Teenager prepares for life without immigrant parents
IT WAS this January, and 14year- old Emily stood in the bathroom at DuVal High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, waiting for a friend.
A soft- spoken freshman, Emily often felt overwhelmed in DuVal’s crush of rowdy students.
She glanced down to see a news alert on her phone: The Trump administration was cancelling temporary protected status for El Salvador, a government program that had allowed Emily’s parents, both Salvadoran natives, to live and work legally in the United States for the past 17 years.
According to the news, on Sept 9, 2019, her mother, Maria Rivas, and her father, Jose, would be ordered to leave the country.
This is not a scene anyone could have imagined in 1990 when Congress created temporary protected status, or TPS, a category of humanitarian relief for foreigners residing in the United States who could not return to their native countries because of environmental disasters, armed conflict or “other extraordinary temporary conditions.”
Most people from TPSdesignated countries who had a generally clean record were eligible, even if, like Emily’s parents, they’d originally come here as undocumented immigrants. ( The Washington Post agreed to withhold Emily’s last name, since she shares it with two non-American siblings whose immigration cases are currently in legal proceedings.)
As of October 2017, there were roughly 300,000 TPS beneficiaries from 10 countries living in the United States. These individuals came from a handful of Central American and African countries, along with Haiti, Syria, Yemen and Nepal. But by far the largest group were Salvadorans - close to 200,000 - who were granted TPS by George W. Bush in 2001, following two massive earthquakes that ravaged their country.
“While nothing in the ( TPS) statute suggests a pathway to permanent status, a lot of links and dependencies were created,” says Jayesh Rathod, a law professor and founding director of American University’s Immigrant Justice Clinic. “It’s only reasonable to assume that alongside the statutory factors, ( previous administrations were) looking at the practical reality and how uprooting that community wouldn’t be feasible, not just to El Salvador, but to American children.”
In cancelling TPS for Haitians, Hondurans, Nepalis, Sudanese, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, the Trump administration forced families like Emily’s to confront the question that past administrations had avoided: What would happen to all these American kids when their parents were officially ordered to leave the country?
The Department of Homeland Security had an answer. “We will coordinate with the Government of El Salvador to better understand what documents might be needed by US citizen children to enrol in local schools, access local health services, or other social
Now their children’s futures are very uncertain, which is something they’ve never faced before. News of the programme ending was a really acute event in their lives. Kathleen Roche, associate professor of prevention and community health
services,” a DHS spokeswoman wrote to me in June. In other words, the government expected nearly 193,000 American kids to leave the United States along with their parents. Simple as that.
Except it wasn’t. From the start, parents balked at the idea of uprooting their children from stable communities and removing them to a country plagued with poverty, corruption and gang violence. Come next September, many, perhaps most, will decide to take their chances by becoming undocumented and staying with their kids in the United States. But others, like Emily’s parents, may begin to see separation as a viable option - heading back to their country of origin while leaving their American- citizen children behind.
In 2023, when Emily turns 21, she could petition for her parents to obtain permanent status in the United States. But to have even a shot, they would have to prove they’d been compliant with American law. And that would mean leaving the country when ordered to do so.
Still, as often as Maria and Jose repeated these intentions - to follow the law and leave the country voluntarily with Ethan in tow - they seemed paralysed when it came to planning. There were so many questions: First among them, where would they go? To escape the gangs, Maria’s mother had fled to Nicaragua and Jose’s parents had moved into a gated community in San Salvador. But Maria, who cleans houses, and Jose, who installs and maintains cellular towers, covered the rent for both households. Without these American jobs, Emily’s grandparents would lose their homes, which meant her parents and Ethan would have nowhere to live in El Salvador.
It was all too overwhelming for them and even unimaginable. How could they be sitting in the suburban home they owned one day and then just up and leave it the next? Emily, however, was preparing for the worst. “My parents are going back to a terrible place, and I don’t want them to die,” she said, not quite looking at her parents across the table.
Emily’s two older siblings, Tita and Jose Jr. - who were born in El Salvador and had stayed behind with family when Maria and Jose came to America - were granted permission to leave El Salvador in 2015 under the Central American Minors parole programme, an Obamaera initiative designed to protect kids from violence. Roughly 1,500 minors were granted temporary and renewable permission to enter the country. Then in August 2017, about five months before Trump cancelled TPS for El Salvador, he cancelled CAM parole. Tita and Jose Jr. would now be sent back unless they could make a case for asylum.
Over the past year, Emily watched with increasing alarm as her older siblings gathered details for their case. She learned that to escape the gangs, Jose Jr. had moved out of San Salvador to a small town where there was no school. He eventually returned to the city to continue his education. But life there was akin to house arrest. Both he and Tita left home only for school and to retrieve basic necessities from the store. Even so, they’d been held up multiple times on city buses. If they lingered for any amount of time on their front steps or in their yard, gangs might harass them or shake them down. On one occasion, the police had asked Jose Jr. why he was walking on the street - a warning that he understood as a threat. On another occasion, Emily’s siblings told her that a family friend in the neighbourhood, a young man around Tita’s age, had recently been murdered by gangs.
In light of all the problems, Emily’s own concerns felt almost trivial: moving in with another family, transferring schools, being separated from her friends, whether she’d still have health insurance. She tried to put on a brave face. “I can take care of myself,” she would tell her parents. But panic attacks, like the one in January, continued. She also began experiencing debilitating migraines, which forced her to retreat to the nurse’s office or miss school altogether. ( Emily eventually received a scholarship to a smaller, private school for the autumn.) Maria took her to the paediatrician, who suggested that Emily visit both a neurologist and a therapist.
By spring, Emily was regularly retreating to her room, to lie on her twin bed and read through the affirmations she’d devised with her therapist and hung on the wall: “You can do it.” “Everything is OK.” “Don’t worry about it.” She’d also been working on visualisation exercises, closing her eyes and imagining herself in a peaceful spot. She often chose a beach at sunset. “The sand is really warm,” she said. “There’s blue, clear water and a forest behind us. And I’m there, with my friends and family, just having fun.”
In March, the ACLU of Southern California, the National Day Labourer Organising Network and the law firm Sidley Austin filed a lawsuit against the federal government for cancelling TPS for El Salvador and other countries.
Emily’s physical symptoms and fatalistic thoughts correspond to what therapists working with the adolescent children of TPS holders have been seeing. “The kids are experiencing mass anxiety,” says Rachel Osborn, senior clinical manager with the Mary’s Centre SchoolBased Mental Health Program, which partners with schools with large Central American populations. “Tense muscles, fatigue, worry, distraction, catastrophic thinking. Even if it’s a specific anxiety about their parents’ immigration status, it can become more globalized. Stressors in school that are normally manageable feel daunting and overwhelming.”
Kathleen Roche, associate professor of prevention and community health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, published a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health about the impact of recent immigration actions and news on parents’ mental health. The study examined 213 Central American parents in the suburb of an undisclosed city and found that nearly 84 per cent of TPS recipients feared their families would be separated and 61 per cent said their children had been negatively affected. Most striking was the finding that nearly 49 per cent of TPS holders were experiencing a high level of psychological distress, compared with 23 per cent of undocumented parents.
“Whereas the undocumented parents may be accustomed to feeling that their status and security is vulnerable, the parents with TPS are accustomed to having protections and living lives legally,” Roche told me. “Now their children’s futures are very uncertain, which is something they’ve never faced before. News of the programme ending was a really acute event in their lives.” She added that when teenage children are raised with parents suffering from anxiety, the kids are more likely to endure a slew of problems including the risk of substance abuse, falling behind in school and mental health problems.— Washington Post.