Undocumented by Jackie Montalvo
Klaudia sits at her family dinner table, blue-grey eyes a little glazed over from memorizing medical terminology. It’s her third year of college and her nursing clinicals are just around the corner. A pile of silver forks and knives clank against the marble table as if they are just as annoyed as Klaudia with her younger brothers who are upstairs playing a video game they just can’t pause. Their mom calls up to them for the fifth time that dinner is ready. Klaudia gathers her blonde hair to one side; it brushes against her thighs as she inches forward in her seat to serve herself. In person, they’re like any other American family having Saturday night dinner. In reality, they’re not even American, but a family here illegally.
A pink and orange sky was setting over a house in Arlington Heights, Illinois in early 2013 as an old friend, a lawyer back in Poland, greeted Klaudia and her mother at the door. All three women climbed up the steps that met them at the entrance, and sat around a wooden dining table for the first time, to fill out Klaudia’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) paperwork. DACA is a two-year grant that prevents her from being deported, gives her work authorization and a social security number. She was nervous but excited. She questioned how long processing could take and how she’d find out if she’d been accepted when reality hit, “shit what if they don't accept me or it doesn't go through?" Her mom was more hopeful. She was happy, not worried. Klaudia said, “My mom is super religious so she kept saying how ‘God is on our side’ and ‘he'll take care of us.’”
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is an immigration policy established in mid-2012 by the Obama administration. “This is not amnesty. This is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship. It's not a permanent fix,” President Barack Obama said outside of the White House. DACA offers an opportunity for undocumented immigrants to apply for a renewable two-year work permit, social security number and exemption from deportation if they arrived in the U.S. with their parents as long as it was before they were 16.
Two months after submitting her application, a white envelope arrived addressed to Klaudia from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. When she ripped open the top, she was instantly filled with courage that could conquer the world. Her application had been accepted, and now she could live like all of her friends. She could get a drivers license, get her social security number, get a job and not feel anxiety when she had to leave that little box asking about legal status in the U.S. on official papers blank. Although she was still not here with any legal status, she had a safety net of two years free from the anxiety of potential deportation.
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It was in June of 2006 when Klaudia, her two brothers, and parents came to the U.S. on a tourist visa, and never looked back to Poland. Before they made the leap to live in the U.S. without documentation, her father would come to the U.S. to work for two-year periods and send the money back home to Łomża, Poland where Klaudia lived with her mom and siblings. She believes that moving to the U.S., even if it was illegally, was the best choice for her family at the time. “Moving to America saved my parent’s relationship, they were spending so much time apart and the stress of bills on top of raising us kids was too much for my mom by herself.” She says that if they hadn’t moved, her life back in Łomża would have been worse than it was growing up here without papers.
She and her family have been here for 10 years now without green cards, without any form of legal status in the U.S. But her brothers have no idea they are in this country illegally.
“They're both clueless they don't know we're illegal. I think the older one is starting to catch on because he starts drivers ed next year and we told him he can't take the driving portion, only theory,” Klaudia said.
They haven’t told the boys for two reasons, first when they moved to the U.S. they were just too young to comprehend what it meant to be somewhere illegally. Secondly, little kids blab and it was too big of a risk.
Recently, her parents received Temporary Visitors Drivers Licenses (TVDL) because Illinois allows non-visa status individuals to apply. These licenses look exactly like Illinois state drivers’ licenses, except they are bordered in bright purple not red. When her brother saw these come in the mail Klaudia said, “I think he’s suspecting it but he doesn’t ask.” These TVDLs cannot be used as picture IDs, but they are replacing her parents’ Polish licenses, which Klaudia said would make her parents anxious every time they stepped behind the wheel. These pieces of documentation, like a DACA card or a TLDV, do no grant her family legality, but they are one less thing to worry about. They hoped their legal situation would be resolved by the time her brothers needed to know, but the process has been slower than they thought.
Being the only person in her family with a social security number that lets her work, there is an immense pressure on Klaudia to navigate their situation. There currently is no way for undocumented immigrants to gain legal status in the U.S., but there is one possible plan, “My mom’s been talking about, for the longest time, to like y’know get me married to somebody. And just you know whatever, get me a green card, and then they can all get green cards through me. It’s an option but she doesn’t want me to do it, cause what the fuck I don’t want to get married to some random ass dude.”
Not only is there a nagging feeling that the only path to legality for her family rests in Klaudia’s future, but she’s also had to sacrifice going to a bigger university in exchange for attending cheaper community college because of a lack of funding to aid undocumented students. “Being here illegally prevented me from going to my dream school. Who knows what I could have done if I was able to apply and afford a school like U of I [University of Illinois].”
Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano issued the June 15, 2012 memorandum implementing DACA with the statement, “Our Nation' s immigration laws must be enforced in a strong and sensible manner. They are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case. Nor are they designed to remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived or even speak the language. Indeed, many of these young people have already contributed to our country in significant ways.”
Napolitano is not the only government figure to back the idea that being a productive member of communities warrants you the ability to remain in the U.S. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel agrees, “If you have no criminal record, being part of a community is not a problem for you. We want to welcome you to the city of Chicago.”
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Never break the law, don’t tell anyone how we came here, her dad taught Klaudia. At a young age she knew to never draw attention to her family at home, and she said growing up in the U.S. was scary, “Our entire life here is just one big insecurity, you know.” Everyday it was in the back of her head that she could be deported.
If an undocumented child ends up entangled with the law for one reason or another, there is often no representation for them. They have a right to be represented by a lawyer, but because of their status they cannot be appointed one by the state. The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights is an organization in Chicago that works to find representation and advocate for the best interest of children who are in the U.S. without their parents and are found to not have legal status. Currently, there is no best interest standard for immigrant children.
In every other court preceding where a child is the subject, the judge has to make the decision based on the best interest of the child. But it’s not the case for children who are in this country undocumented. Immigration judges can be called to make decisions on whether a child can stay or be deported without considering what circumstances or danger that could mean for the child. Although it is most common that children are caught crossing the border on their own, some kids are found to be here without legal documentation after they’ve already been living in the U.S. for years. If they have been living here, it is likely their parents are here without status as well and sending them to their country of origin could separate families for decades, which is why having someone advocate for them to stay is so important. Without services like the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, many kids would end up facing a judge completely on their own.
To the people who don’t believe that children who came to the U.S. illegally should have a path to legality, look at it this way. Klaudia came to the suburbs of Chicago at the age of 12. At 12, one can barely pick out what clothes to wear to school let alone decide to move to a strange new place and live there illegally. Like so many kids out there, Klaudia and her siblings had no choice but to come to this country with their parents even though it ended up being the right move for their family. In the first year of the DACA program, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services published that 557,412 applications were submitted. Currently, there is no way for these contributing members of society to gain legal status. But there can be. The fate of Klaudia and hundreds of thousands other young adults rests on Congress to pass the federal DREAM act. And in fact, The Obama administration enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals as a response to the inaction of Congress to pass the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act is an acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, a legislative proposal for a multi-phase process for undocumented immigrants to gain conditional residency and then upon meeting further qualifications, permanent residency in the U.S.
Until there is a path to legal status, Klaudia and hundreds of thousands of people like her are forced to lead a life of secrecy and sacrifice.
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Klaudia works a full time job and attends community college. She is a straight-A student in nursing school who just wants to give back. Currently, there is no path to legality in the U.S. for her, unless she marries a citizen and is granted a green card – which is becoming increasingly harder and harder to do in this country. If her family is found to be here illegally, they will be deported and she will follow them.
If they return home to Poland, they can’t come back to the U.S. for 10 years when it will be even harder for them to apply for green cards and legal status due to their history. If she returns home to Poland, she will be thrust back into a life of poverty and lose almost all of the freedoms she has had, every contribution she’s made to her community, and every difference she could have made if she were allowed to stay. Everything she has worked for would disappear over a roughly 9 hour flight back to Poland, all because her parents brought her to this country at the age of 12 thinking it was the best thing for her.