The young adults are part of the movement of immigrants who grew up in
this country without legal status who call themselves Dreamers. Their
parents traveled to the Mexican side of the fence from Brazil, Colombia
and Guadalajara, Mexico, seeing their children in person for the first
time in many years.
The meeting, under a searing borderlands sun, was a new piece of the
highly personal political theater that young immigrants have used to
dramatize their support for a bill in the Senate to overhaul the immigration system. Hours before the encounter here, President Obama
spoke at the White House to urge Congress to move quickly to pass the
bill. Suggesting the growing influence of the youth movement in the
debate, the president framed his remarks — both literally and
politically — with Dreamers.
A young woman from Nigeria, Tolu Olubunmi, introduced him, and during
his speech he singled out another young immigrant, Diego Sanchez from
Argentina. Evoking the sympathetic narrative of young people who found
themselves in this country illegally after coming as children, Mr. Obama
said opponents of the legislation had no rationale for blocking them
from a path to citizenship.
“This is not an abstract debate,” Mr. Obama said. “This is about
incredible young people who understand themselves to be Americans, who
have done everything right but have still been hampered in achieving
their American dream.”
Organizers of the Nogales reunion said it was a coincidence that it
happened on the day of the president’s speech, since they had been
raising funds for the parents’ airplane tickets for two months.
“This is not about the president,” said Carolina Canizales, a leader of
United We Dream, the national group that organized the family meeting.
“Today is about reunifying families and what that really looks like to
us.”
Following a prearranged plan, just before 10 a.m. the parents and their
children approached, from opposite sides, a section of the fence on the
edge of Nogales where the poles are set a few inches apart. After
deportation, the parents cannot enter the United States, and the young
people — who traveled to the border from Seattle, Boston and Orlando,
Fla. — do not have legal status that would allow them to leave and
return.
Reaching their arms through, parents and children embraced, wept and laughed.
The mother of Renata Teodoro, 25, passed family photos to her, as well
as a soccer T-shirt from Rio de Janeiro and a letter from a younger
sister who also returned to Brazil when the mother was deported six
years ago. Ms. Teodoro, who had come from Boston, gave her mother a
bottle of nail polish, a joke between them, and displayed the card
showing that she had received a deportation deferral under a program
Mr.
Obama started last year — her first official immigration document.
Her mother, Gorete Borges Teodoro, 52, was overwhelmed with emotion, but quickly reverted to maternal mode.
“I pray for you guys to get the papers, go to college,” Mrs. Teodoro
said in English. Her daughter said she had arrived in the United States
when she was 6 years old and had refused to return to Brazil with her
mother in order to finish her undergraduate studies at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston. Mrs.
Teodoro was ordered deported after her
husband’s asylum petition was denied.
The mother of another young immigrant, Carlos Padilla, 21, from Seattle,
said she was “glad and sad at the same time: glad to be here next to
him, sad because the fence is between us.” Mr. Padilla said his mother,
Josefina Hernandez Madrigal, went to Mexico in 2008 to take care of
ailing relatives and had not been able to obtain a visa to re-enter the
United States.
A Border Patrol vehicle parked nearby, and an officer stayed to observe but did not intervene.
The Senate bill would offer significant gains for young immigrants like
those in Nogales, but not for their parents. It includes a version of
the Dream Act, the measure from which the young immigrants take their
name, which would give them an expedited five-year pathway to American
citizenship. Young immigrants like
Ms. Teodoro and Mr. Padilla who had
received deportation deferrals would have a faster application process
for provisional status, the first step along that pathway.
The Senate bill would also allow some deportees to return to the United
States, including children, spouses or parents of United States citizens
or legal permanent residents, and youths who would have been eligible
for the Dream Act. It does not have any measure allowing the return of
deported parents of unauthorized immigrants. Several Republican senators
have raised strong objections to any return of deportees, and that
provision is considered one of the most endangered in the floor debate.
According to a recent study by Colorlines, a news Web site focusing on
racial issues, about 205,000 people who were deported between 2010 and
2012 had children who were American citizens and living in this country.
There are no solid estimates of the number of deportees’ children who
are not citizens.
Ms. Teodoro said the re-encounter with her mother was frustrating. “When
you get awards, you graduate from high school, it makes me a little
angry to have to show her these through the fence,” she said. “Really
angry, actually.”
In
a protest, Renata Teodoro, right, and her mother, Gorete Borges
Teodora, who was deported in 2007, met at a Mexican border fence.
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