By Shannon Cruz

February 2023

What if you lived in fear every day for 12 years that a family member would suddenly be ripped away from your life? What if you had to choose between the only country and life you ever knew or keeping your family together? These scenarios are reality for thousands of mixed- status families across the United States who have at least one immediate family member who is an undocumented immigrant. It is the reality for many of the students we teach. When one of them comes to me in tears terrified that their parents will be taken away while they are at school I KNOW exactly how they feel. I know because I have walked in their shoes. This is my family’s story.

When those opposed to immigration reform say that undocumented immigrants should “get in line” like everyone else, what they do not realize is that for the average individual living in a developing country with no resources, THERE IS NO LINE. To qualify for the “line” you must be famous, highly skilled in some trade that the US finds desirable or have an immediate relative who can apply for you. None of those scenarios applied to my husband who came from Honduras in 2000 to escape poverty using the only means available to him at the time, crossing the border in Arizona. 

We met in December of that year and got engaged the following year in 2001. At the time I lived under another false assumption that many Americans have, that marrying a US citizen automatically grants status to the immigrant spouse. At the time I knew nothing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, (IIRIRA) which barred undocumented immigrants from reentry into the US for periods of 3, 5, or 10 years or even a lifetime for certain offenses. To apply for resident immigrant status, undocumented immigrants must return to their native countries for visa processing, but doing so triggers these bars: 3 years if illegal presence is less than one year, and 10 years if illegal presence is more than a year. These bars are only overcome by proving extreme hardship to the petitioning relative if either required to live without the immigrant relative in the US or forced to relocate to keep the family together. The US courts define “extreme hardship” as “greater than what the U.S. relative would experience under normal circumstances if the would-be immigrant were not allowed to come to or stay in the United States,” so mere emotional stress or loss of a second income are not sufficient. In addition to the illegal presence bars, there are bars for which there are no waivers available: 5 years for missing a court hearing, 10 years for multiple entries and a life-time for other offenses. 

It was not until we were married in 2002 and consulted countless lawyers did we begin to realize there was nothing we could do but hope and pray for immigration reform, reform that 21 years later still has not passed Congress. 

With nothing to do but wait, we got on with living our lives. My husband volunteered at church and school, we bought a house, had two kids, and I finished my Master's degree. Life was peaceful until 2008, when the South Carolina government passed legislation allowing police to check immigration status even during stops for traffic violations. While I had lived with slight anxiety over the years that immigration would one day come, the new laws brought my terror front and center. I could not function if my husband did not call every time he went somewhere to tell me he had arrived safely. I had nightmares that ICE came to our house. I recently found out that our daughter had the same nightmares. 

In 2012, ICE did come. However, thankfully, it was not as scary as we imagined. They knew we had already started the petition for alien relative and saw that my husband was the primary caregiver for our then 5-year-old son. They agreed to let him stay out until our petition was processed and he had to return to Honduras for consular processing (a necessary step, but one which would trigger the 10-year bar). 

The interview at the consulate in Honduras was scheduled in June of 2013. Since it was summer, our whole family flew down so that our kids could get to know the other part of their family and heritage. We were under the impression that my husband would get the 10-year unlawful presence ban but only have to remain in Honduras for at most a year while our waiver was processed. Our lawyer had not prepared us for the reality of the 5-year ban that could not be waived, and which was applied to my husband because he had missed a court hearing 12 years earlier of which he never received the notice to appear. 

When the immigration officer handed us the paper that said my husband was barred for 5 years with no waiver available, we were devastated. We could not imagine living apart for 5 years- we had been inseparable for 10 years, and our family did everything together! Nor could we imagine selling our house, all our belongings, and giving up our entire lives to relocate to a country that at the time was known as “the murder capital of the world.” We spent the next two months in Honduras visiting family, the whole time pondering what our future would hold. On August 5, the kids and I left my husband in Honduras. It was one of the hardest days of my life, leaving without any plans for the future.

We arrived in Honduras in July of 2014, and at first nothing mattered except that our family was united again. There were many wonderful things about our five years in Honduras. I loved the school and the teaching community where we worked. Because most of the teachers were young singles, my husband and I became like parents away from home for them and they became big brothers and sisters for our kids. We hosted Thanksgiving dinner and Superbowl parties, took teachers to the doctor and rescued them when they would get stranded on the side of the road with flat tires or dead batteries. My kids became bilingual and bicultural and, being surrounded by so much poverty, grew up with an appreciation for everything they had and the perspective that is only gained from living in different worlds: acceptance of those who are different. 

However, despite our joy at being together and our gratitude for the way our new school provided a very comfortable life for us compared to the average Honduran citizen, it didn’t take long for reality of living in another culture to set in. I became weary of the constant attention my lighter complexion seemed to draw. I mourned the fact that my kids couldn’t continue the sports that they loved: ice skating and baseball, and I tired of the inefficiencies that plagued everything from bank visits, to paying bills, to car maintenance. I got tired of the constant termite droppings that sprinkled everything in our house, not being able to flush toilet paper, and limited hot water (well, that was until dry season came and we didn’t have ANY water at all for five days, except what we could buy to drink.) I missed the variety of US grocery stores and refused to face the terror of driving on Tegucigalpa roads. As my parents got up in years, I worried constantly about whether I would see them again and lamented the fact that I wasn’t there to care for them. Thankfully, our income was sufficient for the kids and me to travel home for a visit each summer, but it was always hard to leave my husband behind, and our summer visits were always bittersweet without him there. 

In 2017, life became more precarious following the controversial Honduran presidential election. There were weeks of violent protests and looting, an evening curfew, and schools were closed. Even after life returned to some kind of normalcy, there was a lot of uncertainty, because we never knew when or where a protest would shut down a major road. School would frequently close, and we would have to scour the news to know when and where it was safe to go grocery shopping. In the spring, my daughter had to take cover during a field trip when a shootout happened nearby. When we returned from our summer visit to the states in 2018, we had to abandon our car full of luggage and walk past a blockade of burning tires to get to our neighborhood because we heard of robberies happening while people were stuck in the roads. Thankfully, my husband was able to return to get the car later. 

At that point, I was ready to get out of there! The five-year bar for missing court ended May 31, 2018, and we could finally apply for the extreme hardship waiver to hopefully have the rest of the 10-year unlawful presence bar forgiven. We compiled what we believed to be compelling evidence of why we could no longer live in Honduras or live apart, but were disappointed in November when a letter arrived requesting more evidence to prove hardship. We sent more evidence, including a map showing all the places near our house and school where murders had happened and bodies were dumped. We were overjoyed in April 2019 when we got word that our waiver had been approved and we could finally come home. My aunt was gracious enough to sponsor my husband so he could prove he would not become a public charge (my Honduran income was insufficient to do this). We finished the school year in June, made a last visit to my husband’s family, flew home June 26, 2019, and moved back into our house that the renters had vacated only a few days before. 

I am thankful that we are finally able to live peacefully in the United States and fulfill our dreams without feeling like they are sandcastles that might be swept away at any moment by the realities of our immigration system. In fact, my husband passed his citizenship exam a few weeks ago and expects to become a citizen very soon. After 21 years and tens of thousands of dollars, our battle is finally over, but for the families of many of our students, the battle is still raging. For students whose parents are both undocumented, their only hope is to wait to turn 21 so they can petition for their parents, who will also have to return to their home countries, face the same bars and file the same waivers. If their whole family returns to their home country, they will not likely have the same job prospects that allowed our family to live with most of the amenities we take for granted here in the US, nor the financial resources to pay the thousands of dollars in applications and legal fees. For others, lifetime bars may prevent them from ever being able to come out of the shadows and obtain legal status. Their only hope is reform, which still seems unlikely given the division and rhetoric that continues to plague Congress.