Fanny moved back in with her mother, who stayed in hiding out of fear of being deported again. The toll of those months was quickly obvious to all of us. Fanny had grown up a lot while living apart from her mother, and they were finding it difficult to coexist again. Rosario was taken aback at how much independence Fanny had acquired when it came to makeup, money and outings. Fanny chafed at Rosario’s rules and need for secrecy.
When we got back in touch with them a few weeks ago, things had gotten much worse. Fanny had endured trauma and a trip to the hospital for mental health treatment. They were no longer living together, or even speaking much.
One afternoon last summer, the last day I saw Fanny in person, Melissa and I watched as Fanny got ready to go out. Making up her face took nearly an hour. Before leaving to meet her mother for manicures, she added the final touches: a coat of MAC Viva Glam III on her lips, a flurry of watermelon-raspberry spray on her neck and an antidepressant in her mouth.
In the car, Fanny practiced giving directions as though she were the voice of the GPS system. “In point-eight miles, turn right,” she intoned. Fanny was impatient for the day she could start driving on her own. A license would mean mobility, but it would also mean assuming more responsibility: Already intent on supporting herself, a licensed Fanny was sure to work even more hours. “It’s 50-50,” she said. “It’s 50 I want to grow up, 50 I don’t.”
At the salon, Fanny got fuchsia nails and Rosario got French tips. They took a selfie in the strip mall parking lot before ordering separate Ubers to separate birthday parties. It was almost routine now: That night, Fanny would get home late, not knowing if Rosario would be there.
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