In this op-ed, author Maria E. Andreu explains what it feels like to cross the United States-Mexico border undocumented, and why it’s wrong to separate parents and their children.
Many people who hear about children getting separated from their parents at the border between the United States and Mexico are horrified. I am that, plus something more. For me, it stirs up old fears, a past still palpable in my everyday life in unexpected ways. I was eight years old when I crossed the border, holding my mother’s hand. For me, it is a personal and retroactive fear. What if it had been me? What is happening to these children?
New data from the Department of Homeland Security reported on by the Associated Press indicates that 2,000 children have been separated from their parents at the border during a six-week period. That’s just less than 50 a day. People leave their homes and make the treacherous trip north, sometimes riding on the tops of trains, sometimes paying unscrupulous “coyotes,” or people smugglers, to get them to the border. They are thirsty, they are hungry, and they are often escaping unimaginable violence. Knowing that their trip can end with the worst thing that can happen to a parent and a child — separation — is almost more than I can bear.
My own trip was a little different than most. My parents had come to the U.S. when I was a baby and overstayed their time on a visitors’ visa. When I was six, my grandfather died in my parents’ home country, and after much anguished debate, my parents decided my mom and I should go to be with family during the difficult time. My dad stayed behind to send us money. We were supposed to be gone only two weeks. But our record of having overstayed a visitors’ visa made getting another one impossible, and two weeks turned into two months, which turned into nearly two years. I forgot what my dad looked like. I yearned for my old toys, and my red, white, and blue bike. We trekked to the consulate, tried to call in favors. Nothing worked.
Finally, as a last resort, my dad connected with some coyotes who said they could arrange to cross us over the border. My dad worked as a dishwasher in two restaurants in New York, so he didn’t make much money, but he saved up the sum they requested, plus enough to fly us to Mexico. We took an old bus up from Mexico City to just outside the U.S. border, in Tijuana.
The coyotes took us to a dusty, dilapidated shack on an old, dirt road, surrounded by nothingness, with the U.S. border on the horizon. Inside, there was just a mattress on the floor, and nothing in the rustic cupboards, no running water, and no bathroom. There was an outhouse – the first one I’d ever seen – buzzing with fat flies and a smell I’ll never forget. “They’ll come for you soon,” they told us. I thought they meant that night. They didn’t. We spent the night alone, my mother reading from an old novel someone had left strewn on the floor until it was too dark to read. Then, she put her purse down on the mattress so I wouldn’t have to rest my face on the unrecognizable stains.
The days passed. Groups of people headed for the border came to this way station, then made their way to the border once darkness fell. The coyotes had a network, and the ones responsible for crossing us didn’t come for us. We weren’t Mexican nationals and, the coyotes explained, the penalty for getting caught crossing us would be greater for them. So they argued about how to get us into the U.S. My mother offered to walk in the desert, even though she was wearing not-very-sensible shoes. They said no. They suggested they could smuggle us in the trunk of a car, but my mother’s fear of small spaces put an end to that plan.
Here’s the thing I remember most: They offered to cross us apart from each other. It will be easier to cross you separately, they said. First the little girl, then you. My mother recoiled at the mere suggestion. Absolutely not, she told them. We have come all this way together. We stay together. I remember the look in the coyote’s eyes when she said that, a look of understanding, of tenderness. Even this outlaw knew the terrible toll of separating mother and child.
My story resolves too easily, perhaps. I feel survivor’s guilt when I know how easy I had it and how painfully hard so many of those who have come after me have it now. They took us to the Mexican side of the beach next to San Diego, California. An American man came over and acted like we were his family. He walked us over to a car on the U.S. side. There was no fence then, no barbed wire extending into the sea. (Decades later, while on a book tour to promote my first novel, I went to the spot and took a picture in front of the place where we crossed.) Ten years after that day, an amnesty law, put into place by President Ronald Reagan’s administration, put me on a path to citizenship. There had been pain, yes, and fear, and a long, seemingly endless unfurling of doubts about why I wasn’t good enough to belong here when this was the only place I ever wanted to call home. But for me there was a happy ending.
Few moments gave me more joy than raising my right hand to take the oath of citizenship with my infant daughter on my hip, just over two decades after my border crossing. I was proud because I could finally be a part of a country that throughout its history has been a beacon for the world, a shining light for human rights, for rule of law, for compassion. I had seen it in my own life. I had been one of those upon whom the light was shed.
So it’s hard to watch the news. It’s hard to see the callousness of this administration’s decisions, the appalling lack of humanity in the practice of tearing mothers from their children. That old smuggler hadn’t had the heart to do it to my mother and me all those years ago, but now it’s being done under the banner of law. When I hear stories like that, it feels like that grand beacon is being snuffed out.
But I also know better. Turning off that light isn’t that easy. And there are so many more of us fighting to keep it bright.
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