Laura, a young immigrant protected by DACA, and her two-year-old daughter, who is a citizen.
In most ways that matter to someone like Donald Trump, Laura is American.
She grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, smack in the middle of the heartland that largely voted for him. She went to James Madison Memorial High School, shopping after class at West Towne Mall across the street. She spent her Fourth of Julys at Elver Park, where you can spread out a blanket at the foot of a towering hill and lie directly beneath the fireworks as they flame out into the night.
When I first meet twenty-one-year-old Laura, who wanted to use her first name only, she’s crouched down on the playground with her two-year-old daughter. They share sips from a Starbucks cup as we bond over our shared history on the west side of Madison. Elver Park, the food court at West Towne—these are places that shaped my typical American upbringing.
But they’ve just as deeply shaped Laura—a Lantinx immigrant and a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA—and her hopes for her own child, a U.S. citizen.
“Whatever I can do to better my daughter’s life,” she tells me. “And my own, too. But once you have kids, it changes. You want to do everything for them.”
DACA gave Laura, whose parents and partner are undocumented, the stability to carry out these plans. It allowed her to complete a certified nursing assistant program on a scholarship and find work. But Laura felt that safety net slip away after Trump’s election, and again when he announced an end to the Obama-era DACA program. What would happen to her daughter if her parents were deported?
Laura is one of a growing number of DACA beneficiaries in this situation. A 2017 study by the immigrant youth advocacy group United We Dream, the liberal Center for American Progress, the National Immigration Law Center, and University of California at San Diego political scientist Tom K. Wong surveyed 3,063 DACA beneficiaries across the country in August of this year. It found that just over a quarter of respondents has an American citizen child. Wong has estimated that this means there are around 200,000 children in the United States with a parent who is a DACA beneficiary.
There are around 200,000 children in the United States with a parent who is a DACA beneficiary.
But Laura has a contingency plan, one she put in place not long after giving birth. It’s something more and more people in her position are now pursuing—a legal option that’s as potentially helpful as it is untested: leaving her child in someone else’s hands.
I ask Laura what she remembers from her journey here twelve years ago, when she was eight. “Everything,” she says without hesitation, and begins to cry.
She remembers her parents were fighting back in Mexico City, that there was no money for rent. She remembers filling backpacks with food and water, walking five hours through the desert. She remembers tumbling over the border into Arizona, down a steep hill to the edge of a freeway, where they were told to crouch down until a van drove by to pick them up.
“I actually laid down on top of a little cactus,” Laura says. “So my back was arched for thirty minutes. But I couldn’t move because you don’t want to be seen.”
Packed into the van, they soon set off for the Midwest. Laura’s aunt lived in Madison, so that’s where the family headed. Really, says Laura, it’s the only home she’s ever known.
Leila Pine, a retired Madison attorney, has been an immigrant rights activist for nearly two decades. She was inspired by her parents, who as children escaped to the United States from Russia’s pogroms, and her own, now-adult children and stepchildren, all four of whom were adopted from Colombia and South Korea. She and her husband, Craig McComb, spend almost half of every year in Tucson, Arizona, working with groups such as No More Deaths and Casa Alitas, providing humanitarian aid to people crossing into the United States.
Pine met Laura’s family years ago, at an event through one of the local immigrant advocacy groups. They grew close. Pine takes Laura’s younger sister on day trips during idle weeks of summer vacation, with both of her parents working two jobs. When Laura twice applied for DACA renewal, Pine paid the fee. She even threw Laura’s mother a baby shower after finding out she didn’t have one planned, wrangling thirty friends to donate for a crib and a stroller. She babysits the little boy, now four, often.
Leila Pine (right) and her husband, Craig McComb, in 2015 outside SouthsidePresbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, the birthplace of the 1980s SanctuaryMovement.
“Every time I see him, [he] comes running to me, calling my name and hugging me around my knees,” Pine says.
A few years ago, Pine found out through a woman at her church, which is involved in the sanctuary movement, about a Wisconsin statute that allows parents to delegate power of attorney for their children to a third party. That person can then legally make decisions for the children when it comes to things like school or doctor visits. The law was designed for parents who are temporarily indisposed, such as those deployed on military duty or those in treatment for substance abuse.
Pine approached Laura’s parents, asking if they had a family member or trusted friend who could take in their children in case the worst happened. They ended up asking Pine. She talked it through with her husband. And even though they spend half the year living in Arizona, they agreed.
“We love this family so much,” Pine says, “that we decided if it happened while we were in Arizona, I would be willing to come back here to take care of those kids.”
When Laura gave birth two years ago, shortly after graduating from high school, she asked Pine if she’d be willing to do the same for her daughter. “A day or two” later, Pine says, she signed the paperwork.
“I can never thank her enough,” Laura says. “She doesn’t get anything out of it other than a lot of responsibility.”
Should Laura be deported, she would probably go to the home her parents have been building remotely, bit by bit, in her mother’s hometown of Querétaro, Mexico. But, says Laura, “I feel like it would be such a traumatizing experience, as it was coming here and getting used to everything. I pray every single night that it never happens.”
If it does, the plan is for Pine to bring Laura’s two younger siblings and her daughter and her two younger siblings to stay in the guest rooms in her home, a stately Tudor that sits on a park in a historic lakeside neighborhood. When Laura and her family are settled, Pine has promised to bring the children back to their parents in Mexico.
“I would not recommend that immigrants pick anyone to do this for them unless they have a long-term, trusting relationship with them,” Pine says. “I know these folks very well. I know their values. I know what wonderful, loving parents they are. And I know what they would want for their children.”
Many states have laws on the books allowing parents to grant power of attorney for their minor children, though most come with time limits. In Alaska, like Wisconsin, the delegation period cannot exceed one year. Utah’s is just six months.
In Wisconsin, the agreements Pine signed with Laura and her parents grant Pine the ability to make decisions for the children about routine health care and education. She can do things like travel with them outside of Wisconsin, and allow them to obtain a driver’s license.
Kevin Layde, whose small law firm in Milwaukee specializes in immigration, says he saw a lot of these agreements signed just after the election that brought Trump to power. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people who were getting these done in Milwaukee,” he says.
Because so many of his clients were requesting it, Layde asked one of the legislative authors of the statute to clarify how it can be used.
“It’s not a formal guardianship,” Layde explains. “How it was explained to me is that it creates additional powers for parents, it doesn’t take any powers away.”
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a Milwaukee-based immigrant rights group, says educating families about the power of attorney option is a key part of the group’s “know your rights” trainings. The workshops also coach participants on obtaining dual citizenship for their children through the Mexican consulate—not to facilitate deportation, Neumann-Ortiz notes, but to help “keep families together.” Without these bases covered, children whose parents are deported can be put into the foster care system and possibly adopted.
Having a designated, legal caretaker for children is especially important now, she says, given that recent anti-immigrant policies “are all about moving people quickly through the system.” Those quickly detained and processed for deportation don’t have the ability to take their children with them.
“Your children might come home from school and find that their parents are gone and not know what’s going on. That’s their reality.”
“In the meantime, your children might come home from school and find that their parents are gone and not know what’s going on,” Neumann-Ortiz says. “That’s their reality.”
But DACA holders with citizen children who get picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement aren’t likely to be deported immediately, Layde says. They can make their case before an immigration judge, and even argue against their removal because they have young children who are citizens. This could make them eligible for cancellation of deportation, and even permanent residency.
More generally, undocumented immigrants can have a family member with lawful status—a spouse, adult child, sometimes siblings—file a family-based petition on their behalf.
But nothing is guaranteed. In immigration court, respondents are not entitled to a lawyer. Even with one, Layde says, their odds of being deported are around fifty-fifty. And DACA beneficiaries who are parents like Laura are in a particularly thorny position as a generation often caught between undocumented elders and children too young to petition for them to stay.
It’s easy to see how the power of attorney option can seem like their safest bet. But Layde questions how the legal powers granted to those like Leila Pine will hold up if challenged. Unlike other statutes, he notes, there’s no direction on how the law can be enforced.
These provisions were created with narrow, temporary situations in mind, he says, but “among the immigrant community, this is being called into service on a broad scale.”
“What happens if you want to consent to a child changing schools or consenting to some kind of surgery?” Layde asks. “What do you do if whoever decides not to accept this? They don’t really tell you what happens if the plan breaks down.”
The morning that I meet Laura for a second time, a Wisconsin senate committee approves a bill that would grant police officers powers typically wielded by ICE agents.
Laura had attended a recent public hearing on the bill with other activists, hoping to humanize the immigrant struggle for those who would argue she doesn’t belong here. But she didn’t testify, she says. She was too afraid to speak.
Now, not only does the federal government seem to want her removed, but so does the state she was raised in. Chasing safety, Laura and her partner are now talking about moving closer to his sister, who lives in a small town in New Jersey. But she’s not so sure.
“I don’t know if I even want to do that,” Laura says. “I might just want to go back to Mexico. Because I don’t want to keep running away.”
If she does have to make that choice, Laura knows that her daughter will be able to stay safe in the care of Leila Pine, who is ready if needed.
“I worry about the trauma that all of these families face due to our broken immigration system,” Pine says. “I’m not worried about raising kids again.”
Alexandra Tempus is associate editor of The Progressive.