The The Battle to Stay in America

Immigration's Hidden Front Line

Michael Kagan

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781948908511
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

2020 Foreword INDIE awards winner"Day-to-day life in immigrant communities is described with refreshing clarity and heart... an unusually accessible primer on immigration law and a valuable guide to the ways it currently works to perpetuate an excluded immigrant underclass with diminished rights."
— The New York Review of Books The national debate over American immigration policy has obsessed politicians and disrupted the lives of millions of people for decades. The Battle to Stay in America focuses on Las Vegas, Nevada–a city where more than one in five residents was born in a foreign country, and where the community is struggling to defend itself against the federal government's crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Told through the eyes of an immigration lawyer on the front lines of that battle, this book offers an accessible, intensely personal introduction to a broken legal system. It is also a raw, honest story of exhaustion, perseverance, and solidarity. Michael Kagan describes how current immigration law affects real people's lives and introduces us to some remarkable individuals—immigrants and activists—who grapple with its complications every day. He explains how American immigration law often gives good people no recourse. He shows how under President Trump the complex bureaucracies that administer immigration law have been re-engineered to carry out a relentless but often invisible attack against people and families who are integral to American communities.Kagan tells the stories of people desperate to escape unspeakable violence in their homeland, children separated from their families and trapped in a tangle of administrative regulations, and hardworking long-time residents suddenly ripped from their productive lives when they fall unwittingly into the clutches of the immigration enforcement system. He considers how the crackdown on immigrants negatively impacts the national economy and offers a deeply considered assessment of the future of immigration policy in the United States. Kagan also captures the psychological costs exacted by fear of deportation and by increasingly overt expressions of hatred against immigrants.

PART I

THE TARGETS

1

The Graveyards of Nevada

THE HIGHEST HOURLY wage Fernando Gonzalez ever earned in Las Vegas was $16.54 an hour, and that didn’t last long.* For that, he picked cucumbers at a hothouse on the northern frontier of Las Vegas’s urban sprawl, somewhere in between the Stratosphere and Nellis Air Force Base, where the desert meets the city.

“The cucumbers got infected,” he told me. That was the end of that job.

But Fernando didn’t come to Las Vegas for the money. I tried to get him to tell me a story of misery from Guatemala, where he came from. Something that would place him in a standard immigrant narrative. Some details about extreme poverty. Maybe some violence. But Fernando wouldn’t bite.

“All my family was here. My mom wanted us to be together.” At age twenty-three, he walked across the desert in Arizona and came to live with his mom and dad in a rented house just north of Route 95.

Fernando is undocumented, which seems a bit out of place in his family. His parents are legal permanent residents. His youngest sister is a U.S. citizen. He also has a brother, who came here with his parents as a boy; he’s a citizen. This all might seem weird, to have three different statuses in one family, but it is common. Many undocumented immigrants live in mixed families. This is probably why Fernando tends to just shrug if you ask him why he is one thing and his mom and dad are something else. These are the cards you’re dealt. That’s life. What matters, his mom told him, is that they are all here together. All in one place. That’s what she wanted.

Fernando had been in Las Vegas for thirteen years when I met him, twice as long as me. Along the way, he had a daughter, who was eight when I talked to him. She was the product of a relationship that was long in his past, but his daughter still lived with him for part of the year. She may be the only person who ever made Fernando cry. But that came later in this story.

For the first few years in Las Vegas, he worked for an employment agency for minimum wage. The agency had him doing a bit of everything. Sometimes cleaning, sometimes unloading trucks, sometimes stacking pallets for delivery. Whatever was needed, for not much money. “I was trying to do my best. I was good at any job they sent me to,” he said. He was initially happy with the transition to the hothouse vegetable business because the money was much better. But, of course, the vegetables did not cooperate.

After the cucumbers died, the pastor from Fernando’s church told him that he knew a guy who could give him some work as a painter. It did not pay as well—just $12 an hour. But Fernando sees it as a turning point in his life. It started him in the field of construction and handyman work. As a result of this job, which he got in 2013, he now does house repairs and remodeling. Painting, drywall, electricity. At each of the several meetings I had with him, his pickup truck was filled with a slightly different mix of supplies. Sometimes paint, sometimes plasterboard. Whatever the suburban homeowners in Southern Highlands or Summerlin need. It’s not hard to imagine why a homeowner would trust Fernando. His face is soft, and he doesn’t frown or smile much. His answers to questions are simple and concrete. No embellishment. He seems like someone who will tell you things as they are and will do whatever he says he will do. And that’s how he sells himself.

The homeowners who hire Fernando often know that he is undocumented. It’s hardly a secret, he said. He doesn’t think it’s ever cost him a job. “They feel kind of sorry for me because I don’t have the status,” he said. “I’m a nice guy. I like to help people.” Of greater difficulty, potentially at least, is the fact that Fernando doesn’t have a contractor’s license. Technically, therefore, he shouldn’t do much more than painting. He was interested in getting a license, but he wasn’t allowed to for most of his time in Las Vegas because he wasn’t in the country legally.

You might think that keeping undocumented people from getting a contractor’s license makes sense in terms of restricting them from working. But that’s not really what happens. My wife and I own a home in Las Vegas. When we hired a licensed contractor to do some remodeling, we shook hands with, and wrote a check to, a white man. He came to our house, drew some sketches, gave us an estimate, and told us when the work would begin. And on that appointed day, when the actual workers arrive, they were people like Fernando.

Fernando prefers to just work for himself. And it is his truck that makes that possible. Oh, the truck. It looks like just an old pickup. But it’s much more than that. Much like the man who owns it, it’s nothing fancy, but it does what it needs to do. It’s a Chevy. It’s white, or it used to be. Now it’s merely dirty. The body of the truck is marked, dented in some places, and just bruised in others. It’s worn and battered, but it gets Fernando where he needs to go, with his supplies and tools in the back. He bought it in March 2017. He paid $1,800. “A great, great price,” he said. It was a big improvement over his previous truck, which he said had engine problems and bad gas mileage. Owning a truck lets him work for himself.

As his work got better, Fernando’s life turned upward in other ways, too. In early 2017, he was on Facebook and—as one does on Facebook—he ran into someone from a long time ago. Reina, a girl he’d known in Guatemala since they were two years old. It had been a while. Somehow, after all this time, she’d ended up in Minnesota, where she worked as a manager at a Chipotle restaurant. She found Fernando. As Elvis said, so it goes—some things are meant to be. Fernando and Reina started exchanging messages. They started talking on the phone. Then they decided that Reina should move to Las Vegas. By early 2018, she was pregnant.

Now, let’s be clear. Fernando had problems. Working for himself, going from job to job, can be unstable. He had to keep his truck working, but he couldn’t always afford to fix the little things. He neglected to replace a broken brake light. And in April 2018, a cop gave him a ticket. But Fernando didn’t worry. It was just a brake light. He did not quite understand that in Nevada, minor traffic infractions like broken brake lights are criminal offenses. “Stop Lamps Req (Misdemeanor),” it says on the municipal court docket. That remains, to this day, the most serious criminal conduct for which he has ever been charged. The police officer gave Fernando a lecture about it, too, and so Fernando did the right thing: he spent some money fixing the light. It works now. However, Fernando readily admits that there was one thing he did not do. He did not go to court for the ticket. At the time, he didn’t really understand what that meant. He did know that he had to pay the ticket eventually. “I was having some financial problems,” he said. He saw the ticket as a debt he was having trouble paying, like a credit card or a utility bill. Sometimes, when money was short, he was late to pay those, too. But he always pays people back, eventually, if you give him enough time.

Things were not perfect, but Fernando was happy. Fernando had a girl. He loved her and she loved him. They had a small, decent place to live. They were starting a family together, and he was working for himself. It was never about the money with him anyway. So long as his truck kept working, so long as the jobs kept coming, he and Reina and their baby-to-be would be fine. He would find work and pay the bills. He always did. Like his mom wanted, they would be together.

That was how it all seemed, right through the summer of 2018. But this is no fairy tale. That broken brake light had changed everything.

My first experience of what it’s like to be a resident of Las Vegas was in the Seattle-Tacoma airport in the fall of 2010. I had my laptop open in the Southwest Airlines departure lounge, and I was studying my notes. The two men and a woman next to me were already drunk. I probably projected some level of annoyance.

“You going to Vegas alone, hon?” the woman said. “Where are you staying? You’ll see a show?”

“I’m going to a job interview,” I said.

“A what?”

The three of them stared at me for a moment. One of the men laughed awkwardly. “I didn’t see that coming,” he said. A few minutes later the three of them moved away from me. I was no fun.

The job I was applying for was at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I moved my family to Las Vegas in 2011. Since then, I’ve gotten used to the reality that many people find it surprising that there are around 2 million people who actually live in Las Vegas, and that they do normal things like go to job interviews or take their kids to gymnastics.

I was hired to teach immigration law, and to co-direct the UNLV Immigration Clinic. In reality, I didn’t know as much as I should have about American immigration or how it impacted Las Vegas. I had been working with refugees in the Middle East for the first ten years of my career. In December 2000, when I took my last law school exam, I got on an airplane to join my wife in London, and from there we moved on to Egypt. By the time I got the UNLV job, we were in our thirties and had two kids, but Las Vegas was the first American city where my wife and I lived in our post-student phase of life. We bought our first house here and learned how to take out an American auto loan here. I got myself a Hyundai Elantra and excitedly ordered a pro-diversity license plate frame on Amazon. It was a political statement on the back of my car. I could never do something like that in Cairo or Beirut.

Although I knew many fundamental concepts of American immigration law, it seemed to me that American immigration lawyers talked in code, using government form numbers rather than, you know, words. People didn’t apply for asylum; they filed an I-589. Family members didn’t sponsor each other; they had a pending I-130. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, because I had never practiced immigration law in the United States. It was a real problem, and one I had to keep on the down-low as much as possible.

I was saved in my first few years because until the spring of 2016 I had a co-director at the clinic, Fatma Marouf, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of immigration rules. So did Angela Morrison, who for my first few years at UNLV ran an immigration program out of the clinic offices. In meetings, Fatma or Angela would say something like, “We need to do an I-601A” for a client and I would try to discreetly check Google on my iPhone to find out what in God’s name that was. And then I would smile and nod.

These forms have been the focus of immigration law for a very long time. Almost every immigration category created by Congress becomes a form. Most of these forms have to be mailed off on paper, so it is literally papers required to get papers. For each of these forms there are lists of criteria and exclusions. For many exclusions, there are waivers. For each waiver, there are specific requirements, and another form. And on and on.

All this paperwork can make immigration law blind to real life. The government should recognize that children who have survived abuse and neglect need special protection. But immigration lawyers might instead say, “She has an approved I-360.” Perhaps this is part of why immigration policy can become so rigid and so cruel. It’s just about papers, not people. Perhaps this is part of why the public is so confused about how American immigration law actually works. It does seem like the right lawyer might know the right form for any situation, so why doesn’t every immigrant just follow the law and send in an application? Still, while it always bothered me that immigration lawyers talk this way, I tried to become conversant in the lingo. To an extent, that was a necessity in my line of work. It made me feel less insecure around other immigration lawyers. I liked being able to be the one throwing the form numbers around. Like I knew what I was doing.

Suffice it to say that for my first few years in Las Vegas, despite the progressive language on my Elantra’s license plate frame, despite my title as co-director of one of the only programs in the entire state offering free legal assistance to immigrants, I didn’t have much real contact with the immigrant residents of my city.

In 2014, cable news was gripped by a migrant crisis at the southern border—an influx of unaccompanied children. The kids were teenagers and some younger children. They had come from El Salvador and some from Honduras and Guatemala, and they had horrendous stories of abuse by criminal gangs. Many of the girls were rape victims, or had been told they had to become gang “girlfriends.” Boys told stories of gang members from MS-13 interrupting middle school classes to tell them they had to join the gangs. They had walked through Mexico, sometimes hitching a ride on a notorious train called “La Bestia” (the beast).

The Obama administration found this influx to be most inconvenient. At the time, there was still a faint hope of immigration reform moving in Congress, and these kids made it look like there was chaos at the border when it would have been better to have cable news focus on the improving economy or the normalization of relations with Cuba. Instead, there were awful photos of children crowded shoulder to shoulder, sleeping on the floor under shiny metallic blankets. The Obama administration responded schizophrenically. Officials made grave threats that the migrants would all be deported quickly. Parents who had traveled with their children were locked up in remote detention centers. A frequently reproduced photograph from the time shows a boy, maybe six or seven years old, in jeans and a gray T-shirt, standing on polished concrete in the middle of some kind of warehouse that had been divided by tall chain-link fencing. A bored officer in a green uniform stands over the boy, his thumbs on his utility belt, while the boy stares up at a television mounted high on the fencing that surrounded him. The boy was watching a cartoon while locked in a makeshift prison. America was putting children in cages. That was before Trump even announced he was running for president.

I did nothing—although, fortunately, others stepped up. The kids who came alone across the borders were supposed to be locked up only for a brief period, after which they were to be sent to live with sponsors, if the government could find a relative living in the United States. That is why some of these kids began arriving in Las Vegas. The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, started a program to provide lawyers to the kids in some of the places where they ended up. Two of my colleagues, Fatma and Anne Traum, applied to participate. I thought the program was poorly thought out and unsustainable—I’m pretty sure I used that phrasing at the time, although on paper I was part of the grant. In Las Vegas, the kids would have to fight deportation in court. Anne and Fatma hired two recent graduates, Katelyn Leese and Alissa Cooley, to defend children in these deportation cases. They began attracting local attention for their work. Nominally I was co-director of the clinic, and so I started getting compliments on their work, too. It was a nice feeling, I’ll be honest, even though had it been up to me, we never would have taken part in this program at all.

Many of the kids had viable asylum claims, and others were eligible for something I had known little about previously: Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, or SIJS. If a child in the United States has been the victim of abuse, abandonment, or neglect as defined by state law, and if it is not in the child’s best interest to be reunited with a parent and sent home to her country of origin, she may be eligible to stay in the United States. By early 2016—against the confident statements made by government officials—Katelyn and Alissa had begun winning legal residency for some of these kids.

Katelyn and Alissa earned approximately $25,000 a year each for their work as AmeriCorps fellows. They told dark jokes about surviving on ramen. As they began attracting more media attention, one article highlighted their poverty wages, and the fact that one of them could not afford to fix the air-conditioning in her car, which she drove to court hearings in the summer, with temperatures over 105 degrees every day. Of course, not everyone loved what they were doing. Someone wrote a comment below the article that they must be “bottom dwelling lawyers” because they’d taken a job making so little money. Katelyn and Alissa joked about it, but it clearly stung.

Katelyn and Alissa shared an office across from mine in the UNLV Immigration Clinic. They had a whiteboard where they tracked all of their cases. Before they came in 2014, the clinic rarely had as many as thirty cases at a time. Now, a year out of law school, they had increased our client roster to more than a hundred. I remember one day noticing that colorful handprints had started appearing on their office wall. When their first child clients received legal permanent residency, they bought small canvases and tempera paint in primary colors from a craft store. Whenever a child won asylum or legal residency, Katelyn and Alissa took the kid’s handprint and wrote his or her name on the back of the canvas. The handprints were colorful wall decor for an office that had no windows. Each one meant at least one child would stay safe.

Meanwhile, my own kids had more contact with immigrants than I did. That should not have been a surprise to me, given the demographics of Las Vegas. But that was not something I thought about at the time. What my wife and I wanted was to send them to a good school, and we eventually ended up at Sandy Miller Academy, an award-winning magnet elementary. It had a renowned, dynamic principal, Anne Grisham—known to everyone as Dr. Grish. That’s what we thought about as parents. But it was through this decision that I eventually faced the reality of Las Vegas.

Sandy Miller Academy occupies a modern brick building surrounded on three sides by vacant lots. Where I grew up in upstate New York, a vacant lot is a green space—an overgrown field that, after enough time, turns into woods. But here, a vacant lot is just rock and light gray dirt, the color of blank newsprint. If no one builds on it, it stays that way. The hard, hot, dusty blocks around the school accentuate the fact that it sits, from one point of view, in the middle of nowhere. However, Sandy Miller Academy occupies a pivotal place in American society today, in the middle of one of the largest immigrant communities in this country. This school and the surrounding dust are in the heart of East Las Vegas, in the middle of a zip code that is home to more than 11,000 people who are not American citizens, out of roughly 59,000 residents. Its student body is 65 percent Hispanic and only 17 percent white.¹

Through my daughters’ friends and through other parents at the school, it gradually became impossible for me to avoid the fact that my community was now an immigrant community, and many of my neighbors were in a great deal of danger. The people who would be targeted in an anti-immigrant crackdown would be the same parents who hosted my older daughter for sleepovers, the same parents who waited with me in the line of cars to drop off our chi...