Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
SHE’S MOM TO 1,148
When U.S. agents take away undocumented parents, she takes the children
In November, she had 900. Today: 1,148. That’s how many children consider Nora Sandigo their other mom.
Some live as far away as California; others, within her Miami home. They have one thing in common: They are the children of undocumented parents. Afraid of deportation, their parents give Sandigo legal authority to care for them if immigration officials come knocking.
And they are coming now at a greatly increasing rate. The families of about 250 kids have sought Sandigo’s help after President Donald Trump’s call for widespread deportations. Her attorney, Alfonso Oviedo, said he’s not aware of any law that would limit the number of kids she could accept.
“We have no choice. We have to say yes to people,” said Sandigo, 51, who fled her home in war-torn Nicaragua in the 1980s. “If this were my case, and no one said yes, I would be dead.”
Sandigo, a mother of two who owns a nursing
home business and a plant nursery, does far more than just be there in case a parent is detained. She delivers food to roughly 200 families on a regular basis. She drives kids to doctor appointments and signs school documents. And she invites dozens of them at a time for dinner that she cooks at home.
Sometimes, the parents entrust their children to Sandigo even though they haven’t met her. And sometimes she’s not sure where the money will come from to help the families she already serves. Nevertheless, she makes room. She keeps an expanding database that tracks each child: who they are, date of birth, address, phone numbers, where to go to pick them up.
The kids, she said, are ready to call her if something happens to their parents. So she must be ready at any time to make them a bed in her six-bedroom house or in one of the few open rooms in her nursing home business. It’s a moral commitment, she says, to provide for the children she calls her own.
“When you go there and you open the fridge, there is nothing. Then you understand there is a real need,” she said. “It doesn’t matter where they are from, who they are, how they look, what they think, if they are thankful or not. I think there is no need to think about that.”
Fleeing war in Nicaragua
Sandigo and her husband, Reymundo Otero, grew up in Nicaragua, in the throes of war.
Otero, 49, was 13 years old and playing basketball with friends when some men forced them into trucks. They drove the kids up to the mountains, handed them AK-47s and demanded the kids guard the coffee plants. The kids slept on wet, muddy floors. They ate small rations. One of his friends accidentally shot and killed two of the other kids.
About the same time, in Otero’s hometown, Sandigo was watching her classmates disappear. One of them, she said, didn’t show up to a meeting with the Sandinistas, a U.S.-backed rebel group. So they killed him, she said.
One night, they’d heard that the group was going door to door to take men to fight their cause. Her father sent her brothers to work on a farm far away and told her to leave the country. She went to Managua, where the international embassies were. All were closed, but Venezuela’s door was cracked open so she ran inside and sought asylum.
Sandigo moved to Venezuela, France and then Miami in the late 1980s. She worked for a United Nations organization that helped other immigrants with their documentation.
Several years later, Sandigo was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit aimed at getting the U.S. to grant asylum to Nicaraguans. In response, Congress passed a law allowing in immigrants from several countries, including Nicaragua. And Sandigo got noticed.
A Peruvian mother called from a detention center, asking Sandigo to take legal authority of her two children. Sandigo said yes. And so it began.
An epic grocery stop
On a Friday this month, Sandigo pulled up to a house in Homestead, her minivan packed with enough food to stock the shelves of the 15 waiting families.
As soon as she popped open the door, a young girl ran to her arms and a barrage of kids surrounded her, wrapping their arms around her knees. More than 30 children came to the house that day. And any one of them could come live with her — maybe temporarily, maybe permanently — if their parents get detained.
But for now, she’s the mother who brings food, toys, clothes and candy — following an epic grocery stop. She and Ritibh Kumar, who lives with her because his parents were deported, went to the supermarket in Kendall and cleared shelves of cookies, coffee and soda.
Kumar bagged five tomatoes, stashed them in his cart and then repeated it 10 times. Sandigo slid dozens of chicken breast packages onto the bottom rack of her cart. A gallon of milk for each family, eggs, corn flour, the essentials. When one cart filled up, it was time to get another. In the end, the bill totaled about $450, and the food was jammed into five different carts. Sometimes she feeds 50 families at once, and these trips cost her $2,000.
She does this between trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with lawmakers in an attempt to sway them toward an immigration policy that leaves families intact. And while working with attorneys on another class-action lawsuit that seeks to end the deportation of parents of U.S.-born children and establish a path to legal status for them.
Sometimes, she asks herself why she does this. Sometimes, she asks Otero how all of these families have come to rely on her for so much. So many agencies, priests, churches or politicians could do what she does, she says. “And yet they come to me,” she said. “And I have no power.”
No promises
Desperation. That’s what brings them to her, she says.
As in the case of Dora, who gave Sandigo legal power to care for her four children after her husband was deported to El Salvador. When he was taken, they lost a huge portion of their income. So they stopped renting the whole house and now rent one bedroom in that house.
Or in the case of Valerie and Matthew Travi, whose family was deported to Colombia. Their mother had never met Sandigo — she had seen her on CNN — when she called and asked whether her Florida-born children could return to the U.S. and stay with her. They had been threatened with kidnapping in their new land.
Or in the case of Erica, a high school student in Miami-Dade County. Her mother, a Mexican immigrant, contacted Sandigo after Trump was elected because her husband has traffic violations on his record and she fears he could get deported if he gets stopped again.
Sandigo insists she doesn’t promise anything. She can’t. Her organization, the Nora Sandigo Foundation, operates largely off volunteer hours, supply donations and worldwide monetary donations — last month from a Moroccan princess.
But when the coffers are low, she must dip into her family’s own wallet. Sometimes she has to bring the families less than usual.
“At least they know that if something happens in their family they would have a place to have a roof, a prayer for them,” she said.
Keeping families together
It’s not clear precisely how many American-born children have lost their parents to deportation, but the most recent report available stated that Immigration and Customs deported about 5,450 immigrants claiming U.S.-born children in the second half of 2015.
That was under President Barack Obama’s administration, when agents targeted a narrower group for deportation than today. Trump has issued executive orders that call for immigration officers to find and deport a broader pool of those in the country illegally. Those targeted include anyone who has committed an action that could be considered criminal, misrepresented themselves before a government agency or, “in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise poses a risk to public safety or national security.”
Within Trump’s first 100 days of presidency, officials arrested more than 10,800 non-criminals. During the same period last year, they arrested about 4,200, according to Immigration and Customs officials.
People commonly are getting detained when police stop them on the road and arrest them for driving without a license, said Victoria Mesa-Estrada, an attorney with Florida Legal Services. Undocumented immigrants cannot get Florida driver’s licenses and can only use their original driver’s license for a short period of time.
So more families are making plans for what to do if mom or dad get detained, she said. If they have relatives or friends willing to take on the responsibility, they can sign power of attorney over to them. If they have no one to look after their children in their absence, they could risk losing their kids to the foster care system, Mesa-Estrada said.
Immigration agents rarely refer children to the state at the scene of an arrest, said Mark Moore, field office director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations. Instead, they will help the detainee get in touch with a family member or friend to take their child, Moore said. If both parents are undocumented, the agent may opt to take only one parent so the other is there for the children, he said.
Have you ever been hungry?
Sandigo and Otero have had up to 20 people living with them at once because of deportations.
Sandigo’s phones are constantly ringing. Someone needs a bed. Someone needs a drive to the hospital. Someone needs her to connect them with an attorney.
But she makes time simply to do what mothers do: comfort her loved ones.
She brings diapers and prayers to a new mother in Pompano Beach whose husband was deported and soon killed in Honduras. And she welcomes to her home a teenager, whose parents were deported, by buying him Cuban coffee, placing an American flag on his bed and making juice for him from fruit he had just picked.
Otero said he doesn’t remember the last time the couple took a vacation. Sandigo’s time is constantly taken by one of the hundreds of people she helps. But Otero said the kids need all the help they can give them.
“Have you ever been hungry — truly hungry?” he asks.
Sandigo has many volunteers but doesn’t always have consistent help. She says she doesn’t know how she could take on even one more child. But then she reflects about how she had no one when she moved to America. How she cried for her father, her mother. How she doesn’t want the kids to suffer like “little Norita.”
“Everyone has dreams exactly like us,” she said. “Sometimes they can’t fulfill their dreams.”