Love across the border: a couple’s 13-year quest to be reunited in the US
Tom Kobylecy and Yedid Sánchez’s budding romance took place amid the intoxicating odor of woody oak and sawdust of a Chicago-area Home Depot. Her cleaning shift started at 6am, just as his shift restocking store shelves was ending. He would linger to strike up a conversation, but Yedid, a native of Cuernavaca, Mexico, spoke little English. The few Spanish words he could muster came out in a nasally midwestern accent.
After a few stilted attempts at conversation with the help of bilingual friends, she asked for his nombre, Spanish for name. “I thought she was asking me for my number,” Tom said. So, naturally, he gave her his number. A week later he asked her out for pizza. On their second date, he asked her to go fishing. Tom caught three and prepared them shake ’n’ bake-style. Yedid didn’t let on that the meal was not particularly appetizing – if she had they might not have kissed later that evening.
Comical misunderstandings and fumbled translations with the aid of a pocket dictionary were a feature of those first weeks together. On one of their dates, they agreed to meet at a restaurant, not realizing that they were thinking of different restaurants that had the same name. “He was angry because I didn’t show up, I was angry because he didn’t show up,” Yedid laughed.
Logistical snags aside, Tom had a good feeling about where things were headed with Yedid, even if others expressed doubts. “[A friend] told me I was naive, that Yedid was just using me to get her immigration papers,” Tom said.
Despite the objections of his friend, he asked her to move into his one-bedroom apartment after a few months of dating. Tom told his family and friends that he would not rush things with Yedid even more than he already had. It was a promise he had no intention of keeping. “I was planning on marrying her when we moved in together,” he said. “I didn’t tell her right away, but I knew.”
A few months later, at the Aurelio’s Pizza restaurant where they had their first date, Tom proposed with his mother’s wedding ring, and Yedid accepted without hesitation. “We couldn’t afford a big wedding, we were broke,” Tom said. They married in January 2004 in a Cook County courthouse. Only a few close friends and family were in attendance. “It was a shaky start,” Yedid said of their nuptials.
They had no money to speak of, but dreamed of someday buying a house in a middle-class neighborhood where their son, Teddy, born in their first year of marriage, would play in the street.
But their life together was shrouded in a secret. Yedid was not living legally in the country.
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Yedid’s parents operated a food stand called Antojitos Doña Mago in Cuernavaca that served quesadillas, gorditas, and tacos. Her father’s poor health shifted the burden of running the business, and household, to her mother. The money they made from the food stand was barely enough to keep the family afloat, much less pay for the medication her father required for Type 2 diabetes. His condition had already led to a heart attack and a blood clot in his leg.
Their struggle was familiar to the community, and the remedy was the promise of a well-paid job in the United States for anyone willing to risk unauthorized immigration. “My mother didn’t like the idea of me going,” Yedid said, “but she preferred to give me her blessing than to have me leave without it.”
In February 1997, at just 15, Yedid crossed the US-Mexico border for the first time, and made her way to Chicago.
Yedid lived under the radar, cobbling together work as a housekeeper and looking after the children of wellto-do families. She had dutifully sent money home to help her parents until her life with Tom changed everything. Tom did not want her to risk working illegally, fearing that it could get her deported. And neither of them wanted a life in the shadows for little Teddy. Immigration attorneys cautioned them against navigating the immigration system alone. However, the cost of their expertise was prohibitive, and besides, Tom was confident he could handle the necessary paperwork on his own.
Everything went smoothly when they were summoned to appear for an interview at the US consulate general in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. They discussed the possibility that Yedid might be slapped with a three-year ban from the country for her border-crossing transgressions. If that happened, Tom would remain in the US, while Yedid and Teddy would stay with her parents in Mexico. He would visit them as often as possible.
She walked into the interview nervous, yet upbeat. She came back in tears.
Yedid was barred from returning to the US for no less than 10 years.
“She said, ‘It’s over, if you want to leave me I understand,’” Tom recalled.
She confessed to having twice crossed the border without authorization, the second after a trip home to visit her parents. But in the eyes of US immigration authorities, Yedid was a felon, legally no different than a human smuggler or drug trafficker. She took Teddy with her to Cuernavaca, and Tom returned to Chicago. “Coming home to see Teddy’s toys on the floor,” Tom said, “was the saddest time in my life.”
Staring at his son’s toys, Tom resolved to keep his family together. “I thought ‘if I don’t do something, Teddy may never be in the United States again’,” Tom said.Facing such long odds, some attempt to sneak back into the country,but not the Kobyleckys. The familydecided to ride out a 10-year sentence in exile and get right by the law. •••
Few issues elicit as much empathy, or anger, as unauthorized immigration, making reform to the country’s clunky system frustratingly elusive. The US spouses and parents of unauthorized immigrants, known as mixed-status families, are one of the groups lobbying for change.
An estimated 1.4m US citizens have experienced family separation and 2.8m more face legal limbo. Family integrity was part of the Biden administration’s ill-fated US Citizenship Act of 2021 that failed to advance in Congress. At this point, immigration reform , however unlikely or remote, however unlikely, will almost certainly depend on a bipartisan compromise.
The combined effect of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, dramatically changed immigration laws. The span of criminal penalties increased, even for minor crimes, while legal defenses diminished, setting off a wave of deportations and family separations still today. Since then about 20,000 immigrants are barred from the country for periods ranging from three years to permanence. How many successfully petition for a visa after having received a bar is difficult to know because the US Citizenship and Immigration Service doesn’t make the data readily available. As things are now, the impasse over immigration means that some will remain living in the shadows, and some will opt to eke out an existence on the border.
“There’s a miscalculation of the political capital to be gained or spent for standing up on some of these issues,” said Kali Pliego, the former president of American Families United, a nonprofit organization made up of mixed-status families. The organization has been lobbying Congress on immigration reform since 2006, most recently in support of the American Families United Act, which would help families like the Kobyleckys by giving the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice the authority to use discretion. “We would have wins where some politicians think there’d be losses,” Pliego said.
In Chicago alone, Tom had time to reflect. He couldn’t bear the thought of living apart from Yedid and Teddy. “Having a son in Mexico who doesn’t know me, it just broke my heart to think that could end up happening.” He began looking for jobs along the border, eventually zeroing in on McAllen, Texas, and Reynosa, Mexico region. The area was seeing considerable economic growth in 2008, providing jobs for hard-working CDL truck drivers.
Reynosa was a crime-ridden factory town run by criminal gangs trafficking drugs and people into Texas. Having experienced the streets of Chicago there wasn’t much he couldn’t handle in Reynosa, or so he thought. But by 2010, the city was engulfed in Mexico’s bloody drug war. Spasms of violence between rival cartels, and the military, terrorized the public. When a Walmart burned down in 2015, everyone knew it was the cartel sending a message that not even a billion-dollar company was safe.
“We’d hear gunfire at night, and explosions,” Tom said. “We feared for our lives just going to the store for groceries.” Gun battles, kidnappings, hijackings, and military patrols formed the backdrop of their lives. The Kobyleckys learned, as locals do, to follow social media channels that warn of the riskiest areas of the city on any given day. “We knew when it was safe to leave the house, and when it wasn’t,” Yedid said. “It got better when we didn’t fear for our lives going to the store for groceries,” Tom added.
They settled in a two-bedroom house, about a 10-minute drive from the international bridge. Tom got a job with a trucking business, while Yedid looked after Teddy and their two daughters, Janet and Kimberly, who were born in 2010 and 2012.
Yedid was juggling the house and the kids all while finishing her high school diploma. The pressure eventually took its toll. She had a bout of vertigo one day, causing her to fall and hit her head. The doctor told Yedid that she needed an outlet to relieve stress. He suggested she take up yoga. To her surprise, the exercise helped her sleep for what seemed like the first time in years. She was so taken with the practice that she became a certified instructor, and began teaching kids. “That was my first job in Mexico.”
Meanwhile, Tom was struggling to manage his stress. The daily commute across the international bridge was a festering irritation that became intolerable when peak traffic caused hours-long bottlenecks. A shouting match with a middle-aged woman who bumped her car into his brought him to the edge of a breakdown. Though he managed to compose himself and maneuver his vehicle out of the situation, there was little doubt that the daily commute was changing him. “I had to become a real asshole,” Tom said. “I did all kinds of things that could have