Is He a Citizen?
sandiegoreader.com
By Thomas Larson
Published Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011

On Sixth Avenue, across the street from the block-long Family Court building, stands a row of converted single-family Victorian homes, their yards parking lots, their windows barred. Today those residencies are family-mediation agencies and immigration law offices. In the lawyers’ waiting rooms, one finds a new class of clients: illegal immigrants, most from Mexico, who’ve been in San Diego for years and whose chances of gaining citizenship are getting as slim as winning the lottery. They’re seeking attorneys’ aid, frightened by the anti-immigration movement in American politics, and especially the d word: deportation.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexicans who were in the country illegally traveled back and forth at Christmas: take a bus to the border, walk into Tijuana, fly home for the holidays and fly back, then sneak into America through a hole in the fence or a long hole in the ground. In recent years, for a host of reasons — stronger border surveillance, double the number of Border Patrol agents, widened barriers and sealed tunnels, tougher restrictions on Mexican visas, overloaded U.S. clinics where pregnant women receive prenatal care, and a political will in Washington to revise immigration law — crossing from Mexico has become more perilous than ever, particularly along the 45-mile border between the San Ysidro and Tecate crossings.

A border that is less porous has meant a boon for immigration lawyers. Their clients, many of whom have hidden out in America for years, are now seeking a lawful path toward residency and/or citizenship, though the way, in such an inflamed political climate, is strewn with legal roadblocks and ablaze with constant anxiety.

One such client I meet in a Sixth Avenue law office is a fortyish Mexican woman, here illegally for eight years. She — and her lawyer — agree that she may speak anonymously. Lupe, as I’ll call her, came to America from Mexico with six of her seven children. The seventh, now seven years old, is the only one born here, and thus a U.S. citizen.

Lupe is accompanied by her soon-to-be daughter-in-law, who is an American citizen. The young woman’s Mexican-born fiancé, one of Lupe’s seven children, was deported last June. The two hope that by working with an immigration attorney, they can bring him back and get him and Lupe on the road to residency status.

Lupe is distraught about her son’s expulsion. She has no idea when she’ll see him again. Worse, she says, is her fear that if she went to visit him in Tijuana, where he lives, she could not get back across the border — not today’s clamped-down border. Such a journey might mean abandoning her six children in the United States. It’s a classic bind, between the rock of one child and the hard place of the other six.

Still, with a trusting smile, Lupe says she wishes “there were a better opportunity in the U.S. for everyone here illegally to become, at least, temporary residents.â€