Deportability and Manifestations of Suffering of Immigrants and their Families1

VERÓNICA MONTES

Bryn Mawr College

[email protected]

Abstract. In this study, I examine the way in which deportation inflicts different forms of suffering upon both immigrants themselves and their families. Drawing on a series of open-ended interviews with Mexican immigrants in the United States, as well as children of immigrants, and deportees, I examine not only the subjective condition of immigrants’ deportability status but also how living in a constant state of fear affects every member of the family. In each of the cases, I document the circumstances that contribute to the suffering of immigrants and their families. Finally, although all the stories presented here were forged through pain and anxiety, ultimately, these narratives demonstrate resistance and resilience within the migrant community.

Keywords: Return migration; suffering; deportation regime; resilience; Mexico; United States.

Introduction

The voluntary return of Mexican immigrants to their communities of origin is an inherent part of the long-standing US/Mexico migration system. In the 1990s, however, this pattern of voluntary return shifted to forced return because of the increasing number of Mexican immigrants being deported from the US (Wheatley, 2011). Today, the number of Mexican immigrants involuntarily returning to Mexico exceeds the number of those trying to reach the US. According to Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2013), between 1997 and 2012, the US government carried out 4.2 million deportations, greatly exceeding the total number of deportations conducted up until 1997, when 1.9 million people were deported (Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras recieved 91 percent of the deportations undertaken by Immigration Custom and Enforcement (ICE) between 2003 and 2013 (Suárez, 2016). Mexico’s immigrants alone account for seven out of every ten deportees, totaling up to 3 million people (Price & Breese, 2016). This soaring number has prompted scholars (De Genova & Peutz, 2010; Golash-Boza, 2015) to analyze “deportation regimes,” wherein nation-states crack down on so-called “illegal” immigration.

The extraordinary number of deportations, however, obscure the vast human suffering caused by state violence, family separation, emotional anguish, fear, and the individual hardships immigrants face when returning to their community of origin. Most deportation studies have focused on mechanisms of deportation (Brotherton & Barrios, 2011; Countin, 2000; Golash-Boza, 2012; King, Massoglia, & Uggen, 2012), increases in police/immigration and ICE cooperation, the lack of federal oversight of local enforcement policies (Armenta, 2012; Donato & Armenta, 2011; Stumpf, 2006), and the social construction of illegality (i.e. how communities have responded to the threat of deportation (Chomsky, 2014; De Genova & Peutz, 2010; Menjívar, 2011). As a result, the psychosocial effects of the suffering endured by the deportees and their families remain underexplored (some exceptions are Berger Cardoso, Randle Hamilton, Rodriguez, Eschbach, & Hagan, 2016 and Dreby, 2012 although they focus mainly on the impact on men, women, and children, and changes to the family structure).

This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining the interplay between deportation, considered here as forcible/involuntary/unintended return migration, and the different manifestations of suffering endured by immigrants and their families, as a result of a loved one’s deportation. Drawing on a series of open-ended interviews with immigrants, children of immigrants and deportees, I examine not only the subjective condition of deportability (De Genova, 2002) as experienced by an immigrant, but also the relentless fear such a condition inflicts upon every family member. Deportability status refers to a sense of fear — of being caught by ICE authorities, taken to a detention center for deportation, sent back to their countries of origin, and, ultimately, separated from their families — that millions of undocumented immigrants in the US experience. This fear of being caught is experienced not only by the immigrants themselves, but, as I will demonstrate in this paper, by other family members whose American citizenship does not shield them from the pain of seeing their loved ones being deported.

Through in-depth interviews with immigrants and their families, I have been able to document the diversity of circumstances that contribute to their hardships. Owing to their deportability status, immigrants experience suffering not only during the deportation process itself, but this stress also becomes an inherent part of their identity. In other words, the status of deportability causes suffering not only during the deportation procedure, but also before and after deportation. In this context, the threat and fear of deportation plays a defining role in the daily lives of undocumented immigrants, not only in the US but also those already deported to their communities of origin. In this regard, the suffering embodied by immigrants and their families is not only transnational, as it is experienced by family members on both sides of the border, but is also collective and transgenerational, affecting every member of the undocumented migrant’s family.

To explain this, I begin by presenting the framework of this paper, first introducing various theories that help us understand the interplay between suffering and migration, and then I review the theoretical discussion regarding return migration. As a context of this study, I briefly examine the deportation regime that, for the last two decades, has had a broad impact on the undocumented immigrant community in the US, and the Mexican immigrant community in particular. After introducing this paper’s research methods, I articulate three key findings, each discussed in a separate section. The first section examines the series of emotional dilemmas immigrants endure on a daily basis as a result of their liminal migration status. The second section explores what I refer to as “inherited suffering.” This is the suffering experienced by the offspring of immigrants who endure constant fear that their parents may be deported at any time. In the third section, I examine one of the scenarios that might occur once immigrants are deported and the challenges they face upon returning to their home communities. Specifically, my analysis is centered on deported and returned youth. In the concluding section, I argue that in order to better understand the mechanisms that cause the suffering of the immigrant, their experiences should be situated and analyzed within a broad social context. For instance, what effect does this suffering have on individuals and communities? What does inflicting social harm on a specific group say about society? What does it say about society that so many people are seemingly indifferent to the suffering of a specific community? And, more importantly, how, despite the adverse scenario that immigrants face, do they find ways to cope with the challenges of contemporary migration?

What is suffering?

Though a subjective experience, suffering is inescapable and common to us all, “yet can only be known uniquely as our own” (Wilkinson, 2005, p. 16). It is suffering’s subjectivity that makes it so difficult to define, and even more challenging to write about. In order to effectively talk about suffering, we need to distinguish suffering from pain, because both concepts are often used interchangeably. Pain is more objective than suffering, and while the former is seen as a physiological sensation, the latter is perceived as a subjective psychological response to pain (Wilkinson, 2005). In other words, while pain’s locus is the body, the domain of suffering “extends beyond the bounds of mere bodily sensation so as to encompass our entire experience of personhood in body, mind, and ‘spirit’” (Amato 1990: 15; Cassell 1982 as cited in Wilkinson, 2005). This line of thought suggests that pain is an anatomical matter which must be medically treated. For this reason, medical experts define pain as “an unpleasant sensory of emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage” (Hron, 2009, p. 25). On the other hand, suffering responds to a state of mind, which is subjected to a series of social and cultural perceptions (Hick, 1966:354-8 as cited in Wilkinson, 2005).

In this context, where pain responds to an objective bodily experience and suffering responds to a particular subjectivity shaped by sociocultural norms, “every experience of pain is conceived to take place within, and, further, be derived to some extent from a particular culture of suffering” (Wilkinson, 2005, p. 25). This interplay between suffering and society is what scholars refer to as “social suffering,” a concept “developed to understand how people’s suffering is caused and conditioned by society” (Wilkinson & Kleinman, 2016, p. 14). According to Wilkinson and Kleinman (2016), social suffering occurs when humans are harmed. The harms can be social, economic, moral, emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual. In other words, “suffering takes place as an intensely violent and harmful assault on human personhood” (Wilkinson & Kleinman, 2016, p. 15).

For this reason, we need to understand suffering as a manifestation of harm that strips an individual of his or her humanity. In this context, the difference between pain and suffering is that pain is physical and manifests through the body, while suffering is a more emotional condition brought about by societal conditions. Thus, if suffering is caused and conditioned by society, what social factors cause immigrants and their families to experience high levels of anxiety and anguish, which lead to long-term suffering? More specifically, what is the relationship between suffering and migration? Below, I briefly explore this relationship.

Social Suffering and Migration

In the context of migration, the social suffering that immigrants endure – particularly undocumented immigrants – is almost invisible and therefore socially unrecognizable. In her critical literary study of novels about migrants and suffering, Madelaine Hron (2009) suggests that “because suffering is viewed as an inherent part of the immigrant narrative, it easily becomes regarded as part of the immigrant group experience and internalized as necessary by migrants themselves” (18). In this sense, it seems that when an immigrant decides to leave their country of origin, there is an implicit understanding that the migrant will have to pay a quota of hardships, clear hurdles, and endure suffering. Despite the presence of suffering in the migration experience, such experience has been understudied in the area of migration studies. Most studies about the emotional subjectivities that immigrants experience, as is the case with suffering, have focused on other psychological impacts immigrants and their families experience as a result of the migration event. Scholars (Dreby, 2006; Sadiqi & Ennaji, 2004; Salgado de Snyder, 1993) have documented sentiments of anguish, anxiety, depression, guilt, and sometimes suicidal behavior among women as a result of their husbands’ migrations. In contrast, other scholars (Achotegui, 2009; Ryan, 2008; Svašek, 2008) have examined the different psychiatric disorders immigrants develop as a result of their geographical relocation.

Various scholars have also begun exploring how other emotional subjectivities play a significant role in immigrants’ lives, such as the case of Escandell and Tapias (2010), who developed a framework to better understand how emotions and their embodiment affect the overall well-being of Bolivian immigrants in Spain, specifically when separated from loved-ones. While these studies unpack the feelings and emotions experienced by immigrants and their families, the experience of suffering in the context of return migration has not been thoroughly explored. The first to discuss the direct relationship between suffering and migration was Abdelmalek Sayad (2004) in his seminal work, The Suffering of the Immigrant, in which he describes in great detail the vicissitudes, sufferings, and expectations of Algerian immigrants upon their arrival in France. His work underscores the impossibility of understanding the complexity of leaving one’s homeland without looking at both the processes of emigration and immigration. For Sayad (2004), the double absence of the migrant – who does not fully belong to either the host society or to the community of origin – is what defines immigrants’ paradoxical essence, and what serves as their main source of suffering.

On the one hand, immigrants suffer from being far from their country of origin, having left behind everything familiar and all that gave them a sense of belonging. On the other hand, immigrants in their new society face challenges as a result of being seen as the “Other.” In some cases, being seen as “Other” has created a structure of violence against immigrants, particularly for those whose migration status is irregular. In their study of the different kinds of violence that (particularly undocumented) immigrants in the US endure, Menjívar and Abrego (2012) put forward the notion of legal violence, which essentially “captures the suffering that results from and is made possible through the implementation of the body of laws that delimit and shape individuals’ lives on a routine bases” (p. 1387). Most importantly, legal violence is embedded in legal practices. It is sanctioned and actively implemented through formal procedures, legitimized and consequently seen as “normal” and natural because it “is the law” (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012, p. 1387). Because it is enshrined in law, the legal violence immigrants are subjected to is normalized and assumed to be legitimate. Thus, in a neoliberal society where ideological discourse casts individuals as responsible for both their accomplishments and failures, suffering also becomes the responsibility of the migrant, who is also made responsible for his or her deportation, the punishment for violating immigration law. With this in mind, this paper conceptualizes the suffering of the migrant as the accumulation of psychosocial experiences created as a result of the immigrant’s deportability status, which provokes high levels of anguish, anxiety, fear, despair, and frustration in both the immigrant and their family. A particular characteristic of this suffering is that immigrants and their families have endured it not only over a long period of time but also through social isolation and invisibility. Furthermore, this suffering directly stems from a legal and social framework in which immigrants have been criminalized and dehumanized.

Over the last decade, the suffering of immigrants has increased considerably as a result of what some scholars refer to as a “deportation regime.” In the following section, I delve into how this deportation regime has emerged and its relation to return migration.

Deportation as a new form of return migration and the deportation regime

Return migration has long been a feature of the Mexico-US migratory system (Hernandez-Leon & Zuñiga, 2016). The desire to return to one’s homeland has always been inherent and a painful aspect of the immigrant experience, with much migration literature centered on the nostalgia of home, a common theme in many classical and contemporary literary works (Cassin, 2016). If returning home is what immigrants long for, why, then, is return migration such a source of suffering for millions of them? The answer lies in how return migration occurs. Today, millions of immigrants who have returned to their communities of origin have done so against their will, and this has caused fear, despair, uncertainty, frustration, and suffering. In this paper, I treat the event of deportation as a forcible return migration, as this event occurs in the form of an unexpected, unintended, and/or involuntary episode in the lives of immigrants and their families. Though the history of carrying out deportation in the US is not new, what has changed is the increasing number of deportees – a deportation regime – which, for millions of immigrants, has torn their families apart.

The deportation regime must be understood as a part of US state machinery that criminalizes millions of immigrants and strips them of their humanity, and perhaps more importantly, operates as a structure that extends control over the global division of labor. In short, the objective of the deportation regime is to “reinforce the racialized international division of labor as well as the racialized hierarchy of the domestic labor market” (Golash-Boza, 2016, p. 39). In doing so, the nation-state converts millions of undocumented immigrants into what Standing (2011) refers to as “precariats,” who are neither part of the “working class” nor “proletariat,” but, instead, are given a new social identity that depends on their “deportability” (De Genova, 2002), rendering immigrants more vulnerable and their existences more precarious. “When the threat of deportation looming over these workers becomes a reality, and undocumented workers are deported to their homelands, they are pushed out of the bottom of the employment hierarchy in the United States and into the labor markets in their country of birth, where their options for survival are much more limited” (Golash-Boza, 2016, p. 39). Through this deportation regime, millions of human beings live a kind of wasted life (Bauman, 2004) where any chance of achieving stability and dignity is unreachable.

Thus, not only does the deportation regime function as a mechanism to reinforce a racialized division of labor, but it has also been utilized as a scapegoating instrument against certain ethnic groups in order for the nation-state to grapple with domestic social discontent that arises during economic crises. This has happened in the case of Mexican immigrants in the US, where there have been two deportation eras over the more than 100-year migration history shared by these two countries. In the early 1930s, for example, approximately 450,000 Mexican immigrants were deported as a result of the Great Depression, and in 1954, the Immigration National Service reported that over one million Mexican immigrants were deported under what was known as “Operation Wetback” (Cohen, 2011; Foley, 2014). Though the practice of deportation temporarily waned, the early 2000s saw a reemergence of a strong and extensive deportation regime. Scholars (Abrego, Coleman, Martinez, Menjívar, & Slack, 2017; Brabeck & Xu, 2010; Menjívar & Abrego, 2012; Price & Breese, 2016) maintain that the 1996 Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) profoundly altered the climate for undocumented immigrants living in the US, and, more importantly, that the implementation of this US migration policy officially established the criminalization of millions of immigrant families. One provision of the law, for example, turned petty crimes into grounds for deportation, so that under this act, even documented immigrants became deportable.

By the end of 2013, it was estimated that 4.2 million people had been removed from the US (Price & Breese, 2016), greatly exceeding the number of people removed during the 107-year period between 1892 to 1999 (DHS 2011 as cited in Price & Breese, 2016). The vast majority, 91 percent, of those deported between 2003 and 2013 were from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras (Suárez, 2016), and 90 percent were men. Mexican immigrants alone account for seven out of every ten deportees, for a total of 3 million people (Price & Breese, 2016). Comparing the significant number of deported Latino men to the 10.4 million undocumented people living in the US in 2008 – of which 4.1 million were women, and 80 percent were from Latin America (Passel and Cohn 2009 as cited in Golash-Boza, 2016) – it becomes clear that this deportation practice responds to what scholars refer to as a gendered and racial removal of Latino immigrant men from the US in general (Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013), and of Mexican immigrant men in particular. In most of these families, the primary breadwinner is the man, so when men are deported, their spouses become the only source of income for their families, leading these women and their children to endure a series of dire economic and social challenges. Thus, the impact this deportation regime has had on families has been devastating, particularly within the Mexican immigrant community. It is estimated that approximately 700,000 US-born children have migrated to Mexico as a result of the deportation of one of their parents (Anderson & Solis, 2014). Under this deportation regime, Boehm (2016) states that, as with the initial migration, families must again restructure their lives, this time because a loved-one was deported to face an uncertain place and future in Mexico. Never before in the history of the US has this high a level of deportation been observed in tandem with the criminalization and dehumanization of the image of the migrant. On a daily basis, millions of undocumented immigrants live with the constant threat of being detained and deported by ICE. With this threat comes high levels of anxiety, desperation, sadness, humiliation, frustration, and suffering, the exact levels of which are not known.

Methods and Data

The data presented here are drawn from three different sources. First, as part of my dissertation research between 2011 and 2012, I conducted multi-sited ethnographic work in a Mexican transnational migration community comprised of two sending-migrant communities from the southern part of Mexico and two receiving-migrant communities in the US states of California and Pennsylvania. In total, I conducted 45 in-depth interviews; however, the data presented here are drawn mainly from five interviewees: four men and one woman with an average age of 40 years old. Rather than offering a synthesis of my analysis by weaving together multiple stories from numerous respondents within each section, I carried out an in-depth analysis of specific respondents to shed light on identified themes. The stories and arrangements of these families provide substantial analytical clarity to understanding the complexity of emotions – such as fear, anxiety, frustration, etc. – faced by all family members involved during the time of the deportation. All the interviews were audio recorded with the participant’s permission and ranged in duration from 1–3 hours per session. All interviews were conducted in Spanish and were fully transcribed. To supplement interview data in both sending and receiving communities, I conducted participant observation in diverse public settings including churches, Mexican restaurants and grocery stores, flea markets, schools, and worksites.

For the second data source, I drew on weekly writing exercises that I assigned to my college students during the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2017 in the course entitled “Mexican-American Communities.” For this weekly writing exercise, I asked the students to reflect on a variety of themes discussed in class each week, paying particular attention to their emotions and the ways they engaged with theoretical and conceptual frameworks to better understand their own personal and family migration experiences in particular. I did this because, on average, roughly three-fourths of the students (in this class of 25 students) were of Mexican descent. I received the written consent of my students – two young women and one young man – to use their writings for this study. These three students are of Mexican descent and come from California. For the third data source, I interviewed three returnees in Tijuana, Mexico and a fourth returnee who voluntary decided to return to Mexico and years later was able to get an American visa. I met her in New York City where I interviewed her.

I began my data analysis of the interviews by using a process of open coding to generate overarching and recurring themes, such immigrants’ migration history, family composition, migrant labor occupation while in the US, and so on. By doing so, I engaged in a grounded theory approach, as certain themes emerged in the act of coding the field notes and transcripts (Strauss, 1987). I then employed focused coding to assess the thematic interconnections and differences across the field data (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995). This helped me to identify the core themes of this study, which revolve around the interplay of suffering and the fear of being deported. To store, organize, and code the data, I used Dedoose as my qualitative data analysis software.

In addition to the methodology employed for this study, my epistemology as a feminist ethnographer defined the way I conducted this research. Research is considered “feminist” when “it is grounded in the set of theoretical traditions that privilege women’s issues, voices, and lived experiences” (Hesse-Biber, 2014, p. 3). It also seeks to support social justice and social transformation alongside the creation of a more egalitarian relationship between the participants and the researcher, where the former is seen and treated as a partner in the construction of knowledge. In this sense, my feminist commitment to this study was to shed light on immigrants’ emotional lives. The hope is that through this reflexive exercise of examining the history of these migrant families, the challenges immigrants and their families face at the time when a loved one is deported will be better understood.

Finally, my dual position as an outsider and an insider had a direct impact on how I related to the participants and therefore how they responded to the interviews. As an insider, I share, with both my students and participants, my social identity of being a Mexican immigrant to the United States and being a woman of color, which definitely played a role in determining how openly they shared their personal and family migration stories with me. My outsider position, at least with the participants, was shaped by my urban background, college education, and status as an American citizen.

In what follows, I explore how the condition of being an undocumented immigrant brings about different manifestations of suffering for immigrants in general, and for their families, in particular.

Immigrant Suffering

“But I have so much faith in God that He will help us, and that all we have done, I don’t think that we do not deserve His help, because that is the only thing I ask for…to be able to go out of this plastic bag in which I feel I am in and that makes me feel asphyxiated because of the situation the [Deportation order] is putting us in….but I am at a few days to know what it will happen, and the lawyer has told me that I don’t have to worry because that judge is very nice, and he knows her, and hopefully everything will be fine” (Interview, Pennsylvania, 2012).

The above vignette is from Maria.2 She is a Mexican woman who was in her late thirties at the time of the interview in 2012. In 1989, at the age of 18, Maria crossed the US-Mexico border surreptitiously with her one-year-old daughter. For family reasons, Maria went back to Mexico several times, and during her last re-entry into the US, Maria hired the services of a “coyote,” or human smuggler, who promised her an American passport and a valid visa. When Maria got the passport, she realized that, although it contained her picture, it was issued under a different name. Since she had no alternative, and had already paid the coyote USD $2,000, she decided to cross using that passport. She ended up being caught, detained, her fingerprints taken, and her name registered in the ICE system, and deported. After other failed attempts to cross the border, Maria was finally able to cross into the US through Texas in 1994.

Like millions of undocumented immigrants, Maria has spent most of her life in the US. Several years after divorcing her first husband because of domestic violence, she met Daniel and married him. Daniel is a Mexican immigrant who became an American citizen in the mid-1990s, when they married, Daniel petitioned the US Immigration Department to regularize Maria’s migration status, which was denied because Maria was caught using fraudulent documents to enter the US. By the time of her 2012 interview with the US Department of Immigration, Maria had been waiting several months for a decision on her deportation order appeal. As Maria vividly describes in the above quote, the wait produced a sense of suffocation associated with her anxiety and uncertainty. During our interview, Maria often wrung her hands, sharing that the uncertainty was causing insomnia. Other members of Maria’s family experienced the same feeling, especially her 10-year-old daughter, Sandra. In her book, Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation, Boehm (2016) asserts that many of her interviewees experienced a sense of suffocation, a common feeling among those living with the imminent and persistent threat of deportation every day. As I stated earlier in this paper, I conceptualize migrant suffering as the accumulation of psychosocial experiences that produce high levels of anguish, anxiety, fear, despair, and frustration in the migrant and their family. This mixture of feelings of suffocation and desperation has accompanied Maria and her family for several years. At the time of the interview in 2012, Maria had been waiting for her migration case to be decided for five years.

This suffering is part of what Madelaine Hron (2009) refers to as immigrant pain, which is characterized as “‘an unpleasant emotional experience’ or ‘damage’ associated with the process of immigration” (25). Although in the case of Maria, she has not been deported yet, she embodies the status of deportability: she fears she could be detained by ICE agents during any of her appearances in the immigration court, sent to a detention center, and then back to Mexico. This deportability status has lead immigrants to live in what Menjívar and Abrego (2012) refer to as a state of “legal violence” which is both structural and symbolic. For Menjívar and Abrego (2012), this legal violence is manifested not only through an increase in family separations as a result of deportation, but also through intensifying exploitation of immigrant workers, new violations of their rights, various forms of exclusion, little to no opportunity to pursue the kinds of education that lead to stability and prosperity, and almost no access to the socioeconomic resources necessary for social mobility. For millions of immigrant families, the deportation event is not the beginning of their suffering, but rather another step in their long road of anxiety, anguish, uncertainty, and fear.

It is not only the anxiety, anguish, and fear that generate suffering, but, above all, that these emotions are manifested in such a permanent and pervasive manner. Common daily decisions, for instance, the simple act of grocery shopping, cause stress and a sense of impotence. This is the case for Sara, a Mexican woman who crossed the US-Mexico border in 1986, at the age of 16. Sara is married to an American citizen; she is over 40 years old, and has not been able to legalize her migration status. Although she is married to an American citizen, she is not, under immigration law, entitled to a temporary residence permit because she did not enter the US with a visa. One of Sara’s options is to leave the country and wait indefinitely for the United States Immigration Department to pardon her original entry to the US without a visa. However, her lawyer does not recommend this because there are no guarantees she will be able to legally re-enter the United States. Sara’s immigration lawyer suggested another way to proceed, which involves proving that a close family member – such as her husband, mother, or children – depends on her for care in an irreplaceable way. She did not want to follow this path as she does not have children and both her mother and husband were in good health. At the time I interviewed her in the summer of 2012, Sara had decided to continue living in the shadows and simply wait for possible immigration reform. As a result, Sara lives in a state of constant anxiety because of this uncertainty. In 2008, Sara was formally diagnosed with panic attacks. She prefers not to drive at night to avoid the possibility of being pulled over by law enforcement officers stationed at the many checkpoints established by the local police department as part of the “Secure Communities” program.3 For Sara, simple activities that require identification, such as cashing a check, can be problematic and are a cause of anguish because she does not have legal identification. She depends on her husband for everything requiring paperwork, including banking, car insurance, and even contracting basic utility services, such as water and electricity.

For millions of undocumented immigrants, the threat of deportation inflicts suffering and, above all, creates an inescapable sensation of being trapped. Many immigrants stay indoors to reduce the potential danger of being detained and deported. Their outings are few, and only when absolutely necessary. When they do go out, many have contingency plans in case they are stopped or detained. For example, studies report that in cities with more rigid immigration laws, such as Phoenix, Arizona, undocumented immigrant couples with children never leave in the same car to reduce the risk of being detained and deported at the same time, leaving their children alone and helpless without a parent.

The sense of being trapped is perhaps most felt by immigrants who cannot legally leave the US to visit loved ones who are ill. For many immigrants, knowing a loved one is sick generates deep suffering, especially when the illness is terminal. When an undocumented immigrant faces this, deciding to stay or return to their country of origin to say ‘goodbye’ is an especially distressing and painful moment, as articulated below by Rosa.

“I always thought: ‘What am I going to do the day my dad or my mom gets sick, the day I have to go, and I can’t come back?’ It is very difficult, very difficult having to go; when I left I thought in the airplane: ‘My God, should I go or should I go back?’ Because I was leaving my children, my husband, my life, everything, but my dad was over there [Mexico], and perhaps he was just waiting for me to see me for the last time, and so do I. It was a decision…I’ve never felt as bad as that day…in the flight, it was the longest trip of my life. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know if what I was doing was right or wrong, or what would happen to me because just imagine if I would not be able to come back. What would become of me now? My children?” (Interview, Delaware, 2012).

Rosa, a 39-year-old immigrant at the time of the interview in 2012, arrived in Wilmington, Delaware in the early 1990s. Her older sister and her father had migrated to the US a year earlier. After several years of hard work, Rosa’s father returned to Mexico. Rosa managed to obtain a temporary work visa, and for several years her work visa allowed her to visit her parents in Mexico and come back to the US legally. However, in 2009, Rosa was unable to renew her work visa, so she overstayed her visa and consequently has been unable to return to Mexico.

In 2010, Rosa was notified that her father had been diagnosed with cancer. For several months, Rosa lived in anguish, until she finally decided to return to Mexico to see him before he died. In the preceding quote, Rosa movingly describes how difficult it was to make the decision to see her ailing father. Without a visa, returning to Mexico came with a high probability of not being able to return to the US, and that would mean being separated from her three children and husband. Her decision was not easy. Rosa decided to risk it all and return to Mexico. Rosa told me that suffering the loss her father was intense and that the pain would have been far greater if she had not been able to say goodbye to him, a fear many immigrants share.

The subjectivity of the migrant’s deportability status poses a constant threat and significant suffering to undocumented immigrants and also impacts the lives of their children. In the following section, I examine how the children of undocumented immigrants live with the deportability status of their parents, beginning with Enrique.

Inherited Suffering

“I don’t remember when I fully understood the difference between my status as a citizen and that of my mom’s, or my identity as not-undocumented. I remember conversations about Mexico and the inevitable acceptance of the fact that we might not be able to visit until many years later. I remember translating and serving as a mediator between my home and the world around us. I remember the constant fear of seeing a cop, hearing a siren, or being in the presence of any form of authority. This is mainly the reason why I drive when I’m back in Los Angeles instead of my mom, to avoid any added stress that she experiences whenever a cop is within eyesight. Trips to the airport to pick up/drop off my grandma (or me when I started to fly out here to the East Coast) were always accompanied by a prayer and the hope that there was no “retén” [check point]. This is simply how life was, and to some extent continues to be” (Weekly writing assignment, fall 2015).

With the exponential surge in ICE raids and deportations since the mid-2000s, there is increasing fear and insecurity among immigrants — “those who are undocumented but also among the documented, particularly among those who have a relative with uncertain status” (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012, p. 1400). In the two-year period between July 2010 and September 2012, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deported 204,810 parents of US-citizen children, who made up one-fourth of all removals (Colorlines, 2012, as cited in Berger Cardoso et al., 2016). One report found that between “1997 and 2007, 88,000 U.S. citizen children (44,000 of whom were less than 5 years of age) lost a legal permanent resident parent to deportation” (Baum, Jonex, & Barry, 2010 as cited in Brabeck & Xu, 2010, p. 345). As a result, the number of studies exploring the effects of deportation policies and practices on immigrant parents, families, and children has increased (Berger Cardoso et al., 2016; Dreby, 2010). While these studies have focused on children’s feelings of abandonment, symptoms of trauma, fear, isolation, depression, and family fragmentation, the socioemotional and psychological impact on young people whose parents also face the threat of deportation has been largely overlooked.

This is true for Enrique, a 22-year-old male college student. In the opening quote, Enrique expresses his concern about his mother’s deportability status, and, more importantly, acknowledges that this state of uncertainty and anxiety has been a long-standing lived experience for his family. The constant fear of being caught and deported shapes the experiences of millions of families living in the US in what Gilberto Rosas (2006) refers to as “policeability,” described as “a state of constant surveillance predicated on the hyperregulation of routine activity, evident in displays of state power, vigilantism, and the informal management of everyday life” (Maldonado, Licona, & Hendricks, 2016, p. 323). For many undocumented immigrants and their families, policeability restrains their movements, limits where they go, and how they spend their time. Enrique’s mother experienced this state of policeability, and along with it, the self-surveillance that extended to every member of her family. Like Enrique’s family, millions of immigrant families experience policeability, which promotes a climate of insecurity and suffering among individual immigrants and their families. In many cases, and from a very young age, the children of immigrants must learn to live with and navigate their parents’ vulnerable existence.

“So it was a shock to see that my parents were one of the few who were undocumented immigrants among my friend groups. However, my parents themselves dealt with it much more seriously than I did. They did their best to avoid any police interaction as much as possible because they learned early on that the police were not really there to support them. My parents were used to avoiding checkpoints because they knew that this was a way to see who had a license and to deport those who were not able to come up with any evidence of a license. My parents avoided the police as best they could because of their undocumented status, which is something that I quickly picked up at a young age” (Weekly writing assignment, fall 2016).

In mixed-legal-status families – families whose members include US citizens, US permanent residents, and undocumented immigrants – all members are aware of their vulnerability. Even very young children of undocumented parents understand how fragile and marginal their families’ lives are compared to the families of their friends and acquaintances. This is the case of Ramiro, a college student from Los Angeles currently studying at an elite liberal arts college on the East Coast. Both of Ramiro’s parents are undocumented. As stated in the above quote, from a young age Ramiro became aware of his family’s particular circumstances and learned how to protect his parents, for instance, by calling them as soon as he became aware of a nearby checkpoint so they could avoid using that route and find a detour. Being aware of the legal violence their parents are constantly exposed to causes these young Latinos to internalize and normalize self-surveillance at an early age, a sentiment that pursues many of them, even when they live thousands of miles away from home. One study shows that young Latinos reported: “feeling under heavy and constant surveillance by police and other local authorities, such as teachers and city facilities personnel” (Maldonado et al., 2016, p. 324). Policeability constantly haunts them, and the vulnerability of their parents’ deportability status produces continual anxiety and a sense of uncertainty, which is clear in the following vignette:

“Yesterday while I was walking from my dorm to one of my jobs, I started to plan out my life if my parents got deported. Having them stay with family wouldn’t be an option, mainly because everyone else would also get deported, except for one or two aunts and uncles. I thought about my siblings. I wouldn’t’ want them to be raised by anyone else, so I had the idea of bringing them over here and living with them in the apartments (still considered dorms), which is where I live now, except now it would be me and my siblings living in one apartment. I would get a car to drive them to school in the mornings; I’d put them in some after school program, pick them up in the late afternoon, we’d do homework together on some occasions at the library, we’d go grocery shopping, and I’d let them pick a snack. I was legitimately planning all of this out — I was calm about it too. I still don’t know whether or not Trump can legitimately do anything that he said he would do. I find it harder to hope/say that Trump can’t do these things; I was so confident that he wouldn’t be president and now he’s our President-elect” (Weekly writing assignment, fall 2016).

Natalia, a young college student, wrote this one day after Donald Trump was elected president. Like Natalia, many young Latino students, with parents holding irregular migration status, feel unsettled and have articulated experiencing a range of negative emotions, including despair, hopelessness, and anguish about their families’ futures under the new administration. For years, the undocumented immigrant community has lived under a deportation regime that has separated millions of families. As part of his presidential campaign, Trump promised to deport all undocumented immigrants, who all together comprise upwards of 11.7 million people. Although for years mixed-legal-status families have lived with the constant threat of a loved-one being deported, today more than ever, they face uncertainty and high levels of anxiety, fear, frustration, and hopelessness. In this context, social suffering in all its forms becomes commonplace, normalized, and familiar. Like Natalia, millions of undocumented families have designed their own contingency plans in the event a loved-one is deported. Boehm (2016) found that a common practice among mixed-legal-status families is to draw up legal documents granting custody of children whose parents were undocumented to family members with American citizenship. Mixed-legal-status families must prepare for “anything can happen” scenarios like Natalia’s hypothetical case of taking care of her siblings. Other mixed-legal-status families worry about how to support their families here in the US and in their countries of origin.

When one family member is deported a series of challenges arise for the entire family. As discussed earlier, this current deportation regime responds to a gendered and racial removal of Latino migrant men in general, and of Mexicans in particular (Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). For example, when fathers are deported, the economic burden falls mainly on women who suddenly become heads of the household. This phenomenon of becoming single mothers used to happen when their husbands began migrating to the US. For many years, these women become the so-called “wives left behind.” Today, as a result of this deportation regime – this time here in the US – thousands of immigrant women are forced to become de facto single mothers. When their husbands are deported to their countries of origin, these women must assume sole custody of their families. In many cases, rather than waiting to be deported, immigrant families make the decision to voluntarily return to their countries of origin as a way to avoid the humiliating and inhumane process of deportation. One study reported that 1.4 million Mexican immigrants and their children returned to Mexico between 2005 and 2010 (Anderson & Solis, 2014).

In addition, it is estimated that 4.5 million US citizen children have an undocumented parent at risk of detention and deportation (Ahmed, Appelbaum, & Jordan, 2017). The number of studies focusing on the impact that the deportation of a family member has on the family has increased considerably. While there are studies exploring the effects of deportation policies and practices on immigrant parents, families, and children, other scholars have focused on the educational challenges of US-born children who migrated to Mexico to be with their deported parents. Despite this, more studies are needed to further our understanding of the many challenges deportees and their families face. One of these groups of deportees are of young people.

Young returnees

Among the young returness, the so-called Dreamers are the ones who have gotten the most public attention. These are young immigrants who were brought to the US by their parents when they were very young. Dreamer is a political term that originated in 2001 with the “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act,” or the Dream Act. This act would have provided undocumented immigrants, who arrived in the US before their fifteenth birthday and who had no criminal record, the possibility to study in the US or join the military as a path to US citizenship. The Dream Act failed to pass in 2007, and failed again in 2010. Yet, after years of arduous, tireless, and inspiring civil disobedience activities all across the US by dozens of Dreamer-based groups, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was enacted in 2012. According to Hipsman, Gomez-Aguinaga, and Capps (2016), DACA has provided a two-year reprieve from deportation and temporary eligibility to work legally in the US to more than 728,000 unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children since the implementation of DACA..

It is estimated that 1.3 million young people were immediately eligible to apply for DACA; however, 398,000 who met the DACA age-at-entry and entry-date requirements, do not appear to have met its educational criteria (Hipsman et al., 2016). These are students who failed to complete high school and those who committed minor crimes, such as shoplifting or driving without a valid driver license. “It is estimated that since 2005 around a half a million of young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five have returned to Mexico after having lived in the US for five years or more” (Anderson & Solis, 2014, p. 9). This number includes those who were deported, those who were de facto deported via a “voluntary departure” order, and those who decided to move to Mexico. According to Anderson and Solis (2014), the median age of deported individuals is thirty, and just under half of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportees in 2012 and 2013 were between the age of fifteen and twenty-nine.

In their study of the Dreamers living in Mexico, Anderson and Solis (2014) identified three groups of returning Dreamers: 1) young men with criminal convictions that led to their deportation, 2) deported university students and graduates, and 3) young people who made the difficult decision to return, alone or with family. For each of these groups, the challenges faced vary based on their deportation circumstances. However, the most frequent obstacles these young people endure upon their arrival to their birthplaces include, among others: experiences of discrimination, bureaucratic frustration, culture shock, lack of employment opportunities, stigmatization of their identities as returned or deported immigrants, institutional barriers to continue their US studies, violence, and a variety of mental and emotional disorders. In addition to these challenges, for the great majority of these young people, their families no longer exist. They return to Mexico while their families, in many cases, stay behind in the US. This happened to Daniel, who was deported to Mexico in September of 2015.

Like most Dreamers who have been forced (either voluntarily or involuntarily) to return to their countries of origin, Daniel came to the United States when he was only one year old. He had spent most of his life in the US and was deported when he was 25. The son of a single father who battled alcoholism for many years, Daniel grew up in a difficult environment. As a teen, Daniel ran into problems with the law, and at the age of 17, entered a juvenile correctional center. He was supposed to serve only one year but ended up serving five. When released, he avoided deportation and found work. After two years, however, he was wrongly accused of a committing a crime – a mistake commonly made by local law enforcement agencies, leading to the involvement of ICE agents and the detention of the migrant (Ahmed et al., 2017). One night after work, the police arrested him. Once he was cleared of the crime, his family went to pick him up from the police station. There, his family was notified that ICE agents had taken him away. Daniel spent eight months at a detention center in southern California before being deported to Tijuana, Mexico.

Once in Tijuana, Daniel called his family in Los Angeles, who told him to wait at one of the migrant shelters in the border city while they made the necessary travel arrangements to see him, which is a common strategy for families when a loved one is deported. When a person is deported, family networks quickly mobilize to provide support. Several days passed before two relatives took Daniel to a friend’s house in Ensenada, a touristic port city located 100 miles south of Tijuana. Once there, the family explained Daniel’s situation to their friend and asked for help. Daniel lived in his family’s friend’s house for a couple of weeks, but as soon as his family helped him economically, Daniel was able to rent a small room in the back of a house and began his new life in Ensenada. The first months were challenging for Daniel, as it was the first time in 24 years that he was back in Mexico. Not only were the Mexican cultural codes unfamiliar, but the sense of uprootedness also made Daniel feel emotionally overwhelmed for several months. In the beginning, he spent most of the time in his rented room, not seeing or speaking to anyone for days. The sense of loneliness and not feeling at home accompanied Daniel during his first year in Ensenada.

Although Daniel managed to obtain a job and housing, his life experience is that of an exile. Because his father and relatives lack US immigration documents that would allow them to leave the US, he will not be seeing them – in Mexico or the US – anytime soon. Although soon after his deportation, Daniel often considered crossing the border to return home to Los Angeles where all his family resides, today, Daniel feels he is better off in Ensenada. Like other Dreamers, Daniel’s return to Mexico has been “a breath of fresh air” (Anderson & Solis, 2014, p. 10); a relief from the anguish, anxiety, and frustration caused by living as an undocumented immigrant in the United States. Although it was a painful experience, in the case of Daniel, his deportation freed him from this feeling of uncertainty and constant fear of being deported at any moment. In this sense, the US deportation regime decided on Daniel’s involuntary return. However, in the case of other Dreamers, the decision of returning is made consciously, which is the case for Maggie. In 2008, Maggie decided to return to Mexico because she felt that, “I was at a point where I couldn’t do nothing [sic]. Nobody would hire me. I could not continue to college since it was way too expensive, and I wasn’t able to get any scholarships” (Anderson & Solis, 2014, p. 127).

In April 2018, I met Maggie during a conference on Migrant Care and the Politics of Solidarity in New York City. As co-director of the organization Otros Dreams en Accion (Other Dreams in Action), Maggie, alongside other scholars, activists, and NGO representatives from Mexico, Central America, and the US, were invited to talk about the meaning of the sanctuary movement in the current political and social environment in the US. During Maggie’s presentation, I learned about Other Dreams en Accion (ODA) and the advocacy work this organization does to fight for the full recognition of immigrants’ human rights wherever they may find themselves, either in Mexico or in the US. Maggie was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico then migrated to Dalton, Georgia at the age of two, and after living in the US for 16 years, she then made the decision by herself to return to Mexico in 2008 (Anderson & Solis, 2014). At the end of her presentation, I introduced myself and had a conversation with Maggie. I found out that Maggie was part of a book about the lived experiences of deported youth in Mexico by Anderson and Solis (2014).

This book presents the narratives of 26 Otros Dreamers – those who either have been deported or decided to return by themselves – with the aim of untangling the endless factors and circumstances that compelled each of these Dreamers to return to a place that they had known only through their parents’ accounts. For Maggie, the first years after her return to Mexico were difficult, since her first employer took advantage of her by not paying her on time and treating her very poorly (Anderson & Solis, 2014). In 2015, Maggie, along with Jill Anderson, decided to fund ODA. Through different projects,4 ODA assists and works with returned and deported youth to help them transition smoothly to their new lives in Mexico. If at first, the return to Mexico led to endless challenges, anxieties, frustrations and a large dose of despair, Maggie transformed all those experiences into a growth opportunity not only for her but also for other young people who, like her, had returned to Mexico with a sense of personal failure.

Conclusion

While the levels of uncertainty, worry, fear as well as different forms of suffering, are constants in immigrants’ lives, the current political climate in the US has exacerbated their vulnerable condition. During his campaign, one of Trump’s cornerstone promises was to deport at least 3 million undocumented immigrants with a criminal record. At the time of this writing (summer 2018), not only have millions of immigrants been detained and deported but also, as Rebecca Torres (2018) contends, rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee crisis,’ the US restrictive and punitive migration policies reproduce and reinforce a structural and systemic crisis of rights and responsibility.

While the threat to continue with a deportation regime is not new, under this new administration, the levels of hostility, hatred, and xenophobic discourse towards minority immigrant groups, such as Mexicans and Muslims, are sure to escalate. It is estimated that the deportation of Mexican-born immigrants residing in the United States may reach 500,000 a year. However, this number may well reach as high as 700,000 to 900,000 (Becerril & Ballinas, 2017). Far from reducing the intensity and types of suffering faced by immigrants and their families, the new administration's measures have already created a scenario that intensifies suffering and increases its acuteness.

As previously established, for millions of immigrants deportation was an involuntary and unexpected return. In analyzing deportation as a systematic method by which immigrants are forced to return to their country of origin, this article contributes to scholarly discussions about the relationship between return migration and suffering. This paper also argues that suffering occurs before, during, and after the deportation event. Similarly, it asserts that being deportable causes permanent and prolonged suffering which many immigrants have struggled with for years, resulting from a structure of legal violence (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012) that inflicts anxiety and uncertainty on immigrants and their families. In this article, I document the social circumstances contributing to the suffering of immigrants through the presentation of several cases. By embodying a deportability status, immigrants suffer not only during the deportation process, but also before and after, and that suffering becomes an inherent characteristic of being deportable. In this context, the fear and threat of deportation come to define the daily lives of undocumented immigrants living not only in the US but also the lives of those already deported to their communities of origin. In this way, the suffering embodied by the immigrants and their families is not only transnational, but it is also a collective and transgenerational experience involving every member of the undocumented immigrant’s family.

The immigrant’s status of deportability causes direct emotional and psychological suffering, which extends to the rest of the family. Analyzing inherited suffering allows us to understand the scope and impact that feelings of anxiety, fear, and impotence have on the children of immigrant parents. This allows us to examine the levels of socioemotional and psychological stress they are exposed to, as well as their effects. Studies show that the parental embodiment of social suffering is correlated with children’s future health and overall development (Tapias, 2006). Therefore, considering that between July 2010 and September 2012 the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deported 204,810 parents of US-citizen children, the future intergenerational impact of the Trump administration deserves urgent attention. In this regard, much remains to be investigated regarding the long term psychosocial impact that children of immigrants, who end up being deported to their countries of origin, may face.

This study calls for a more in-depth examination of the mechanisms that make this social suffering of millions of immigrants and their families possible. The levels of suffering not only reflect a culture of insensitivity and lack of empathy toward the “Other,” but may also lead to dangerous terrain, where a sense of fear and despair prevails, on the one hand, and rejection and indifference grows, on the other. Society seems to show indifference towards the suffering of those who have been discursively shaped as if they were deserving of such poor treatment, those who have been labeled as “illegals.” Relying on cognitive science and social psychology, Massey (2007) argues that, in the minds of US citizens, undocumented immigrants (alongside sex offenders, drug dealers, and those perceived to be lazy welfare recipients) are considered “despised, out-group members” (14), and undocumented immigrants “are not perceived as fully human at the most fundamental neural level of cognition, thus opening the door to the harshest, most exploitative, and cruelest treatment that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another” (Massey, 2007, p. 150 as cited in Menjívar & Abrego, 2012). This mindset, however problematic, is not exclusive to the US, as this deportation regime has been widely emulated in many other migrant-receiving countries all across the world. In this regard, the liminal condition of millions of immigrants and their families has become widespread, and with it, the normalization and dehumanization of the immigrant “Other.”

Finally, by showing some of the circumstances that contribute to the suffering of immigrants, this study not only sheds light on the daily challenges immigrants face, it also shows their endless source of resistance and resilience. This is exemplified by some returned and deported youth who have been able to organize, capitalize on their human resources, and, most importantly, create an atypical non-profit organization. According to its website, ODA is a “member-based, grassroots organization funded through the heartfelt work and dedication of its members, direct donations, and project-based grants.” ODA’s core commitment is working against the criminalization and deshumanization of immigrants and their families, both in the US and Mexico. Relying on firsthand experiences, ODA’s members strive to transform adversity into growth opportunities. For many of these young people, these lessons of resilience and resistance were first learned at home, seeing their own parents resisting on a daily basis. Thus, rather than feeling like victims of an unjust American immigration system, ODA’s members embrace their lived experiences in order to advocate for imimmigrants’ human rights both across the border and throughout the world. By doing so, they demonstrate that immigrants are not passive vessels of oppression, but rather, form a community that has consistenly engaged in resistance, capable of contesting social injustice. Thus, although these stories reflect a series of sufferings, at the same time they show us the strength, determination, and dignity of these immigrant families.

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