By Sam Ciesielski & Sacha Verlon
The Communicator Magazine
Ann Arbor Community HS
1st Place
Division 4, News Writing
In-Depth Feature
In 1999, nine-year-old Marria Ibarra- Frayre traveled with her mother and brother from their home in Guadalajara, Mexico to Detroit to visit their father, who had moved to the United States four years before in search of a better job and a better life. Initially, they planned to stay for a month. That vacation has lasted 18 years.
“It was difficult at first,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “I remember, I came in in 4th grade and didn’t speak a word of English. The only thing that my dad wrote down for me on a little piece of paper was how to ask for the bathroom in English.”
Because Ibarra-Frayre’s family traveled to the United States through a time-limited travel visa, they were not legally permitted to stay in the United States. Nevertheless, her parents chose to stay in the United States knowing that the quality of life would be better than in Guadalajara.
“My parents are the anomaly, I would say,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “They are very bold… Maybe they did it to protect my brother and myself but we are here…They are very much in this mindset of we should not live in fear and we should not limit ourselves in what we can and cannot do.”
Until 2012, Ibarra-Frayre and her family were living in the United States as illegal aliens: individuals from a foreign country who are residing in another country without authorization from the government.
In the United States, the only way you can apply for citizenship is to get sponsored from an immediate relative who is a U.S. citizen. This system favors sponsorship from a parent, spouse, or child.
The problem was, most of Ibarra-Frayre’s family didn’t have relatives that fit that category. This meant that they had no way to obtain citizenship and legally live in the country.
“So people talk about ‘Why didn’t you just apply? Why didn’t you get in line? Why wouldn’t you just become a citizen?’” Ibarra- Frayre said. “And I would love to do that, but that option literally does not exist. There isn’t an application that I can fill out.”
The only person who was eligible to apply for citizenship in her family was her father, Jesus Ibarra-Frayre. Unfortunately, Jesus’s only relative who was a U.S. citizen was his brother.
That meant that his application would take years being processed before he would recieve his citizenship. It has been 16 years since Jesus applied for citizenship, and he still hasn’t obtained it.
He will probably need to wait five more years. The reason behind this lies in the maximum number of applications the federal government reviews per year. Even if an immigrant were qualified to apply, their application would be put at the back of the long line of other people’s applications, some of which may have been in the system for decades.
The Obama Administration lifted the hopes of many illegal immigrants on June 15, 2012, when Obama announced the implementation of a program called the Deferred Action for Child Removal, also known as DACA.
DACA was designed to help unaccompanied minors immigrate legally. Immigrants under the age of 16 without any legal status who were present in the United States prior to the establishment of DACA are granted a two year renewable stay assuming they are enrolled as a student or are an active member of the workforce.
During the time of DACA’s implementation, Ibarra-Frayre was 22 years old, living in Milwaukee working in a legal services agency. She was able to apply for a DACA permit after she proved that she did not have a criminal record and that she never returned to Mexico.
“It actually makes me really sad that I need DACA in order to have just basic human rights, like the right to have an ID, the right to work, the right to move about freely,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “It is very upsetting; the more I think about the things that DACA affords, the angrier it makes me. How did we get to the point in the U.S. that we need to have people go through this to get basic human rights, like the right to not be afraid and the right to support their families?”
In December of 2014, the Obama administration attempted to expand the DACA program by broadening the restrictions, making a larger variety of immigrants eligible for the program.
The expansion was met with substantial backlash; 26 states sued the Southern District of Texas in the District Court in question of the constitutionality of DACA with the expansion and the Deferred Action for Parents of America program.
While Trump was insistent on the repeal of DACA during his presidential campaign, the Trump Administration released a list on of their demands in a deal to replace DACA on Oct. 8.
The list includes rigorous border security increases, financial aid to the President’s border wall, and making it more difficult for unaccompanied minors to enter the country in the first place.
“A lot of these people are in the military, they have jobs… I fully understand it,” said Trump during an interview with Sean Hannity on Oct. 11. “But if we’re going to do something, we have to get something in return. And what I want is tremendous border regulation. I want the wall.”
The government stopped processing new DACA applications on Oct. 5, declaring that they are only renewing pre-existing permits. The Trump Administration has left the responsibility of ‘fixing’ DACA to the legislative branch, who has until March 5, 2018 to make a change before DACA recipients start losing their legal status.
This leaves immigrants like Ibarra-Frayre and her family fearful of losing their established lives in America.
“With DACA, I’m able to build a very independent life for myself that I wasn’t able to have before,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “I have my own apartment, I have a full time job that I love, I can travel freely, I had plans of buying a home in the area. And now all of these things are up in the air.”
Now, Congress is faced with passing an immigration bill that satisfies the needs and wants of both pro and anti-immigration politicians. Republican Senators Thom Tillis and James Lankford have proposed the SUCCEED Act (Solution for Udocumented Children through Careers Employment Education and Defending Our Nation Act), which provides illegal aliens a 15-year path to citizenship. It would also prevent DACA recipients from sponsoring family members.
To be eligible, the applicant would have to have lived in the U.S. since June 15, 2012 and entered the country before the age of 16. This proposed bill does not solve the problem of the drawn-out process required to gain citizenship.
Some are asking for a bill that grants legal residency to immigrants and leads to a path of permanent residency. Liana Mulholland, an advocate for this Federal DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), is an activist for BAMN (The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary) who helps to organize protests and demonstrations in Detroit and surrounding areas. BAMN is a national organization with local chapters at university chapters.
“Everybody on DACA needs to have a way to be a citizen and protected from deportation,” Mulholland said. “There needs to be a way that everybody that’s… the 11 million undocumented people in the United States to also get a way to citizenship.”
To many immigrants, America is as much of a safe-haven as a land of opportunity. But because of America’s strict immigration laws, some are being sent back into a life of constant fear and distrust in their government, and creating stricter immigration laws would restrict immigrants from fleeing from that.
“[In America] there is no one coming to your house at the middle of the night and killing your family members in front of you,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “There aren’t gang members—unless you are caught up in really deep trouble—kidnapping your child asking you for ransom and sending you body parts. There aren’t politicians, for example in Mexico, who covered up the disappearance of college students, and three years later they still haven’t been found.”
The fate of these immigrants lies in the hands of Congress and the Trump Administration. Their decision determines whether Ibarra-Frayre and her family get to stay home or go back to Mexico, leaving behind the only life that they have.