A month after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Marvin Gonzalez , a government mail clerk in Jefferson City, Missouri, was sorting packages for Governor Bob Holden when he came across a package addressed to the governor that included an unmarked envelope and a book about Osama bin Laden. Frightened but remaining calm, he alerted his superiors. The nation was on the lookout for another terrorist attack, after a series of anthrax incidents had killed five people, sickened more than a dozen and left the country once more on edge.



State investigators later determined the package did not contain anything hazardous, but the government took anything that looked like the deadly white powder seriously, and the FBI came to Jefferson City, Missouri, to interview Marvin. He and others in the mail room began wearing protective gloves and masks when they handled the mail and were moved out of the capitol building.

Marvin kept his head down and hoped that was the end of it. But in December, as Marvin opened another letter addressed to the governor postmarked from a nearby prison, white powder spilled out on to his leg. He was terrified. The FBI visited again. He called his wife.

Don’t get scared, but a powder spilled on me when I was opening mail, and I don’t know if I’m going to be all right.

They quarantined Marvin for the day and ran tests. For a week he waited for the lab results. A few days after the incident, the left side of his face swelled up, and he developed a rash, but officials told him the powder had tested negative for any biohazard. Marie accompanied her father to the doctor and translated the diagnosis for him. The doctor suggested the rash was from something he ate. Marvin and Marina didn’t know what to believe. Now Marvin began to dread going to work. He couldn’t sleep, but for Marie, he tried to pretend everything was OK.

Marvin became something of a hero after that, but it was attention he didn’t want. Marvin had brought his family to the United States a decade before on a tourist visa, and they’d stayed long past the legal limit. The last thing he needed was people looking into his life.

•••

Marvin had sold his seafood restaurant in Costa Rica back in 1991 after a cholera epidemic crashed the local tourism industry. He and Marina packed up as much of their lives as they could into suitcases and flew with then five-year-old Marie to southern California in late November.

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Eventually they wound up in Jefferson City, Missouri, where Marvin took over the American Wok, a popular downtown restaurant started by Nicaraguan immigrants that catered to the government worker lunch crowd. Then Missouri’s governor, John Ashcroft, who would soon be appointed US attorney general by George W Bush, was among those to stop by and leave a signed photo. The Gonzalezes moved in upstairs.

During the afternoons, Marie did her homework at a table and in the evening played by herself in a side room her parents closed off, the smells of sizzling ginger and garlic wafting in from the kitchen. When she wasn’t at the restaurant, Marie would hang out at the library across the street. She spent so much time there that the librarians sometimes had her test out new educational software. She took the job seriously, her green eyes scanning the screen, tight black curls bouncing ever so slightly as she read.

Over time, Marvin and Marina saved up enough money to buy the restaurant, and, along with the help of a scholarship, to enroll Marie in a nearby Catholic school. Marie loved school and took up tennis and track, avoiding the dreaded label of nerd.

Watching her father crunch numbers at his desk in the back of the restaurant, she learned early the difference between telling her parents she wanted something and telling them she needed it. And she prided herself on being her parents’ helper, their translator and their adviser.

Marvin and Marina took out a small business loan for the restaurant and diligently repaid it, but the restaurant hours took their toll, and business was fickle. In January 2001, the father of one of Marie’s schoolmates told Marvin about the $20,000-a-year mail room messenger job with the governor. Finally he and Marina would have good medical insurance and a steady income.

They bought a house on a quiet residential street, a one-floor brick home with an elm tree in the front yard. It never occurred to Marvin or his family that his connection to the state’s highest-ranking official would prove his undoing – nor that it would lead his daughter to help ignite a national movement.

•••

By high school, Marie no longer spent her afternoons alone. Increasingly, she was busy with the track and tennis teams, attending church on Sundays with her parents. The governor even sent Marie a handwritten letter congratulating her on her academic achievements.

Life was good, at least until her father began opening the letters with the powder inside. He became more anxious, distracted. At the time, Marie thought it was just because of the threat of the attacks.

In April 2002, when Marie turned 16, she, like her friends, made a beeline with her mother to the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain that piece of plastic signifying freedom for teenagers across the United States. But the DMV wouldn’t accept her identification.

She had come in on a child’s passport, one that needed to be renewed every five years. And her parents had never renewed it. They hadn’t thought about traveling anywhere, and it seemed an unnecessary expense. Her US visa had also expired. She had no proof of identity.

At work, colleagues joked with Marvin about Marie’s not getting her license and offered to help. The governor’s chief of staff accompanied Marie and her mother to get the coveted card, but again they were rebuffed. Now Marie was worried. What did it mean that she didn’t have the right papers to get her license?

It will all get sorted out, she told herself. These kind of things always do.

•••

It wasn’t for lack of trying that Marvin and Marina remained in the country without legal status. When they’d lived in Los Angeles, they’d forked over thousands of dollars to immigration lawyers to get on the right side of the law. The lawyers had told them if they worked hard, paid taxes, bought a home and stayed out of trouble, after five years they would have a good shot at applying for a green card.

And the lawyers had been right. Back then, to avoid deportation, immigrants had to show the “extreme hardship” they might face if they were sent back to their home country. But in practice, one often had to show simply the likelihood of more routine hardship, including separation from children, with the US government taking into account the person’s age, his or her time in the United States, the financial strain of deportation, lost educational opportunities and family connections.

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After five years, however, Mario and Marina were told the wait had now stretched to seven years. But then the law changed in 1996, and the wait became 10 years. The Gonzalezes moved to Missouri, where finding a lawyer who spoke Spanish was no small task. They briefly looked for one, but just paying the bills on the restaurant, and later the house, took up most of their money and energy.

Soon after the license fiasco, Governor Holden spoke at an event where Marie was honored for her academic success and again at a ceremony recognizing the state’s growing Latino community. The governor gave a shout-out to Marie and her father’s patriotism. Once again Marvin winced at all the attention.

In early June of 2002, his worst fears came true.

•••

The governor’s office alerted Marvin that it had received an anonymous tip: Holden’s trusted messenger and mail room clerk was in the country illegally and had been for years, the caller said. Someone should look into it.

Marvin had presented a social security number and a valid driver’s license when he applied for the job. He’d been issued the social security number when he arrived, and he’d gotten his driver’s license with it. And back then, that was enough to get hired as a state employee.

Federal agents came to Marvin’s office and interviewed him for two hours. This time, no one treated him like a hero. He phoned Marina to warn her that the agents might come to the house.

Quick guide What is Daca and who are the Dreamers? Show Hide Who are the Dreamers? Dreamers are young immigrants who would qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (Daca) program, enacted under Barack Obama in 2012. Most people in the program entered the US as children and have lived in the US for years “undocumented”. Daca gave them temporary protection from deportation and work permits. Daca was only available to people younger than 31 on 15 June 2012, who arrived in the US before turning 16 and lived there continuously since June 2007. Most Dreamers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and the largest numbers live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Donald Trump cancelled the program in September but has also said he wants Congress to develop a program to “help” the population. What will happen to the Dreamers? Under the Trump administration, new applications under Daca will no longer be accepted. For those currently in the program, their legal status and other Daca-related permits (such as to work and attend college) will begin expiring in March 2018 – unless Congress passes legislation allowing a new channel for temporary or permanent legal immigration status – and Dreamers will all lose their status by March 2020.

Technically, as their statuses lapse they could be deported and sent back to countries many have no familiarity with. It is still unclear whether this would happen. Fear had been rising in the run-up to last week’s announcement. Those with work permits expiring between 5 September 2017 and 5 March 2018 will be allowed to apply for renewal by 5 October. What does the recent ruling by Judge William Alsup mean? In his ruling, Alsup ordered the Trump administration to restart the program, allowing Daca recipients who already qualify for the program to submit applications for renewal. However, he said the federal government did not have to process new applications from people who had not previously received protection under the program. When the Trump administration ended the Daca program, it allowed Daca recipients whose legal status expired on or before 5 March to renew their legal status. Roughly 22,000 recipients failed to successfully renew their legal status for various reasons. Legal experts and immigration advocates are advising Daca recipients not to file for renewal until the administration provides more information about how it intends to comply with the ruling. “These next days and weeks are going to create a lot of confusion on the legal front,” said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which has filed a separate lawsuit against the Trump administration’s termination of Daca. Joanna Walters

Someone leaked the investigation to the media, and by the evening, the family made the local news. The following day the story had gone national.

Holden’s staffers weren’t willing to stick their necks out for an undocumented immigrant who appeared to have duped them. Marie wondered who had called in the tip. A jealous staffer? A friend? Someone seeking to damage the governor?

She no longer knew whom she could trust. Terrified of what people would think, she began calling everyone she knew – teachers at school, friends from church – trying to explain they were not criminals.

Their friends at church didn’t understand how the family they knew could be “illegals”. Marie had gone to school with their children; her mother had worked as a teacher’s aide; her father had even been a government employee. These kinds of cases didn’t happen in Jefferson City, at least not to people they knew. Sure, they didn’t want drug dealers and gangbangers sneaking across the border. But this was different.

The community rallied around the Gonzalezes. A group of friends began calling themselves the “Gonzalez Group” and reached out to every lawmaker, every political contact they knew.

But others were wary of being associated with Marie and her family. After so much recognition from the governor’s office, Marvin was quickly cast out. And now that his case had made the headlines, no one would hire him. Fortunately, Marina was allowed to continue working at her school as a volunteer, receiving donations and gift cards in lieu of pay. Now she was the main breadwinner.

At night, Marie watched the stories on CNN and Univision of people being deported.

Oh, my God, she thought. That could be us.

•••

It wasn’t until the summer of 2003 that the government agents finally arrived.

The first interview was simple. The officer, from the newly created Department of Homeland Security, was cordial enough. But he warned the couple that it could have been much worse: he could have come in a show of force, with several vehicles, and taken them into custody.

Later other agents would return to interview the couple separately about a small-business loan they’d taken out years before and paid off, seeking, it seemed to Marie, to catch them in some misstatement, some illegal act.

As the officers watched, Marvin and Marina carefully pulled out years of records establishing their ties to the country: ownership of the American Wok, the loan, their home mortgage, the years Marina had spent as a teacher, the background checks they’d undergone for their jobs in government and at the school. They were, in fact, anything but undocumented.

The family had their first hearing in December 2003, driving two and a half hours to Kansas City, the nearest immigration court.

Theirs was the only case on the docket that day. When they arrived, Marina was shocked to see a group of immigrants sitting in chairs, handcuffed. They didn’t look like criminals to Marina. But now she wondered whether that was how others saw her.

Then, to their surprise, the judge walked into the courtroom and quickly made things clear: they had no claim to stay in the United States and now were officially in deportation proceedings.

•••

In the spring of 2004, Marie flew to Washington DC. She used her school ID to board the plane, terrified she would be detained at any minute.

Staffers from the not-for-profit Center for Community Change picked her up at the airport. Before she knew it, Marie was at the offices of an NPR affiliate, doing her first major interview. Her voice trembled.

As the interviewer focused on Marie and other students like her, a hard knot tightened in her stomach. Don’t forget my parents, she wanted, but was afraid, to say.

Later, older immigrant advocates sat her down. She needed to tell her story again, but with more emotion. If she needed to cry while telling it, she should cry, because if she wanted to convince US senators, she would have to touch their hearts.

Then Marie did cry, in anger and frustration. Why did she need to show those officials weakness? When she allowed herself to imagine losing her country, her friends, her life, her heart started beating so fast she could barely breathe. Reciting what was happening to her family as if it were happening to a stranger was the only way she could get through it.

That night Marie couldn’t sleep as she wondered how on earth she would get up the next day and speak in front of hundreds of people.

But she did. The next morning Marie donned a royal blue cap and gown she planned to wear at her high school graduation the following month and spoke at a mock version of graduation as the honorary “valedictorian”. It was all part of an action the Center for Community Change and the National Immigration Law Center had organized on the US Capitol grounds.

There she met other burgeoning leaders, like Walter Barrientos, a Guatemalan native from New York, who was already recognized among the small group of young, undocumented activists in cities like Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. She was amazed to meet teens from Bangladesh and Trinidad, even Germany, all without immigration status.

They sang the national anthem. One student read Langston Hughes’s poem Harlem, whose opening lines seemed prescient more than 50 years after he penned them: “What happens to a dream deferred? …”

But few apart from Marie were willing to give their names or speak about their own cases. They were still mostly flying under the federal radar, wanting to participate but terrified of the backlash they might draw against themselves and their families. Soon it was her turn.

“Like any normal kid, I went through the daily routine of school and extracurricular activities,” she began. “I’ve worked hard to become the person I am, with good grades, athletics, Christian service and other community involvement … I was even honored by being named to the homecoming court of 2003,” she told the crowd of reporters. “What makes me angry is that our nation’s immigration laws don’t take any of that into account. The Dream Act would change that. It would give 65,000 young people like me the opportunity to prove we can give back to our communities, communities like mine that have been incredibly supportive.”

Yet as Marie begged the audience to recognize her ties to Missouri, she felt torn, adding “Even if the Dream Act passes in time for me to stay, I am faced with the difficult fact that my parents would have to leave.”

•••

Her pleas hadn’t worked, not for the bill and not for her own family. The Gonzalezes’ deportation date was set for 5 July 2005. They bought plane tickets for Costa Rica. On the afternoon of 1 July 2005, Marie received a call from her attorney: DHS had granted a last-minute reprieve from deportation.

Marie gripped the phone, shouting. She wanted to sing! The news was too good to be true!

Wait, wait, her attorney stopped her. It’s just you.

At the last minute, Illinois senator Dick Durbin had reached an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official at an Independence Day party, convincing him to sign off on Marie’s waiver.

Marie tried to breathe. She had four days to say good-bye to her parents, maybe for a decade. Marvin and Marina faced a ten-year ban from the United States for overstaying their visas. If Marie were to leave to go visit them, she would be banned from returning for ten years as well.

The family spent the Fourth of July holiday weekend packing. The day her parents left, they all wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words “God Bless the USA”. They met friends at a nearby park and prayed with fellow churchgoers. Local TV stations showed up to cover Marvin and Marina’s departure.

“Everybody, take care of my daughter,” Marvin pleaded as he stood before the crowd.

Later, Marvin lifted his suitcases into the family SUV and hugged his daughter so hard he nearly crushed the reading glasses dangling around his neck. Some 40 cars caravanned with them through downtown Jefferson City to say goodbye.

And then her parents were gone.