A couple, one of them an undocumented immigrant, begin weighing the risks of where to build their lives
Mexico or the US
WHEN Donald Trump announced that he was running for president in a 2015 speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, Rachel McCormick declared to her husband, Irvi Cruz, “If he wins, we’re leaving.”
She was a US-born high school teacher from the Philadelphia suburbs; he was a doting stay-at-home father who had immigrated illegally from Oaxaca, Mexico.
The night after the election, sitting in their Harlem apartment, Irvi was confident about the move south.
“I need to start building something and I think if we wait longer it’s going to keep getting harder,” he said of the decade they had been together, all along believing that a policy would eventually be enacted allowing him to legalise.
But Rachel was having second thoughts. She looked down at the living room floor, where their daughters’ picture books and toys were scattered.
“But is that an environment where I want to go?” she asked. “From New York City, where my kids are in decent public schools, to a place where schools are shut down most of the year because of teacher strikes?”
The question of where to lay down roots looms over the country’s estimated 9 million families of mixed immigration status, in which legal residents and those here without authorisation share the same roof. For them, deportation means a family torn apart.
For decades, politicians have raised and then dashed the hopes of the roughly 11 million undocumented residents in the United States; Trump’s election seems to have pushed off any clear-cut resolution of their status even further. He has vowed to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants but has been fuzzy on the details of how his policies will play out.
Early optimism
Because Irvi had travelled back and forth to Mexico ille- gally on several occasions, he faced a penalty that prevented him from applying for legal status through Rachel, who is a US citizen.
So the couple were boxed in by two bad options: take a chance on a new life in the small, struggling town in Mexico where Irvi grew up, or stay here and try to ignore the shaky ground beneath them.
They were as optimistic as can be at their wedding seven years earlier – it was a melding of two cultures that, at the time, felt utterly American.
Inside a barn in the Hudson Valley, Irvi stomped on a glass and their guests, half of them with Mexican accents, shouted mazel tov! Friends prepared Oaxacan mole. They danced all night, hora, then cumbia.
They had met at a soccer game in Poughkeepsie, New York, where Rachel had attended college at Vassar and Irvi worked construction. She was studious and shy, taken by Irvi’s playfulness. They bonded over feeling invisible, Irvi because of his immigration status and Rachel because she had been overweight all her life.
They always figured that Irvi would be able to legalise eventually – so did the immigration lawyers whose advice they sought every few years. But under a 1996 law, Irvi would have to leave the United States for 10 years to apply to re-enter legally. Even then, the family would have to prove they would face extreme hardship without Irvi so he could return, which would be difficult because Rachel was the main breadwinner.
“I guess I just always assumed I could somehow transfer some of my privilege to him,” Rachel said. first
Threatening neighbours
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They had always talked hypothetically about relocating their family to Mexico if Irvi were deported or the pressure became too much. But while they were still dating, his status had felt more like an annoying hangnail than an aneurysm that could burst at any time and destroy their lives.
That assessment changed when they had Sara and Ana, their daughters. Rachel earned good money and benefits as a teacher, so Irvi stayed home with the girls, now 2 and 4, during the day and worked nights as a restaurant server. But having an undocumented stay-at-home parent has come with risks.
A testy downstairs neighbour has threatened to call authorities, annoyed by the girls’ playing loudly. One afternoon last summer, Irvi borrowed Rachel’s parents’ car to take the girls to Coney Island. Distracted by their excitement, he nearly drove straight into a police checkpoint at the park’s entrance. He pulled over, shaking and “freaking out”, and called Rachel to come and pick them up.
When Rachel told Irvi they would move if Trump won the election, she was reacting, in part, to the candidate’s remarks – but she was also goading her husband. She had often felt guilty that he had sacrificed more than she had for their arrangement, though Irvi would never admit it.
Irvi agreed to Rachel’s proposal, a little too eagerly, and in the ensuing weeks, began to joke that he was encouraging friends to vote for Trump. Rachel took the commitment seriously but never imagined that she would have to follow through with it.
On Election Day, she voted