USA TODAY International Edition
A desperate quest for American dream denied
A father and daughter came from Guatemala only to find frustration and heartbreak at US border
EL PASO, Texas – The night after their immigration court hearing, Francisco Sical held his young daughter in his arms in a Border Patrol cell. She begged him to open the door.
“Have you ever experienced a moment when you see your child crying and you can’t do anything?” he said about the night he confronted one of the hardest decisions of his life. “It breaks your soul.”
Melissa Sical – second- youngest of his seven children – had glimpsed El Paso from a government van and wanted to see more of the houses with yards beyond the highways. Sical couldn’t bear to tell her they were detained.
They had come 2,000 miles from Guatemala to wait two months in a makeshift shelter at the U. S. border in Juárez, Mexico, only to find that their case under the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols was hopeless.
“I told her, ‘ Don’t cry. Be strong,’ ” Sical said. “Tomorrow we’ll leave here.”
“No, papá,” she said. “Let’s go now. Open the door!”
That summer of 2019, tens of thousands of Central American migrant families faced the choices Sical had before him: Stay in Mexico and attend the program’s court hearings, in which barely 1% of applicants win relief; return
“The conditions of the countries ( in Central America) get worse by the day. Access to earnings, to work, even to education for children – the options aren’t there.”
Ursula Roldán director of the Institute for Research and Projection on Global Dynamics at the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City
to face his children’s hunger and the crushing bank debt that funded his trip north; or risk crossing into the USA illegally.
They were two of the more than 68,000 people caught in the net of the Migrant Protection Protocols and returned to Mexican border cities. Many, like Sical, were parents who sought refuge from gang violence, the ravages of climate change and economic distress in Central America but who were unlikely to qualify for asylum under U. S. law, especially without the help of an attorney.
Thousands went home, defeated, to face greater desperation. Hundreds remain in limbo in Juárez, in rented rooms or relief shelters run by non-profit and religious organizations.
As the administration of Presidentelect Joe Biden prepares to overhaul U. S. border and immigration policies, experts said the process of unwinding Trump- era restrictions is fraught with the peril of stoking a new humanitarian crisis at the U. S.- Mexican border.
“If you don’t start fixing the way the border operates on Day One, they’ll face a humanitarian crisis when they’re not ready for it,” said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute based in Washington.
During Sical’s night in detention with his daughter, ideas came to him that hurt to remember.
He thought seriously about sending his 10- year- old home with a coyote, a smuggler.
“I could see the wall” from Juárez, he said. “There it was, and I would stare at it. And I said to myself, ‘ There is the United States. I can jump the wall, and I’ll be there.’ ”
He regretted bringing her to the border, exposing her to so much danger. But send her back, alone?
“Abandoning her would mean making the biggest mistake of my life,” he said. “I couldn’t leave her. The debt didn’t matter anymore. My daughter meant more to me.
“And that’s why I am here.”
He spoke in March outside his tworoom home in the high plains of Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. The debt he owed tied his stomach in knots. The bank held the title to the only thing of value he possessed: his family home.
Hens clucked at his feet. One of his daughters swept up leaves and garbage from the dirt patio. The fields that cornered his home lay fallow and dry, no way to plant them without the rain.
His 2- year- old granddaughter wailed a toddler’s drama.
“I have always been a person who dreams big. I don’t like to remain where I am,” he said. “The door is closed. For me, the American dream is dead.”
It seemed so at the time. But embers burn under the ashes of fires.
A false promise
While Sical talked, his wife, Maria Elvira Ramos, lit a fire in her outdoor kitchen, awaiting the corn masa with which she would pat out thick, yellow tortillas in her palms. Their second- eldest daughter, Delmy, set out on a rutted dirt road with two tubs of golden kernels of maíz balanced on her head, to be ground at the mill.
The unpaid labors of home bridged dawn and dusk, every day. Days and weeks and months without steady, paying work wore worry lines into Sical’s face.
Almost a year before, Sical and his daughter Melissa had set out with hopes of crossing the border at El Paso and reaching Virginia, where they had family. News had trickled to their indigenous Mayan community that the United States was giving families a pass. Details didn’t arrive about who qualified for refuge or under what circumstances.
A permiso for the children. A chance for the parents to work.
Sical remembered speaking to his wife in their native Achi, the language they used among family. He thought this could be a chance to work legally in the USA. He thought about taking Melissa.
“No, no, no. My daughter doesn’t go. God save my daughter. You can go but not her,” he remembered Ramos telling him.
“I told her, ‘ Listen, lately the U. S. government is giving children priority.’ ” Ramos’ brother had reached the USA with a son a few months before. “Immigration visits him twice a week,” Sical said. “But they let him work in peace!”
From 2003 to 2008, Sical had worked in Anaheim, California; Tampa, Florida; Washington, D. C.; and many places in between, laying tile and driving trucks for $ 12 an hour as part of a vast undocumented labor force that fueled the U. S. economic expansion of the mid- 2000s.
Sical’s two eldest daughters, Olga and Delmy, 24 and 21 years old, had partners and children of their own. A son, 18- year- old German, lived in Guatemala City. Sandy, 17, was at the end of her schooling, and Ilse, 13, had earned a scholarship that let her study at a religious boarding school in the capital.
Daniela, 6, the youngest, suffered from asthma. It was too much to risk taking her on an arduous, unpredictable journey.
As shy as she was, Melissa was curious about the world. He could show her Mexico and the USA, the places he loved. She was young enough to learn English and benefit from an American education. At great pains, Sical persuaded his wife.
Few jobs in Guatemala
“The people of Guatemala are very rooted in their families, their culture, their land,” said Ursula Roldán, director of the Institute for Research and Projection on Global Dynamics at the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City.
“But the conditions of the countries ( in Central America) get worse by the day,” she said. “Access to earnings, to work, even to education for children – the options aren’t there.”
According to a World Bank report, the percentage of the population in Guatemala considered poor increased from 43% to 49% from 2006 to 2014, the latest year for which data was available.
The pressures that have driven Guatemalan families, workers and unaccompanied youth to the U. S. border are likely to intensify during the pandemic, said Selee of the Migration Policy Institute. The Biden administration needs to be prepared, he said.
“The best way of dealing with irregular migration is not building walls but creating labor opportunities for people to work for periods of time in the United States,” he said.
U. S. Customs and Border Protection reported apprehending more than 264,000 Guatemalans in fiscal 2019, including more than 185,000 people in “family units” – a parent or legal guardian traveling with a child – and more than 30,000 unaccompanied children.
The majority did not break the law. They turned themselves in to customs officers at ports of entry or to Border Patrol agents, seeking protection.
It’s what Sical and his daughter did at the El Paso border.
The Trump administration said most wouldn’t qualify for asylum and were gaming the system. Of all the obstacles the administration set up to block undocumented immigration at the border, the Migrant Protection Protocols were, by the administration’s standards, among the most successful. To immigrant advocates, the protocols were among the most cruel.
“By any measure, MPP has been hugely successful, including by reducing burdens on United States communities and easing the humanitarian crisis on the Southern border,” the administration said in a statement in February, in response to a lawsuit.
Immigrant advocates said the program is inhumane and illegal, forcing families to wait for protection in some of Mexico’s most dangerous cities without access to legal counsel.
Although the Mexican government set up a shelter in Juárez, it couldn’t cater to the thousands returned to that city. Churches and nonprofit shelters, accustomed to providing a few nights’ food and shelter for travelers, found themselves supporting entire families for months at a time. Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry didn’t return the El Paso Times’ repeated requests for comment on the future of the Migrant Protection Protocols.
“This very cruel policy put many in harm’s way, including children and families as a whole,” said Linda Rivas, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Rights Center in El Paso.
Two legal challenges to the policy are headed for the Supreme Court.
The Migrant Protection Protocols remain in effect, although the program has been little used during the pandemic.
In March, the Trump administration began returning anyone who crossed the border without authorization to Mexico or their home country, including unaccompanied children, using an arcane public health law to justify the policy.
The new rules all but ended asylum at the U. S.- Mexican border.
‘ We won’t all have the same luck’
When Sical and his daughter reached the El Paso border on May 31, 2019, after a 20- day journey and five days detained by U. S. Customs and Border Protection, their fate was spelled out in English on paperwork a border agent handed them:
“You are an immigrant not in possession of a valid unexpired immigrant visa, reentry permit, border crossing card or other valid entry document required by the Immigration and Nationality Act.”
The papers assigned father and daughter an “alien” number, used by the U. S. government to track immigrants, and listed an appointment to appear before a U. S. immigration judge at 8: 30 a. m. on July 23, 2019, at the courthouse in El Paso.
They were dropped back at the downtown international bridge and told to wait in Juárez.
The bridge empties onto a seedy street lined with bars and pharmacies catering to U. S. tourists.
Sical had experience with failed border crossings but nothing like this.
He had his daughter to protect. The first time they were sent back to Juárez, she was in pain, suffering from an earache.
He approached people on the street for help. A woman offered to buy his daughter medicine and told Sical she had a modest, unfinished house where they could stay.
A month later, Sical and his daughter and a dozen other people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador shared a concrete floor covered with dirty mattresses.
“It wasn’t what we expected. We were hoping for a response in our favor,” Sical said.
“We don’t have any concrete information” about the Migrant Protection Protocols, he said. “That is the fear. All our cases are different, and we won’t all have the same luck.”
He and the others knew only rumors about what the program entailed, how long they would have to wait or what their chances of success would be. Their conversation centered on the same dilemma: whether to stay, return home or cross illegally.
Melissa snuggled under a blanket, just waking up. A sour stench of garbage and sewage breezed through a barred window.
“It’s been so hard for her,” he said, “leaving behind her school, leaving behind the family. What am I going to do here in Juárez?”
Sical sighed. The wait felt excruciating, but he was eager to tell a judge why he and his daughter deserved a chance in the USA.
“I’m going to wait for court,” he said.
“The best way of dealing with irregular migration is not building walls but creating labor opportunities for people to work for periods of time in the United States.” Andrew Selee president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute
‘ Sadly, they didn’t let me in’
The morning after their court date, after the night in Border Patrol custody, Sical and his daughter crossed the international bridge to Juárez for the last time.
Waiting for them was an agent of Mexico’s Grupos Beta aid agency dangling a carrot: If they wanted to go back to Guatemala, funds were available to pay for the trip.
The United Nations’ International Organization for Migration provided “departure assistance” for more than 1,500 people subject to the Migrant Protection Protocols, including 1,100 people in Juárez.
Sical was among those who took the offer.
Back in Guatemala, in the home he built a quarter- mile from the one where he was raised, where his elderly parents still lived, Sical tried to make sense of his fate.
His failure at the U. S. border had taken away any hope of changing his family’s circumstances.
Ramos had taken out a $ 3,000 microcredit for “construction.” The couple spent it instead, as others in his community had, on the journey north. They owed the bank $ 128 a month, an enormous sum without steady work.
In Guatemala, where the minimum wage is roughly $ 11 a day and work for him was scarce, he struggled to bring home even $ 220 a month. They survived on corn. Some months, he and his wife went hungry to make sure the children ate.
“If the United States government had told me, ‘ OK, Francisco, you can come in, but you are going to go to court,’ no hay problema. I will go to court,” Sical said. “Whatever the government wants me to do, I will do, because I’m inside the government’s country.
“Sadly, they didn’t let me in,” he said. “They left me here, outside. And being outside is not the same as being inside.”
Melissa isn’t old enough to know the the financial worries borne by her parents and sisters.
“We are people with few resources,” Sical said. “Here in Guatemala, the governments have dedicated themselves to corruption, and they have forgotten the people, all of us who live in the high plains of the country. This is why so many people make the trip. They immigrate because there is no work.
“Children don’t ask you if there is or isn’t food. Children say, ‘ Mami, give me food,’ whether you have it or not. So, as a father, as a mother, you do what you have to do to provide for your kids.”
A U. S. judge deported Sical and his daughter in absentia in August 2019 after they missed their second court hearing. Melissa, 12, has a record in the U. S. immigration system.
For Sical, the USA is always on his mind – “and in my heart.”
But, he said, “you’re left with feelings of resentment. The families who have someone in the United States, every eight days, they go to the bank for the remittance. And us just watching, because there is nothing else we can do.”
“I don’t think the U. S. will give me another chance,” he said.
As hopeless as things might seem, his old dream hasn’t been completely extinguished.
“I would still love if one day ...” His voice trailed off.
“If I could ever be invited, if I could have asylum, the American dream is still in my mind.”