An immigrant Dreamer awaits her fate

Itzel Avila is a child of the world and a woman without a country.

Now 23, she was brought to the United States when she was 7 from a rural town five hours south of Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast. She knows the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She does not know the Mexican anthem.

“I have an Americanized life, but I am Mexican,” she says. “I know I am Mexican, but I am more American.”

Avila, of Raleigh, is one of 66,000 young people in North Carolina who were brought to the United States as children and now face an uncertain status in their adopted land. Many of them came out of the shadows and officially identified themselves as undocumented after President Obama granted temporary protection from deportation though an executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Those in the program must reapply every two years, but the program itself can be revoked immediately.

Avila is one of those who stepped forward, a group of about 750,000 young people nationwide collectively known as Dreamers because they would have gained legal status to stay in the U.S. under a proposed law, Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or the DREAM Act, which stalled in Congress. Obama’s executive order allows Avila to drive and work legally and also pay taxes. She works for a janitorial service. At one point, she worked three jobs at once.

Now, the temporary protection granted the young people who came forward has exposed them to deportation under President Trump, who promised to clamp down on immigrants here illegally and deport many of the 11 million who live in the United States.

But Trump appears unwilling to punish those brought here as children. He said of the Dreamers in an interview with Time magazine in December: “They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

That’s Avila’s story. Her parents came illegally to the United States a few years before she did. One day back in Mexico, her uncle told her and her sister, then 6, that he was taking them into town for groceries. She remembers thinking it odd how tenderly her grandparents said goodbye. Soon she understood.

“That ride turned out to be much longer,” she says. “You realize you are not going back anymore.”

After a long journey, she and her group of a dozen led by paid guides known as coyotes walked through the desert at night and came to the U.S. border at Arizona. There was a 15-foot wall. They crawled under it. A van took Avila, her sister and their aunt and uncle to North Carolina, where she was reunited with the parents she barely knew. She lives with them in Raleigh. They, too, worry about whether the president will send them back to Mexico. Those fears grew last week as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement appeared to step up raids targeting undocumented immigrants around the country.

Avila’s life here has been much the same as other young people: schoolwork, playing soccer, high school graduation and work. That stability changed with Trump’s talk of Mexican immigrants as criminals, his promises to deport undocumented immigrants and build “a beautiful wall” along the border with Mexico. Avila was stunned when he was elected president.

“It was like the wall fell on us. You’re just under it,” she says. “Before Trump, the idea was we would work our way up to be a resident and a citizen, but when Trump got elected everything just got crushed down.”

Now she faces an uncertain future that will be decided by an erratic president, a billionaire son of privilege who has stoked working-class resentment toward immigrants.

“Will my future be here, or will I be going back to my home town?” she asks. “It all depends on him.”

Avila has watched the long version of the now famous 84 Lumber Super Bowl ad that showed the journey to America of a mother and her young daughter. The video ends with the two walking through the desert and arriving at a tall wall. Then they find a massive door and push it open. The ad ends with, “The will to succeed is always welcome here.”

“I was pretty shocked about someone making a commercial about my life. It kind of felt like somebody cared about what we went through. I thought that was pretty nice,” Avila says. “That message is what we’re doing. We’re looking for something better.”

The nation shouldn’t fear such young people being here. It should fear losing them.

This story was originally published February 11, 2017 at 6:16 PM with the headline "An immigrant Dreamer awaits her fate."