Children in the Shadows

Alex, because he fits in so well, knows exactly what they think. "People who don’t know my situation, it’s very interesting to just listen to them," he says.

Sitting around the dorm last year, his roommates dissed illegals. "They’re taking our resources, our jobs ..."

Alex said nothing. At the end of the semester, he told them he was undocumented, and they were stunned.

"They had this idea of what an illegal immigrant was, and I didn’t fit that," he says. "They saw that I wasn’t any different from them. So it was like, ‘well, you’re OK.’"

More illegal immigrant teens are starting to talk. And, increasingly, their peers who are citizens are going to bat for them. Last summer in Miami, when Colombian-born Juan Gomez, 18, and his family were picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Juan made a phone call.

His friends took swift action. They persuaded immigration officials to delay the deportation, and then they brought his case to Congress.

In the past, there was little hope for Juan and others in his situation. But that could be changing. In spite of the recent crackdown on illegal immigration, teens like Alex and Juan may be closer than ever to getting legal status.

Off the Map. Under the Radar.
There are 1.7 million "undocumented migrant" children in the United States, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates. They don’t choose to move here; their parents make that decision. But the children have to face the consequences.

What are those consequences? How does the life of an illegal immigrant child differ from that of a U.S. citizen? In many ways, it doesn’t.

"In Florida, there are not a whole lot of benefits that aren’t available to an illegal child as opposed to a child who is born here," says Samuel Blanco, an immigration attorney with Blanco & Pelier, P.A. in Naples. "They can get emergency care. They can get public education until they are 18."
Their access to these services offends many U.S. citizens, who view illegal immigrants as a fiscal burden.

Most of these children blend in quickly. Take Amanda, 18, from Brazil. She came here at 12 on a tourist visa and overstayed it. After three months, she fully understood English. Within eight months, she was in all honors classes, and serving as an ambassador for another student from Brazil.

Her parents had pressured her to learn English. She picked it up at school and from watching Rugrats, the television show.

Separated Families
Illegal immigrant children differ from their "legal" counterparts in important ways. Often, they stay behind in their country with relatives or friends while their parents get established in the United States.

Ivan, from Mexico, was four. "I got mad at my dad," Ivan says about his leaving. "I hit him. I went to my room and spent three days crying."

Ivan’s older brother, Arturo, laughs. "For me, it was better. My mom let me go anywhere."

His mother was distracted, he explains, and too busy working to pay attention to him. They saw their father again five years later, when they moved to the United States.

"He was a lot skinnier," Ivan says. "Probably because of stress," Arturo adds.

Alex, the college student, was only two hours old when his dad left. Alex came to the States at age five, and they had to be introduced.

Luis, age nine, is from Brazil and didn’t know that his mother, Viviane, was leaving the country. She couldn’t bear to say goodbye, so she arranged for her son to be out shopping with his grandparents. He returned home, and she was gone.

Close Calls
I ask Luis whether he’s ever afraid that his mother will suddenly disappear again.

"No," he says, definitively. He pauses. And then he says, "Well, now I am. Because you asked me that."

Most children of illegal immigrants either don’t realize or don’t think about the fact that their parents could be deported. But Crystal, eight, a U.S. citizen, recalls the day two men from ICE came looking for her mother, Niki.

"We had to hide in the bathroom," Crystal says. She was six. "I was afraid. And I remember that my mom was pregnant with my baby brother."

Earlier that day, ICE had picked up Niki’s mother in Naples. Niki’s step-dad called to warn her that the men might be on their way.

"This guy knocked on the door," Niki says. "I looked through the peephole, and it looked like them because of the way my stepdad described them—a blue Focus car. I grabbed the kids and got in the bathroom closet. I told them, ‘You guys need to be real quiet.’ My middle child, I was holding her mouth.

"My husband answered the door. ‘Where’s your wife?’ they said.

"‘She no longer lives here.’

"They came in. I had the door cracked. I could look through the mirror in the hallway and see them."

The stepdad suspects that Niki’s sister "dropped the dime." The sister had been charged with a crime and could have been hoping to lighten her sentence.

"They came into the front room," Niki says. "I don’t know why they didn’t search the bedroom and bathroom. As soon as they were gone, we grabbed a few clothes for the girls and for me, and we left."

After that, Crystal and her family moved a lot, never staying in one place for very long. Crystal finally asked why. "Mom told me she wasn’t really meant to be in this country."
Niki says, "I told her, ‘There’s a possibility that mommy could be caught one day and go to jail and wouldn’t be able to see you.’ It was really heartbreaking for her."

Crystal worries. But she’s glad her mom told her. About all the moving, she says, "You don’t want to get too used to where you moved. Because when you move somewhere, you have to move again."

First Impressions of the United States
Many things about the States seem strange to the children when they first arrive. Wal-Mart, for instance. It’s astonishingly big. And everything’s so cheap.

Carpet. "Weird," Amanda says. "In Brazil, everything is tile. I used to love to wash the tile with water."

Baked beans. Ick. Too sweet. Why would anyone do that to beans? The hand dryers in public restrooms. "I didn’t know how to use them," Alex says.

The size of the cars. The food. "I was sick the first year. I couldn’t get adjusted to it," Arturo says.

The pace. Everything is more hectic. "I was isolated," Alex says. "I started kindergarten. I didn’t know anybody. And I didn’t cry to mom because I didn’t know her that well."

"I wanted to go back," Arturo says.

Natalie was four when she came here from Mexico. When I ask her what she remembers about her first few days in the United States, she says, Monsters, Inc. She watched the Pixar movie over and over again during the three-day trip from Arizona to Southwest Florida, where her family lives now. They were in a mini-van with a DVD player.

Before that, Natalie and her mother, Luz, walked through the Sonoran Desert for two days. They crossed the U.S./Mexico border on foot. Luz asks Natalie if she remembers the cacti, the snakes, the dead cows. The little girl shakes her head.

They walked to a prearranged spot where a coyote picked them up and brought them to Phoenix, where they met Natalie’s father, Juan. Natalie didn’t know who he was.

Juan had come here a year and a half earlier. He’d been laid off from a white-collar job in Mexico.

For three months, he looked for work there with no luck. He would have preferred to come here legally, but says he didn’t stand a chance of getting a visa. He had no job lined up in the United States. And even if he had one, he couldn’t have afforded the fees. An immigration attorney told me an employment-based entry costs roughly $10,000, spread over four or five years.
"If I had that kind of money," Juan says, "why would I leave?"

Pint-Size Translators
"Do you want water? Or juice?" Natalie asks me. She’s now eight. I’m in the living room with Juan. Natalie’s mother is in the kitchen, and I know this offer really comes from her. Luz doesn’t speak much English. At her prompting, Natalie brings me a generous piece of her flan.

It’s something an outsider notices instantly—that these children translate for their parents. Quite often, they navigate the bureaucracy, too—schools, healthcare, other institutions.

Their parents make sure their hair is straight and their clothes are perfect. "So everybody stays out of our business," Crystal’s mom tells me.

Amanda, at 16, was managing the family’s finances and paying bills from her parents’ bank accounts. "I think I do the things my dad is supposed to do," she says. "But it doesn’t bother me."