On that particular evening back in 2003, my parents were in the car together returning home from work — my mother was a babysitter, my father an electrician — when they noticed three men in suits reading the labels on the mailboxes in front of our building. This was on the urban streets of New Jersey, against a backdrop of dilapidated buildings, and they immediately assumed who it was.

“Go in your bedroom and hide,” my mother hissed over the phone. “Immigration is here. Do not open the door.” My younger sister, Kim, was only 12, and I was 16, a junior in high school. When I relayed the message to her, we both grinned. Our family had a dark sense of humor, and even though we were residing in the United States illegally, this sounded like just the kind of prank she would play on us.

“Krys,” she said, “this is not a joke! I am sitting outside with your father. They are going upstairs right now. Hide!” Her voice was too serious, too worried. Not a tremor of a laugh vibrated in her words. So I shut my sister in our bedroom, turned off all the lights and locked the windows. We lived in a third floor walk-up in Bayonne. It would take them a couple of minutes to get up there, so I stood behind the door of our apartment and peered through the peephole. I could hear footsteps on the wooden stairs — not the weary ascension of the old Egyptian lady and her husband who lived across the hallway or the skip of the little Puerto Rican boy below us or the cheerful whistle of the African-American woman on the first floor.

It was when the tops of their heads floated above the railing that I really believed my mother’s words. Having gone through the motions of locking the apartment down, I was still hoping it was all an elaborate gag. I felt the unlawfulness of our status in this country acutely. As far as I knew, they could, and had every right to, remove us from our apartment and send us back to our country, Trinidad and Tobago.