Teenager to pay for dad’s mistake
Deportation looms for father who returned to U.S. to take care of daughter
Some days Hulissa Aguilar, a freshman at Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo, has to force herself to get out of bed.
It’s not because she loathes distance learning. It’s because each day she gets closer to losing her father, Hugo Aguilar, who is scheduled to be deported to Mexico before the end of the year.
“I just have too much stress going on in my life,” the 14yearold student told
me as we sat in the backyard of the San Lorenzo home she shares with family. “A lot of times throughout the day, the reality of this whole situation really hits me. I’m really gonna lose my dad. What am I gonna do with my life?”
Aguilar put his face in his hands as his daughter spoke.
“I should be enjoying my teenage years,” Hulissa continued. “I should be worried about my grades, but right now I feel like that’s the least of my problems. School is less stressful than this whole situation.”
This is the situation: Aguilar, the father of three children born in the United States, including Hulissa, has lived in this country for almost three decades. A carpenter since graduating from high school, he’s known as a devoted father. But 15 years ago, he was sentenced for possession with the intent to distribute drugs. After completing the twoyear sentence in 2007, Aguilar was transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody before being removed from the country.
Aguilar soon illegally reentered the U.S., he says, to support Hulissa, who was a toddler. He is her primary caretaker.
In March 2017, Aguilar was arrested following a domestic dispute. No charges were filed, but he was held overnight. The next day, ICE picked him up and he was held in detention for more than a year before being released on an $80,000 bond. A immigration judge ordered his removal.
Aguilar’s application for a stay of deportation or removal is his last chance. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office is “in touch with the family and working to help them,” according to one of the senator’s aides. Nancy O’Malley, the Alameda County district attorney, wrote a letter of support. Aguilar expects a final decision by Dec. 11.
As we embark on a truncated Thanksgiving and holiday season because of the raging pandemic, I’m thinking about families like the Aguilars. The fear of deportation puts unimaginable stress on immigrants and their families, as undocumented immigrants have to worry about the neighborhood and workplace sweeps that could rip them from their families and homes. And many immigrants are suffering financially because of the pandemic.
Immigration law hasn’t been addressed since 1996. Our approach to immigration needs to be overhauled, especially after almost four years of draconian enforcement by a presidential administration that stoked nativist fear. How is it sound policy to sanction separating children from their parents at the border and then losing contact with more than 500 parents?
In school and church, we’re taught that the tradition of Thanksgiving began with the pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a feast together. What isn’t widely taught is that the European settlers pilfered the land used to build America from indigenous inhabitants. Why is it that we celebrate the immigrants who formed this country but demonize the immigrant experience in the country they built?
“Whenever people are afraid, for any reason, whether it’s for their health, or their safety, or their economic security, immigrants become a target,” said Susan J. Cohen, an immigration attorney. “And it’s not just in this country, but every country in the world, because it’s the ‘other.’ People who especially don’t interact with people from other countries tend to be much more afraid of them and think of them as a threat.”
I asked several immigration experts for their take on what Presidentelect Joe Biden’s immigration policy will mean for immigrants.
Will people like Aguilar have any hope of staying in the country? Jessica Bobadilla, an immigration attorney, said her office is receiving a lot of calls from people wondering the same.
“We’re hoping that we could have a more intelligent and detailed conversation with ICE like we were often able to have over four years ago,” she said.
While President Barack Obama’s administration deported an average of 382,000 immigrants each year during his presidency, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data, Bobadilla said ICE and other agencies were more willing to work with attorneys.
“I think that allowed us more lines of communication or the ability to
“They just look at that one thing he did 15 years ago, rather than what he has done in this time. They ... don’t see that he’s changed.” Hulissa Aguilar, San Lorenzo high school freshman
kind of give a human face to our clients and to present that human face to the government,” she said. “And the government had a structure to try to at least consider that. Whereas now, we don’t really have lines of communication that are easy, because the officers and the agents, while they will listen to legal arguments, they don’t have that structure of prosecutorial discretion.”
My colleague Tatiana Sanchez reported that in his first 100 days in office, Biden has pledged to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a program established under Obama in 2012 that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the United States illegally when they were young.
“You could imagine, as part of a comprehensive immigration reform, some program like the program that President Obama proposed in the last couple of years of his administration, which was to provide temporary legal status, moving into a more permanent legal status, for the parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents,” said Louis DeSipio, a political science professor at UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences.
A prior removal would be hard to overlook under any administration, experts told me. Aguilar said he was 16 when he came to the U.S. in 1995, settling with his brother in Hayward. He said he fled violence in Sinaloa, a state on Mexico’s western coast. As a boy, he said, he witnessed a bus driver get shot in the head. He said his father was kidnapped in Mexico. He doesn’t want to go back.
“I commit one mistake. She wasn’t even born, and she’s paying for it,” he said, referring to Hulissa. “My other kids, they have to pay for it. If I had to leave, I don’t know what’s gonna happen to them.”
I met Aguilar and Hulissa at a rally in front of ICE’s San Francisco office on Oct. 27. Hulissa told the crowd she was glad Aguilar came back for her.
“They just look at that one thing he did 15 years ago, rather than what he has done in this time,” she said at her home in San Lorenzo. “They just still define him as still that person, but they don’t see that he’s changed.”
Every day she tells Aguilar that the fight to stay isn’t over. And he believes her.
“I belong to this community. I’ve been here since I was a teenager,” Aguilar said. “I’m doing everything for my family, for my community. I have faith in God that he’s gonna make a miracle for us.”