Tearing families apart won’t secure our borders
When ICE hunted me down, my school and community fought back
Guards shuffled me through the damp, icy air of a February morning, my hands and legs in shackles. I stepped from the cold air onto a bus filled with people sitting in frigid darkness. I sat, dropped my head and began to cry.
I had gone in less than 24 hours from high school soccer player to incarcerated immigrant. It started with my school’s police force turning me over to Harris County sheriff ’s deputies. They took me to jail, gave my information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then, instead of releasing me after I’d paid bail, they held me until ICE agents came for me.
Like many other Houston high school seniors, I had been busy with sports, college applications and spending time with friends and family. Except there is one thing different about me. I don’t have “papers.”
Being undocumented has challenges for young people. I used to feel that school was pointless because I thought I couldn’t go to college. Playing soccer was the only thing that made me keep going. Learning students without papers could go to college changed my life overnight.
But as I sat on that bus, I trembled, believing my dream of going to college was over. Even worse, I thought I was going to be sent away and lose my family forever, all at the hands of people I had been taught to avoid since I first understood the words la migra — the ICE agents who now had me in their custody. I knew them as the ones who take people from my community send them to places like Honduras, the country where my father was murdered. The place we had traveled for months to escape.
Sitting captive on that bus, my thoughts were of survival. My tears poured for all that I was losing, for all the uncertainty and for the fear that I would be deported to Honduras.
Immigrant communities and their allies across the United States are calling for ICE to be abolished. The agency is destroying our communities, taking our friends and loved ones from us, brutalizing our neighbors and family members and sending them to face violence abroad. The world has seen what happens when a government agency is given endless resources. We have seen what they do to children and families.
Calls to abolish ICE are calls for justice for our community, for an end to the abductions, and to the hunting and cag-
ing of people for the profit of private detention centers. They are calls for freedom for immigrants and for keeping families together, keeping communities whole.
For three days, they moved me from center to center, and each time I was certain that this was the bus that would take me away from my life forever.
One day, Cortez Downey, the teacher who had encouraged me to apply to college, came to visit me. It was a relief to see someone familiar, and I began to cry. I knew my family could not afford an attorney, but Mr. Downey told me that he and others from school were raising money to help me.
Days later, hundreds of students and teachers from my high school took to the streets to call for my freedom and an end to the collaboration between HISD police and ICE. I witnessed the power of a community united to confront injustice.
After two months in detention, countless calls to local officials and thousands of petition signatures, I was reunited with my family while my case for asylum continues to play out in court. Since then, I have been able to catch up with my school work, I graduated high school and accepted admission to a university where I will study computer science. I have also joined other undocumented immigrant youth in United We Dream’s Summer of Dreams program for voter education and leadership development.
I have seen how a community united for freedom can transform cruelty into strength and fear into collective power. We can use our voice and our power to move politicians to do the right thing: to abolish ICE and pave a path for full and equal rights for undocumented immigrants. This moment in history calls on us to recognize the humanity of the people who, like me, are being targeted and terrorized every day. We must lead with love and fight for the dignity that every person deserves.