NEW YORK — It’s almost bedtime and Angel Reyes Rivas is going through a universal parent routine, alternating between begging his toddlers to simmer down and issuing warnings.
As he negotiates, he tells me that on the rare instances when he and his wife have some alone time they’ve been having a terrifying conversation: what to do if one of them gets deported.
They started having that discussion earlier this month, when former President Trump was reelected, largely on the promise of mass deportations.
Reyes Rivas is originally from Peru. His wife is from Colombia.
Neither of them are in the U.S. with permanent legal status, but their children are.
Similar conversations are taking place in families across the country.
Throughout the presidential campaign season, immigration was largely framed as an “Americans citizens vs. immigrants” issue, but for approximately 11 million American citizens who live in families with mixed immigration status, mass deportations could be devastating.
Wennie Chin, senior director of community and civic engagement at the nonprofit New York Immigrant Coalition, says, “Often folks fixate on the number of undocumented immigrants in the country. But deportation is not just their lives at stake. Immigrant rights are American rights.”
“I can tell you from firsthand experience, a deportation is the worst thing that can happen to your family,” says Reyes Rivas. “I wouldn’t want my kids going through something like that.”
When Reyes Rivas was 19, during the Obama administration, his mother got deported. Suddenly, he was a teenager in charge of his 13-year-old brother.
No one had ever told him what to do if this happened. He says it was emotionally and financially devastating.
These days, he works in a cellphone repair business and as an immigration advocate.
He says he’s been warning immigrant communities that “part two of the Trump administration is going to be something that we haven’t seen before. Get to know your rights. Get ready. Talk to your kids. Look into how you’re going to handle being detained, being deported.”
Reyes Rivas has DACA, a temporary protection against deportation for some people brought to the U.S. as undocumented children. This program, created by the Obama administration, is facing legal challenges in courts.
The incoming Trump administration could end the program, and Reyes Rivas might find himself undocumented again.
He says he can’t find it in his heart to explain the potential situation to their children.
“I don’t want to put in their heads that they’re going to separate me from you. I mean who wants to have that conversation with their kids, right?”
For many mixed status families, this conversation is nothing new. It’s been happening for an entire lifetime.
At La Morada restaurant in the Bronx, Carolina Saavedra recalls that she was 8 years old when her parents bought her and her siblings a piece of jewelry, then explained what the kids should do if their parents got deported.
“You take that piece of jewelry and you sell it. And you find a church and you ask for help there. I remember it was a gold necklace, with two dolphins on it.”
Saavedra was born in the U.S., but her parents are undocumented, originally from Oaxaca, Mexico.
“I was raised with the fear that one day, deportation will happen. It’s bound to happen. So we always had a game plan in action.”
They were so worried about being separated, they would bake the instructions into her bed time stories. She’s 31 years old, and still knows the story by heart.
“Long ago there was a little girl and her mom. The bad guys were coming. And the daughter sold the piece of jewelry that they had. They made it to the next safe land, and they lived happily ever after.”
The Saavedra family owns this restaurant. Over the last 15 years, La Morada has become a hub of the community, doubling as a mutual aid for neighbors and recently arrived migrants.
And yet one thing never budges: they’ve been undocumented for over three decades. And there’s a sense of disenchantment with both political parties for not providing a path to legal status.
“My parents have been paying taxes since before I was born,” Saavedra says. “We’ve been putting into the fabric of the American economic system for so many years. But there is no path to citizenship.”
She says any sense of safety, stability and a future has come from their neighbors. “We have this saying here: in community there is immunity.”
As lunch hour rush dies down, her mother, Natalia Mendez, sits down with me. I ask if she’s nervous about the incoming Trump administration.
She tells me an anecdote about when she first arrived: there was a raid at the factory she worked in, and a colleague helped her escape through a laundry chute. This happened several times back in the ’90s. It was during the Clinton presidency.
“You see, there is nothing new under this sun,” Mendez says, before heading back to her kitchen.
