Why Becoming a Legal Immigrant Is Next to Impossible

Many wrongly assume there is a process you can easily go through to become legal. In reality, our immigration system is a bureaucratic nightmare.

By Mari Herreras

The young woman sitting at a kitchen table with her father looks like any other Arizona teenager. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she's wearing jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a large silver peace sign.
Moments ago she was running around her family's house in slippers being chased by a little black puppy her family got her -- a perfect distraction from her family's worries that her father faces deportation back to Mexico, where the family came from more than 14 years ago.

At the request of the family's attorney, the Tucson Weekly will not identify her or her father or mother. The family is undocumented, in the country illegally. But this 18-year-old wants you to know a few things about her. She wants you to know that she works extra hard to be a good person. She obeys the law, works hard in school and cares about her community. She is in almost every way a model U.S. citizen.

"I've always had to work harder than most of the other kids I know, kids who have their papers, kids who are here legally and always getting into trouble," she explains.

She entered the United States when she was three years old. Now she plays a bit of a waiting game, hoping for the passage of the Dream Act legislation, which would allow young adults who entered the U.S. illegally as young children to stay in the country and be able to eventually apply for citizenship.

"We've been here for 14 years. My father came here -- jumped over the fence. My brother and I came here in a car with friends, and my mother came over in a different car," she says with just a slight accent.

"We've been here most of my life. I don't remember anything about Mexico."

Part of the waiting game for her also centers on her father, who was apprehended in early July during a traffic stop and spent three weeks in detention while his family figured out the process to post bond and have him released.

Eventually, her father may face deportation proceedings, although she says an attorney is working with the family to help him avoid deportation or at least slow the process to allow him to continue staying with his family as long as possible.

Her father says he was going to work in a truck with two other people for a job he had doing drywall. He was driving in a construction zone that changed the speed limit abruptly to 25 miles per hour and he wasn't able to slow down fast enough. The police officer who stopped him gave him a ticket for speeding and another ticket for a problem with the car and then another for an expired drivers' license. The cop also asked the other two people in the car for their identification and asked about their legal status.

"The (SB 1070) law hadn't (taken effect) yet, but the police asked if they were Mexican. They didn't have any ID. At that instant my dad showed them a G-28 paper that indicates he has an attorney representing him. I think it's what eventually helped us get him released on bond."

She also thinks what helped her father was the information she has learned being involved in local immigration organizations, such as Tierra Y Libertad. Through Tierra, she says she's learned what to do if she's stopped and asked about immigration status. She taught this to her parents and other members of the community. Her father followed her advice, while the two men with him did not.

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