2018#
On November 15 Dariana Ruiz woke before dawn to find an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent standing over her bed and shining a flashlight in her face. The ICE officer guided the 18-year-old into the kitchen of the suburban Elmhurst home where she lived with her mom, Carla, her dad, Kikin, and her eight-year-old sister, Viviana. Her dad sat at the table across from a cup of hot coffee and a slice of bread, his hands cuffed behind his back and another ICE agent by his side. Her mother, she was told, had been arrested during a traffic stop and was in a van outside.
When agents escorted her dad out of the house, Ruiz stopped them. She still had questions. Ruiz has pretty, plump features—cherubic cheeks and lips and big brown eyes. Though she’s short and often soft-spoken, that night she demanded answers. She translated the quick English conversation for her father in snippets.
Then he was taken away.
The parents I spoke to for this story feared that contact with any government agency could lead to contact with ICE. One family said they kept the undocumented father’s name off their children’s birth certificates and refused to list him as an emergency contact at school. Ramped-up immigration enforcement under Obama and now under Trump has demonstrated that even the most cautious can still be swept up.
For Ruiz, deciding what to tell Viviana was a reminder of her own experience. Ten years earlier, when she herself was eight years old, her father was deported for the first time. She remembers her mom was deeply depressed, so much so that Ruiz was sent to stay with her aunt for a few weeks. “I was very innocent,” she said. “I did not know what was going on. I just knew that my dad wasn’t around.”
2012#
On an October night Cecilia Garcia expected her husband Hugo Velasco to return to their home on the southwest side at 6 PM. When he still hadn’t arrived four hours later, she told herself he must be drinking with friends. The phone rang at midnight. She felt relieved that the caller ID read “Evergreen Police.” She thought she could pick him up, pay a fine for what he was arrested for, and then he’d be free.
