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#2
07-30-2019, 04:11 PM
Senior Member
Joined in Nov 2012
133 posts
DreamerAngel
Part 2 with link to article:

“I need to know,” she would say, “that the country that I call home sees me as a human being worthy of life, and not as an invading alien. How much longer do you think I have to wait?”
She was surrounded by people who seemed to think the answer was: not much longer. The 2016 election was almost over. While Donald Trump had disparaged undocumented immigrants and denounced DACA as unconstitutional, Hillary Clinton had hired DACA recipients onto her staff and met with them to learn about their lives. She had vowed not only to protect them from deportation, but their parents too.
But Sadhana would wait to feel optimistic, she said, to see if anything real happened once Clinton was in office. Come election night, she had homework to do. She stayed in her dorm with the map of incoming results a mostly ignored tab on her browser.
Only when she refreshed the page late in the evening did she realize she wasn’t going to finish her assignments. She thought about calling home, but couldn’t bring herself to pick up the phone. She could only stare at her computer, watching the states turn red.
‘My full potential’
“How did you get so beautiful, young lady?”
Sadhana saw the comment beneath a selfie she had posted to Facebook on a spring night in 2017. She could tell the guy who wrote it was in her scholarship group, but she had never met him. My Ford Noel. It looked like he lived in Florida. What could be the harm?
“Thank you,” she messaged him. “That was very nice of you.”
For hours they typed back and forth. The next day, he changed his Facebook status to “In a relationship.”
This was how their romance would go on: him certain and ready, her smitten but hesitating.
He came to visit, and he wanted to move to Washington. He moved to Washington, and they moved in together. They moved in together, and he wanted to get engaged.
She was awed by his stories of growing up in an orphanage in Haiti, coming to Florida after surviving the earthquake and working three jobs so he could earn a GED, three associate’s degrees and a bachelor’s.
At a time when there was so much uncertainty in her life and in the country, he was solid, unshakable. “You take your time,” he would say. “I know we are going to be together.”
This, she realized, was what she wanted too. But when she called home to tell her parents, they were devastated.
They did not approve of her dating a black man. They especially did not approve of her dating an undocumented immigrant.
For months her mother would call her, crying. Then she stopped calling altogether. Sadhana still spoke to her brother and her father, who always sounded deeply worried. “How,” her dad asked, “will you ever become a citizen?”
She invited them to her graduation in May 2018, where she earned summa cum laude and received the Saint Catherine medal, one of the university’s highest honors. They didn’t come.
She called to tell them she got a job at the scholarship program that had made college possible for her. She called to say she and My Ford were engaged.
She sent her brother photos of the summer wedding her parents refused to attend: the small ceremony, the fancy lunch with their friends, the moment during their photo shoot in a park when kids from a day care across the street came outside holding up pieces of their alphabet mat that spelled CONGRATS.
Kids: She wanted them, and at 32, she wanted them soon. Four of them. My Ford kept saying they should have 10. He wanted to gush the parental love he had never been given. She wanted her children to be carefree in a way she never could be in America.
But how could they give them that kind of life amid so much uncertainty? They didn’t want to become like so many families, where the parents are undocumented but the kids are citizens. They wanted the basic, boring parts of adulthood, like getting a home loan and investing in a 401(k).
But America, My Ford told his wife, was never going to give them those things.
“We stay here, and suck it up until a certain president is gone, or a certain group of people has majority? You think they will change something?” he said.
“I’m a human being,” he said. “ I want to be able to make plans. I want to live to my full potential.”
Soon Sadhana began saying these things too. “I don’t want to put my life on hold any more,” she explained as her husband applied for jobs in Europe and Canada.
“We need to be in a stable place to plan our lives,” she told her brother when he came to visit in November 2018.
“I think you should come for Christmas this year,” he told her. He still lived with their parents and had been trying to change their minds. A few weeks later, he called to confirm. Sadhana and My Ford could come to Georgia for the holidays.
The whole flight there, her emotions boomeranged between relief and anxiety. After all of this, her parents were finally going to accept her? Accept her husband?
The smell of her mother’s cooking hit her as soon as she walked through the front door.
Then her parents appeared, their arms reaching out. Her father looked at My Ford and went in for a hug. A moment later, her mother hugged him too.
“Are you hungry?” her mom asked.
Sadhana sat down beside them, trying to put out of her mind what she already knew. By next Christmas, they would be in Canada. My Ford had accepted a job.
‘I just feel sad’
Sadhana’s father sagged against her kitchen counter in his flannel pajama pants, sipping Lipton out of a red plastic cup. All her dishes were on the U-Haul, which was now somewhere in Pennsylvania, according to My Ford’s last text.
In two hours, her father would be gone too.
For a month he had been staying with her, watching her deconstruct the life she’d made for herself in America, while her husband got settled in Canada. My Ford had been granted permission from the United States to return to Virginia and help her pack — a privilege Sadhana wouldn’t have once she officially moved. So she went out for goodbye drinks and goodbye dinners. “We’ll come visit,” promised her friends who weren’t undocumented.
Her father went with her to Trinity, where she was recognized again and again. People shook his hand and introduced themselves with titles like “dean” and “president.” He could tell they had guided her in a way he never could.
He met her bosses and co-workers, who were allowing her to keep her job at TheDream.Us and work as a remote contractor. They want her to partner with Canadian universities and businesses eager to recruit college-educated workers from the United States with DACA or TPS.
Meanwhile, they would try to get her an H-1B visa, which might allow her to get a waiver, which might override the 10-year-ban on her return to America. It was unlikely, but they said they would try, and they would hope. Sadhana didn’t let herself say she would hope, too.
Instead she and My Ford started imagining a website, an organization, a podcast; some way they could help other undocumented immigrants follow in their footsteps.
As they prepared to leave the country, huge waves of children and families were trying to enter it — so many that the federal shelters that housed them were canceling classes and legal aid because of lack of funding. The border issues were tangled up with DACA in Congress, where in early June the House passed a bill to give DACA recipients a path to citizenship. “Oh, happy day,” Pelosi told reporters, while Sadhana’s co-workers warned scholarship recipients the bill would never pass in the Senate.
“I am so exhausted,” Sadhana wrote in her journal the next day. “I would like to sleep for three days straight.”
Soon she was coughing as bad as her father, lying awake at night on the air mattress she had squeezed into the living room. Her brother and mother came to see her, having only a few days to visit and say goodbye before they had to return to their jobs in Georgia. The whole family ended up inside, bingeing on Bollywood music videos and passing the Vicks VapoRub and DayQuil. Her mom made them Sadhana’s favorite Caribbean soup.
Then came the packing and the painting and the runs to Goodwill, and now there was one hour until Sadhana’s father would be gone.
“You got everything?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he answered. “You got everything? You got your keys, you got your phone?
“Yeah,” she said. “You got water?”
As she steered out of her apartment complex, her phone rang.
“Hello, Mom,” Sadhana answered. “I’m carrying Dad to the bus station now.”
“I just feel sad for ya’ll,” her mom said.
“I know,” Sadhana told her, keeping her eyes on the road.
At the bus station it started to rain, wetting her cheeks before any tears could. She reached up and adjusted her father’s collar. He reached up and pushed a strand of hair out of her face.
When the Greyhound pulled in, he wrapped his daughter in his arms.
“I’m really going to miss you,” she told him.
“We had a good time,” he said.
Then he let go, climbed the steps and disappeared behind the tinted windows.
‘Do you have a visa?’
Two days later, she woke at 3:15 a.m. She changed into a delicate floral dress she’d picked out for this day. She thought the outfit made her look relaxed but professional. Like someone customs officers would want in their country.
“Air Canada,” she told the Lyft driver who took her to the airport three and a half hours before her flight. She dug her nails into her thumb. She texted My Ford some emoji that captured her emotions. A bunny dancing. A bunny crying.
“Do you have a visa?” an airline employee asked.
“I do,” she answered, handing it to him.
She’d gone over each step in her mind dozens of times. Counter, security, gate, plane, customs, baggage claim, better life.
She thanked the employee for her ticket and lugged her suitcases around a corner. She passed a gift shop selling, red, white and blue hats and T-shirts.
“Maybe I should get something that says ‘USA,’ ” she said. She took a few more steps.
“No,” she said. “I think I have had enough.”

© 1996-2019 The Washington Post


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