The New American Contract: Facing Deportation

Yearning to breathe free

“To cross an ocean
You must first love the ocean
Before you love the far shore.”
(Suzanne Buffman, “On Duration”)

For months, despite the distractions of daily life, I’ve known I’d have to be in immigration court; however, it wasn’t until the federal judge, in his practiced monotone, through the haze that fills any room of teeming bodies huddled from every corner of the world, said, “We’re here for the deportation proceedings of Dujanaht-Al-Rayan Tahat,” that the full weight of the decisions made in that courtroom hit me.

There’s a sedative effect in immigration court created by the combination of a packed gallery, the pastel trends of past decades, and the low constant hum of the various interpreters in the background. The ostensible stillness of these rooms bely the drama and anxiety simmering beneath the surface. Each person or family who steps up to the plaintiff’s table is placing the trajectory of their entire life in the jurisprudence of a federal court system that barely recognizes their existence.

In the pews, every one of us waiting our turn says some version of the same prayer — regardless of faith, regardless of language — that the judge and government attorney are having a good day: that they slept well, had a good breakfast, or didn’t get in a fight with their partner on their way out the door.

The romantic view of the immigrant experience is — in America’s best moments — one of self-determination and self-reliance. It celebrates the courage required to strike out to a new country, the greatest country, and build a successful life out of nothing. Perhaps ironically, perhaps not — a deportation hearing has no such grand vision, lacks all the luster of golden bootstraps and packs all the potential for devastation in a small, overcrowded courtroom.

The man ahead of me on the day’s docket was a non-English-speaking Nicaraguan asylum seeker. I never saw his face. He sat in front of me in a black leather jacket and hoodie, completely still, interpreter headphones on, staring ahead the whole time. Before he could plead the substance of his case, his lawyer, the judge, and the US attorney ping-ponged for 10 minutes about adjusting his name on file. It wasn’t his. It wasn’t the name he carried with him from the place he was born, the place he left, the place he now feared: Santa-Maria. In the service of expediency or perhaps a misunderstanding, it was separated into middle and last names. An insipid sin. To correct it, however, took a motion, a clarification of the motion, an objection, an amendment to the original motion, a withdrawal of the objection, an acceptance of the motion, a clarification of the acceptance, and, finally, a decision. In the shadow of this procedural nightmare, Santa-Maria’s lawyer explains his client’s credible fear of returning to Nicaragua, but because he lacks the right forms or something just as trivial, his case is pushed out to 2021.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. It’s this seemingly innocuous exchange that sublimates the magnitude of the choices made in a few weighty minutes by a federal judge hearing any given case. The politeness masks the terror of everyone in the room.

One by one, names are crossed off the list ahead of me; suddenly, I find myself crossing the bar, seated before the judge. My lawyer reminds me to just say “yes” to the first couple questions and to let him do the rest. I’d been reassured that this is a simple, procedural motion that — while initially rejected by the court — would only require a simple explanation to be reversed. Thereby freeing me, finally, to become a Permanent Resident of the US. It’s a foregone conclusion, I was told.

My lawyer laid out our case just as he had in the pro bono meeting room in the hallway earlier. The judge seemed receptive. The US government’s lawyer, however, stood fast. When pressed by the judge, the other lawyer spent a few minutes getting acquainted with my case for — what I can only presume was — the first time. Finally, she cited previous applications for a green card had been denied in 2002, 2004, and 2008. The US government would not accept the motion to separate my present circumstances as an adult married to a US citizen with three US citizen children from the case file wherein I was listed as a dependent.

My lawyer appealed to the judge — surely he had the authority to overrule this obvious and egregious technicality. But as the judge pointed out, the US government had standing.

“I’m sympathetic to your argument, but there’s nothing I can do.”

The judge doesn’t look at me as he says this. The inflection in his voice never changes. Yet oddly, I believe him. In closing, he recites a mechanized last verse on the gears and cogs of the thing; he asks me if I understand that I would be required to return on January 5th of 2021 and that if I didn’t, I would be removed from this country.

“Yessir.”

“What was that?”

“Yessir.”

I have to speak up the second time. I hadn’t even realized I had so suddenly collapsed into myself. That I wasn’t looking at who I was talking to. That my vision had fallen out of focus, my voice was inaudible.

There’s a particular kind of hope that comes to fruition only when an immigrant finally steps foot on United States soil. Not the hope about the American Dream bought and sold in political campaigns, but rather a hopeful prerequisite in punching that golden ticket.

When my family left the Philippines, and then again when we left Jordan, there was never a guarantee we would arrive as we did in an America as it was. We knew intuitively and recognized quickly that the path towards the platonic American Dream would not at all resemble what we were told nor even what we conceived. We learned in those first years that a college degree didn’t preclude you from picking fruit in the orchards, or that even other immigrant children, out of self-preservation, will find ways to make you different from them and, in turn, the native-born white kids. To continue on our journey, we came across hope’s sister: faith.

That hope and faith is the basis of my identity and my worldview. It has to be. As I’ve grown and moved through the world, I’ve seen it echo in countless ways. The prospect of becoming a teenage father, the birth of each of my children, the loss of a partner — all seemingly sudden — required a strength drawn from a simple and well-known fact for all immigrants: that all of this has never been promised.

Perhaps that’s why immigrants are so easy to prey on. We never expected any of this to be easy. Our very sense of being relies on ever-shifting existential circumstances, which, frankly, warps and relativizes a deeply personal sense of justice. Our inability to vote — the singular, most important participatory act in a democracy — intensifies the distance between immigrant communities and the political process. The notion of consolidating and exercising political will is met with skepticism, for a range of reasons, mistakenly or not. We’re here, after all, but by the grace of our gods. For politicians, there just aren’t that many votes on immigration reform. That’s why you don’t see immigration town halls. And in the broad conversation of America, it’s what makes us easy to dismiss, to put away in detention centers without due process, to summarily deport without consideration for our shared humanity.

Sitting in the court lobby before my hearing, I watched a lawyer step out to smoke a cigarette minutes before his client’s deportation proceedings. He turned around on his way out the door and casually said to his client — who was too eager to know he was being dismissed, too willing to accept the professed goodness of his lawyer — “Go on in. They won’t start without me.”

It was on the elevator ride down that I had to remind my own lawyer about my case history. That I was a minor listed as a dependent on my father’s application when those previous cases had been denied. He had forgotten or never bothered to remind himself. This is the man who didn’t hide his surprise when he learned I had not just attended but, in fact, graduated college.

These are the guys in our corner.

It’s not like we don’t know any better or that the impossible position we’ve been put in doesn’t make us want to pull our hair out. It’s not as if we aren’t always considering what it means to be a citizen of or how to be alive in America today. In some ways, we rely on the fluidity of circumstance, the arbitrariness of citizenship. That is what called us here.

Of course immigration reform hasn’t happened. Of course no real effort has been made to mobilize immigrants. Of course we’ve allowed the conversation to devolve into loosely coded travel bans and racist attacks. A Sikh man in Kent gets shot in his own driveway after being told to go back to his own country. Two Indian engineers are killed in a Kansas City bar. A Salvadoran brain tumor patient gets detained by ICE during treatment.

Case after delayed case, layers of procedure that gunk up the system, and over-worked and exploitative lawyers line the hallways of our immigration courts. And these are just the black and brown bodies fortunate enough to see the inside of a decaying courtroom. It’s a thick smog I didn’t notice earlier that I have to wade through on my way out. I can still smell it on my hands as I drive away from that place, on the way to pick up my daughter from chess club. When I get to her, she tells me about that day’s field trip, her plans for her birthday, and a new journal she’s eager to fill.