My Own Mother Illegally Immigrated To The U.S. Then I Became A Prosecutor At ICE.

I was only three months out of law school, and sitting in the black leather chair at the prosecutor’s table felt surreal. It was one of my first days as an assistant chief counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, and I was assigned to observe my first deportation hearing.

I placed my legal pad, pen and highlighter atop the mahogany table where I sat beside my mentor.

“Just watch and learn,” she whispered, smiling. I was still waiting for my bar exam results but dreamed of becoming an immigration judge. I expected my mentor, a seasoned lawyer, to guide me through the legalities of immigration. I didn’t anticipate the emotional gut punch I’d soon experience.

My parents never shared their immigration story with us. Every summer, we’d travel to Colombia. As a child, I didn’t think much about the differently colored passports we each had. My mother’s and my twin brothers’ passports were burgundy, from Colombia. My father’s maroon, from Peru; my passport and my sister’s were blue, from the United States.

When I got the job at Homeland Security in 2010, my family expressed mixed emotions. My mother was thrilled, thanking “Divino Niño Jesús,” whom she credited for “such a blessing.”

My brother was less excited. With a smirk, he half-jokingly asked, “What if you deport our cousin or something?”

“Impossible,” I retorted, as only a 26-year-old could, full of the belief that the world would bend to my will. I assumed that in a court of law, justice would prevail.

There was a lot to learn from my first case that day, but not all my takeaways were what my mentor intended. The case involved a 50-year-old Mexican man, whom I’ll call Javier. It would test my belief about my role in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

Javier didn’t make eye contact with me or my mentor, gazing instead at his weathered hands resting on his lap. But as trial attorneys, we were privy to the most intimate parts of a noncitizen’s life. Javier’s file lay thick on the table. It was full of decades of information: an illegal crossing, his U.S. citizen wife’s death certificate, his children’s birth certificates, and the government’s favorite: years of tax transcripts.

The door swung open, and the atmosphere in the room shifted. Instinctively, we rose to our feet. I’d heard the whispers in the office: “Immigration judges weren’t real judges.” They followed orders from the attorney general. But still — I didn’t want to cross any judge, especially not this one.

By New York standards, people considered Judge Rice a conservative judge. He denied about 66% of cases before him, issuing orders of removal, commonly referred to as deportation orders. This felt high compared to the 34% denial rate in New York’s immigration court at the time.

The judge immediately noticed two boys in the back. “Who’s in the courtroom?”

The children, still on their feet, responded with their names and stated they were 15 and 17 years old. The judge pressed the bridge of his glasses. “Please don’t take offense, but I usually don’t take testimony from children in this courtroom,” he told Javier’s attorney, Mr. Wheeler.

“They are here to support their father,” Wheeler said, explaining that they had written letters in defense of their father and were aware of their father’s case.

But before Wheeler could finish explaining, the judge raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me. Let’s have them wait outside. It doesn’t matter to me, but things come up that children shouldn’t know,” the judge said.

After 30 minutes of back-and-forth between the attorney and a frustrated Judge Rice, the judge let the issue go, and the children were allowed to stay.

At ICE, no one acknowledged the distress of a deportation hearing, and how it quietly spreads to everyone connected to the respondent. Judge Rice didn’t address it, either. But his desire to remove the kids seemed like a quiet recognition of the human toll. At the time, I agreed with him: Excluding children who were not named in the case seemed like the right thing to do.

Even if no one speaks about immigration’s spillover effects on first-generation children, I know it in my bones. My mother crossed through the southern U.S. border without a visa but became a lawful permanent resident before I was born.

As a result, I’m not part of a mixed family, which is defined as a family whose members include people with different immigration statuses. Recent data show 16.7 million families currently live in the U.S., and that 5.9 million children live with mixed-status parents. However, I can deeply relate. Immigration trauma doesn’t simply vanish once someone gets “legal.” The years of instability, fear and cultural disconnection linger, passing through generations.

I’ve always wondered how many parents share the intimate details of their immigration stories with their children. My parents never did until my adulthood. I only knew my parents and twin brothers had naturalized because it was a question on my security clearance application.

My mother accepted my invitation to speak about her immigration story over lunch. She folded a white napkin over her lap and recounted that in 1983, at three months postpartum, she kissed my twin brothers goodbye. The separation was meant to be temporary as she decided that, even with soaring murder rates caused by Pablo Escobar’s drug cartels and guerrilla groups turning cities into battlegrounds, they would be safer in Colombia. As a woman in her early 20s, she understood all too well the common risks she faced on the trek to the U.S. –– rape, sexual abuse and other forms of exploitation that could easily become her fate.

At the U.S.-Mexico border, immigration authorities arrested her, briefly detained her, and placed her in a deportation proceeding. But she got “lucky” when a deportation officer “paroled” her in. Even in the 1980s, the U.S. immigration system was overwhelmed by an increasing number of migrants, and perhaps there wasn’t enough detention space to hold her. Or perhaps the officer, in his professional judgment, believed she wasn’t a threat.

Whatever the reason, she escaped the sharp teeth of the immigration system and traveled to her brother’s home in New Jersey. She found work manually filing airplane parts in an airplane manufacturing factory. There, she met my father, who had entered the U.S. at age 17 with a green card and was now a lawful permanent resident. Through marriage, and because my mother had been paroled into the country, he was able to pass his status on to her and my twin brothers.

When I was 8 months old, the three of us traveled to Colombia to pick up my brothers. This seemed like the American dream.

As the first child in my family to be born in the U.S., my American dream was a complicated inheritance filled with expectations and silent sacrifices. In a way, my journey through law school and becoming a government lawyer was my “thank you” to my parents for crossing borders.

Back in the courtroom, only Javier, the sole named party in my first case, was questioned. Wheeler began with basic questions: Where were you born? Why did you enter the U.S.? Why didn’t you wait to get a visa? Have you paid taxes? How will your children suffer if you’re deported?

Javier’s voice held steady as he explained that he had come to the U.S. when he was in his teens and never went back. He had tried to get a visitor’s visa, he said, but as a mere day laborer in Mexico, he was too poor to convince the U.S. government that he’d return after his visit rather than stay permanently. (Assets in a person’s native country are often used to show that the person intends to return.)

His sons sat rigid, their faces mirroring every emotion he displayed. They listened to his response twice, once in Spanish and then through the English interpretation.

Javier’s face changed as he spoke of his wife. She was a U.S. citizen by birth, powerless to pass on the privileges her citizenship should have provided because her husband crossed the southern border without permission. Then doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer.

Passing legal status through marriage is a two-part process. While Javier could show that his marriage was based on love, he couldn’t complete the second part of the process, which proved he was legally admitted or paroled into the U.S. Unlike my mother, he wasn’t given the blessing of a parole stamp when he crossed through the southern border.

Javier’s voice began to waver. The family was so happy when his wife went into remission. He reached for a tissue and crumpled it into his hands. “The cancer came back,” he said. His tears now flowed down his cheeks. The kids’ eyes filled with the same tears he fought to hold back. “I am all the family my kids have left.”

My mentor argued for this father’s deportation. She argued that Javier didn’t deserve to stay here. He came to the U.S. without permission, an act so severe that he deserved a lifetime penalty. The law was on her side.

Immigration laws don’t work to keep noncitizen parents with their U.S. citizen kids in America. A U.S. citizen spouse can petition for their noncitizen spouse, as long as their marriage is legal in the state where they marry, but American-born minors can’t transfer their citizenship to their undocumented parents. A U.S. citizen child must wait until their 21st birthday to petition for a parent. Mixed-status families remain vulnerable to immigration enforcement until then, risking deportation and separation.

Javier and many others who cross the southern border illegally are disqualified from getting legal status. They can only stop their deportation through a law called cancellation of removal. A parent can stay in America if they can convince the court that their U.S.-born child will suffer “extreme and unusual hardship.” But showing hardship is an impossible standard. One court describes it this way: “Hardship that flows from deportation is expected, but it isn’t enough. The applicant must show more than that; they must show ′exceptional and extremely unusual hardship.’”

I was most surprised when my mentor questioned Javier’s relationship with his American-born children. He claimed not to speak English, and the children claimed not to speak Spanish. According to my mentor, the way this mixed-status family communicated undermined their relationship. She argued that the children spoke more Spanish than they admitted and that, if the court deported their father, the kids could finish high school in Mexico. Or they could stay in the U.S. alone, using their mother’s death benefits for financial support. The choice would be theirs.

I pretended to jot down notes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the family before me had so much in common with my own.

When I started at ICE, I never believed my job was to deport. I believed that courtrooms could deliver justice. I thought I could help families like Javier’s from separation.

For many of my early years in New York as a trial attorney, about 70% of cases were approved, granting people permission to stay in America. Some call it luck. Or, as President Barack Obama called it, administrative grace. The focus was on “felons, not families. Criminals, not children.”

But my belief in the system began to change. Luck became harder to find once President Donald Trump took office in 2017. His administration created a “zero-tolerance” policy, erasing Obama’s administrative grace. The Department of Justice introduced case completion quotas. This required judges to process at least 700 cases per year. The pressure to hurry cases along resulted in more deportation orders.

This was the beginning of the end of my time at ICE. Two days before Christmas Eve in 2018, the government shut down. Congress couldn’t pass a budget because it disagreed over funding for a U.S.-Mexico wall.

One day during the furlough, I was driving home. I heard an NPR story. It stopped me cold: “A 7-year-old Guatemalan girl collapsed in Border Patrol custody, one of two child deaths this month.” Her name was Jakelin Caal Maquin. She was about the same age as my son at the time.

I could no longer hold on to two identities: the immigration prosecutor and the daughter of immigrants.

The emotional aspect of our work was also something we didn’t discuss at ICE. It was as if we weren’t allowed to feel on the job. I expected my supervisors to say something about the children’s deaths, but it was never mentioned. I’d grown tired of retreating to “safe” spaces. I wanted to stop closing office doors to have hidden talks about my work’s emotional toll. I feared that speaking up would make me seem “too soft” and hurt my professional reputation.

My understanding of my family’s story also changed. Many families, including mine, avoided discussing immigration. They find it shameful; a burden they don’t want to place on their children. But a green card or U.S. citizenship doesn’t magically cure the painful emotional and financial immigration trauma. Things may have been different if my mother had shared the emotional cost of her illegal entry. Without acknowledging the real cost of immigration under the current system, we miss the human toll.

I resigned from ICE in early 2023 because immigration law is ill-equipped to handle the complexities of modern families. This is especially true for those with American-born children, whom the system treats as invisible collateral damage.

The Obama administration once suggested Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, as a solution. It would have let some undocumented parents of U.S. citizens apply for deferred action and work permits. This would have given U.S. citizen children born to mixed-status families stability. DAPA was never implemented.

I still think back to my first deportation hearing all those years ago, where Judge Rice ordered Javier deported. My mentor “won” the case, but she did her job without understanding the intricacies of families who live between cultures. Remaining silent felt like a betrayal, but I was only a few weeks into my career. I still had that twinkle in my eye.

I no longer believe in excluding children from the immigration conversation. The truth is, immigration policies impact children. They face family separations, live in mixed-status households and watch their parents struggle in a biased system. They see and feel the consequences, even when we don’t talk about it. Excluding them from the conversation underestimates their resilience. It also ignores their need to understand the forces shaping their lives.

By dismissing the children’s presence that day, Judge Rice would have made his job easier. But, those implementing the laws should feel every part of it; no matter how cruel it feels. Only by being honest about immigration’s true cost can we, as Americans, bring real change. And change is imperative.

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