Had to split article in two. Here is Part 1:

Her choice: Stay with her undocumented family in America or live freely in Canada

They packed their life into a U-Haul, piece by piece, all they would take with them on a journey where they would leave so much behind.
In went the Virginia marriage license for Sadhana Singh and My Ford Noel. The license was one of the only official forms the Alexandria couple owned on which they were not identified as “alien” or “temporary.” In marriage they were just two people in love, calling each other “baby” in public, texting too many heart emoji, picking out the names for the children they didn’t yet have.
With that piece of paper were their college diplomas, the ones they had been able to earn because of two programs designed to protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation.
One was called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA: It provided protection to people brought to the United States as children, like Sadhana, 32, who came from Guyana, a small South American country, at 13.
The other was called temporary protected status or TPS: It provided the same benefits to immigrants from countries devastated by war or natural disaster, like My Ford, 33, who came from an earthquake-ravaged Haiti at 24.
Into the U-Haul went the couple’s computers, which they’d been using to track the uncertain fate of those programs. In the midst of the immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, another has been playing out for immigrants who have long lived in the United States. Since 2017, the Trump administration has been working to end protections for those with DACA and many with TPS.
Those efforts have been thwarted by lawsuits and rulings by federal judges, but only for now. Congress has tried to come up with a permanent solution, but nothing has worked. For some 670,000 people with DACA and 400,000 people with TPS, the future is unknowable.
Into the U-Haul went the couch the couple had sat on as they tried to plan their lives anyway. Maybe, Sadhana and My Ford told each other, a deal would be reached; they could stay at the jobs they loved, her in communications at a scholarship program, him in management at a logistics company.
Or maybe both programs would end, and they would have to settle for lives of working for cash under the table, driving without licenses, fearing each day that they could be deported.
Or maybe, they finally concluded, there was another option. One that would rid them of all these maybes.
Last into the U-Haul on this June day went their safe, which had been guarding their chance at that option: Two visas that would allow them to live and work in Canada. My Ford had accepted a job at a food-manufacturing company, giving him and Sadhana a chance to become permanent residents.
“A life without restrictions,” My Ford called it.
“To finally be free,” Sadhana said.
But as the U-Haul door slammed shut, what she was giving up for that freedom was standing beside her, bent over and coughing.
“How are you feeling?” Sadhana asked her father.
He had come from Georgia to help her pack, despite this deep, wet cough he’d had for months — another problem to go with his back pain, his shoulder pain and his knee that needed surgery. After decades working in construction and living without health insurance, he had the medical problems of someone much older than his 59 years.
“Alright,” he told her, shrugging.
“Alright,” Sadhana said. They had less than 16 hours left together.
Because her parents are still undocumented, they would not be able to follow her to Canada or visit her there. She would have to leave them behind at a time when President Trump was rebranding America as a country that puts its own citizens first, threatening to close the border, ramp up raids and deport millions. And because of a law that temporarily bars undocumented immigrants from returning to the U.S. once they leave, Sadhana will not be allowed to return to the country for 10 years.
She stood between her husband and her father, her future and her past. The next morning, My Ford would drive the U-Haul north to a four-bedroom house he had rented for them in Ontario. Her father would board a bus and leave for Georgia. Sadhana would be alone in Virginia, trying to gather the strength to follow through on the plan: Take a flight to Toronto. Show her new visa. Leave behind the country her parents had hoped would give her a better life, so she could give the same to her own children one day.
“I am happy to go and I want to go,” Sadhana had reminded herself in her journal.
“I need to focus on what I am gaining (complete freedom) and not what I am giving up,” she wrote too.
“Feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, exhausted, inundated, suffocated, anxious, uncertain,” she wrote another day. “I feel like I am fraying at the edges.”
She turned away from the U-Haul and headed into her apartment. She crossed the living room, her footsteps echoing in its emptiness. She plopped down on the hardwoods and dug her nails into the soft part of her thumb.
“I just need a minute,” she said, and she tried to take a deep breath.
‘Call me Ashley’
The first time she left everything behind: 1999, when she landed at JFK Airport in New York at 13 years old. Her aunts lived in the city, and she had visited them before: a few weeks taking in the bright lights and bustle of America, then back to Guyana.
She’d grown up riding bikes, watching Bollywood movies, being the pink Power Ranger while her younger brother was the blue. Her mother stayed home. Her father worked as a chauffeur at the airport. She didn’t know about the whispered conversations they had in their bedroom at night, her father fretting that his precocious daughter was too smart for Guyanese schools, that she deserved more.
Only when Sadhana found herself on a bus leaving New York did the permanence of this trip begin to sink in. Her family arrived in Georgia with a plan to overstay their tourist visas.
Her mom found work at a fast-food restaurant and enrolled the kids in school. Before long, Sadhana had given up her Creole English accent for an American one, swapped Bollywood for ‘N Sync, stopped using her first name and told her classmates, “Call me Ashley.”
In 2002, when her 16-year-old friends were getting their licenses, she said she wasn’t ready to drive.
In 2005, when everyone wanted to know what colleges her impeccable grades had earned her admission to, she said she was still waiting to hear back.
For nine years after high school, Sadhana languished, living at home, working as a lab technician for an archaeology company and sinking into a depression she struggled to explain. Even when President Barack Obama announced DACA in 2012, giving Sadhana and her brother access to work permits, Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, she couldn’t afford college. Undocumented students are barred from receiving federal financial aid, and in Georgia, they must pay out-of-state tuition.
Then a co-worker told her about TheDream.US, a scholarship specifically for DACA and TPS recipients. (The program was co-founded by Donald Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post, who would later bring Sadhana’s story to the attention of Post reporters. Last year Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the current owner of The Post, and his then- wife MacKenzie donated $33 million to TheDream.US.)
Sadhana agonized over her application essays, trying to summarize all her parents had hoped for her — all she’d wondered if she should still hope for herself.
The second time she left everything behind: 2014, when she enrolled in Trinity Washington University in the District, her tuition completely paid. At 28, she moved into the dorms and threw herself into her classes. She missed her mother’s Caribbean soup, watching movies with her father, having her brother as her best friend. But in four years, she completed seven internships and earned only one A-minus.
What had once been her biggest secret became her elevator pitch, the story that opened doors in a city increasingly aware of the plight of DACA recipients. She sat on panels and attended marches. She spoke to journalists and wrote op-eds. She met then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and visited the White House.