When Deportation Is a Death Sentence
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. may face violence and murder in their home countries. What happens when they are forced to return?
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| Laura S. Photo: Carolyn Drake / Magnum/New Yorker |
By Sarah Stillman, New Yorker
January 9, 2018 (posted)
On June 9, 2009, just after 2 a.m., Laura S. left the restaurant where she waitressed, i
Pharr, Texas, and drove off in her white Chevy. She was in an unusually hopeful mood. Her twenty-third birthday was nine days away, and she and her nineteen-year-old cousin, Elizabeth, had been discussing party plans at the restaurant. They’d decided to have coolers of beer, a professional d.j., and dancing after Laura put her three sons to bed. Now they were heading home, and giving two of Laura’s friends a ride, with a quick detour for hamburgers. Elizabeth said that, as they neared the highway, a cop flashed his lights at them. The officer, Nazario Solis III, claimed that Laura had been driving between lanes and asked to see her license and proof of insurance.
Laura had neither. She’d lived in the United States undocumented her whole adult life.
“Do you have your residence card?” Solis asked.
“No,” Laura said, glancing anxiously at her cousin and her friends. Solis questioned them, too. Only Elizabeth had a visa, which she fished out of her purse. Solis directed the others to get out of the car. “I’m calling Border Patrol,” he said—an unusual move, at the time, for a small-town cop in South Texas.[…]
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What the Salvadorans Being Kicked Out by Trump Face Back Home
By Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker
January 9, 2018
Patty is a thirty-eight-year-old Salvadoran mother of two who has lived in the United States, on Long Island, since 1998. Her father was killed during El Salvador’s civil war, in the nineteen-eighties, and her mother fled to the U.S. to seek asylum as a refugee. Patty had initially thought that she would be eligible for residency in the U.S. through her mother, but that didn’t work out. “I never understood what happened with my papers,” she told me Monday night, when we spoke by phone. “But then there was another option.” In 2001, after a string of earthquakes had struck El Salvador, Patty was among the thousands of Salvadorans who qualified for temporary protected status, or T.P.S., a federal designation that allowed her to live and work legally in the U.S. She has renewed her T.P.S. status every eighteen months for the last seventeen years. During that time, she got married; had her two sons, who are U.S. citizens; went to community college; and found a job as a secretary at a financial-services firm.
On Monday morning, the Trump Administration announced its decision to cancel T.P.S. for Salvadorans.[...]
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