Life In The Shadows
Maximiliano Trejo was still sleeping in his home at dawn this summer when his sons Max and Marcos were startled awake by the sound of fists pounding on the front door. More than a dozen men were walking around the house. Inside, a platoon of images of Catholic saints hung above the main entryway like silent guards. The boys huddled in the early morning’s quiet violet light. They refused to open the door. The men left; the tension broke.
But the following morning, it was a different story. As the 48-year-old Maximiliano Trejo left his home outside of Dallas and headed off to his job as a roofer, three vehicles followed. He was soon pulled over and the interrogation began:
“What’s your name?”
“Maximiliano Trejo.”
One of the men smiled. He told Trejo that he was with U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE.
“Do you have documents to be in the United States?”
Maximiliano—he goes by Max—recalled that he made sure to tell the truth. That honesty, however, was no shield. He was shackled on the spot with metal handcuffs.
The $18-an-hour roofer had fled poverty in central Mexico more than two decades earlier. After his apprehension, he spent some time in federal detention. Today, he’s out on an immigration bond, fighting deportation with the help of an attorney.
His wife fears the worst kind of ending to this story: a fractured family if Max is deported.
“They are taking the bread from this family,” said Maximiliano’s wife as she sunk into the family’s grey sofa the day her Max was taken. “He’s not a criminal.”
She doesn’t want her name published because, like her husband, she is undocumented.
Her family and friends know what’s going on, though. On the day Max was picked up, family surrounded her. Brothers-in-law, nephews and comadres have come into to the house, bearing food and prayers. A family altar with an array of saints of the Catholic faith was filled with flowers. Their Catholic pastor called six times that day.
Her youngest son, 11-year-old Marcos, described his dad with simple words. “He is everything to me.”
Then, Marcos, a slim boy with mountains of wavy black hair, choked up and stopped talking. Sixteen-year-old Max drew closer to his younger brother.
They soaked up the stress, worried their father might not come home to the little house on a quiet cul-de-sac where neighbors look out for each other, mow each other’s lawns and even fill in as child-care support. The boys were worried that the day the government men came knocking, the day the house with the cheery coral-red door felt more like a military bunker under siege, would mark the end of their time as a normal family.
Max’s detention took place in the geographic heart of the United States, in a part of north Texas where the economy pulsates with construction, corporate expansion and an envious jobless rate hovering around 3 percent. Yet the cruel irony is that immigration detentions in this same region lead the nation. The twin realities underscore the bipolar nature of the national immigration debate: The harshest crackdown on suspected undocumented immigrants in recent history is hitting hardest, splitting families, where the economy seems the strongest.
Add to this an intensifying stress brought on by racist rhetoric flung at Mexicans, or those perceived to be Mexican immigrants. It’s become more than imagined fear. In early August, fear became tragic reality when 22 people were killed in El Paso by a man from the Dallas area who said he was targeting Mexicans.
Finding sanity in the insanity
A relative helped guide the family through the first day of Max Trejo's detention. They found him in the locator system at a private detention center in Alvarado, about an hour south of Dallas. Marcos and Max, Jr. paid visits, but left upset by their fathers' tears and his weight loss.
For Max’s wife, desperation had set in. She needed to find a way to put food on the table. She took a second job at a restaurant where workers could take home for free the day’s leftovers of nopales, frijoles or beef guisados.
With that second job, she at least could feed her sons, she reasoned. Her friends at the Catholic church called her, as well, and paid visits.
“They are my sanity in the insanity,” she told a friend.
As days went by, the family altar in the Trejo home swelled in size as more friends and family brought vases of yellow chrysanthemums and marigolds.
Today, lit candles with a light-skinned Jesus image fan out on the white-tiled floor in front of the altar. Above them two images of a brown-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe peer out. And there is now a special feature: A plastic virgin called Rosa la Mistica. She has special powers for those with cancer, or for those in prison, Max’s wife said.
Backing up Rosa la Mistica, neighbors, the family priest and Max’s sons wrote letters to an immigration judge, pleading for his release. Eleven-year-old Marco’s letter is written in blue ink, in careful block letters and with the straight-up attitude of a pre-teen Texan.
“Y’all should not deport him because he is my dad,” Marco pleaded. “He is a good person. He always works. He serves me food to eat...This past week have been the worst week.”
Like Marcos, Max Jr. was born in the United States. His letter to the judge was equally direct.
“I’m 16 years old and right now without him I’m suffering so much. I have too much pain while hearing him through the phone...I am pleading to you, please, please, as a son, to not separate my dad from me, my mom and my little brother because without his presence this family wouldn’t function. We love him so much.”
Another letter from neighbor Jennifer Cimaglia praised Trejo for mowing her family’s lawn, without her having to ask, after her husband had back surgery. Maximiliano always took time to greet her four-year-old twin girls, Cimaglia said. “That is how he raises his family, to care for others regardless of their differences,” her letter read. “Our lives are better with Maximiliano Trejo in it, our street would not be the same without him and his caring spirit, friendly wave, amazing smile and servant’s heart.”
In his letter urging leniency, Trejo’s pastor, Luis Arraiza, began with, “To Whom It May Concern: Peace and All Goodness! ... Removing him from his wife and two young children will create unnecessary pain and stress to his family.”
Amid all this, Max Jr. began showing signs of stress. His neck muscles had tensed so much that one ear swelled up. A medical exam showed he had no infection, his mother said. Doctors landed on anxiety as the cause.
A precarious reprieve
On July 18, Max Jr. and family friends filed into a small immigration courtroom for the bond hearing. The proceeding was by video-conference. The black-robed judge sat in a 10th floor immigration court at the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas. From a detention center in Alvarado, an hour south of Dallas, Max Sr. appeared on a video screen. He wore a yellow tee- shirt, slacks and a medallion around his neck. He approached a grey table and looked into a video camera from inside a conference room.
“Did you understand your rights in your removal situation?” Judge James Nugent asked him.
If you bond out, the judge said, you still need to show up for the rest of the hearing process. (The process began in early October.)
“Okay that’s fine...many thanks,” Max told the judge.
His oldest son sat in a wooden pew, tensely looking at his father’s live image on screen. The neighbor Cimaglia, her husband and her mother-in-law joined other Trejo family and friends and sat with the skinny teen-ager, whose hair had begun to show flecks of gray.
Bond was set at $6,500, a high sum for this family, but they had passed the hat. They paid the fianza the next day. In the United States’ immigration system, families of detainees must pay the full amount, not the roughly 10 percent common throughout the nation’s criminal justice system.
Max Jr. walked out into the sunlight outside the courthouse. Jenny Cimaglia began to cry, happy that Max Sr. would be freed. Her mother-in-law, Patricia Cimaglia, praised the elder Max: “Max is so clean-cut, and we were surprised when they picked him up. We can give you some names of men that should be picked up.”
This all meant that Max would—at least temporarily—be back with his family.
Fuel for the economy
Max was released back into his North Texas community, where he’s awaiting the next round of court appearances. A court backlog of more than one million deportation cases means Max won’t have his crucial merits hearing to fight for the right to stay in this country until early January of 2022.
He’s a working man, uncomfortable with too much time sitting on a couch. He’s part of the reason the North Texas economy is booming.
Phil Crone knows it’s people like Max Trejo who’ve been propelling the area’s economic surge. At the Dallas Builders Association, the young executive director is scrambling for solutions. He wants high schools to bring back the old-school shop classes. He’s working with one of Dallas’ largest schools on such an initiative. He hammers away at the importance of “middle skilled” jobs like those in the well-paid construction trades. Success doesn’t have to be defined by a college degree, he said.
Crone fumes, telling stories where builders have had subcontractors come to the job sites and “pilfer” workers away with higher wages. He estimates builders need at least 20,000 workers in commercial and residential construction. The competition, the struggles to keep workers, is intense. “It is as bad as any region in the country,” Crone said.
Nationally, it would take a construction crew the size of the population of Tampa or New Orleans to fill the need. This past July, the U.S. building industry was short 370,000 construction workers, up from 314,000 a year earlier.
Going into 2018, Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders, predicted that, “while the labor shortage wouldn’t get better, it would stop getting worse.” He was very wrong.
Construction wages have gone up some 25 percent over the last 5 years, according to the U.S. Labor Department. In the past, such pay hikes have usually attracted new workers to construction trades. But these aren’t usual times. “It isn’t a matter of how much we can pay people,” Crone said. “It’s just that there aren’t enough people and therein lies the frustration with our immigration and education systems.”
Crone would like legislation that provides visas for the construction industry. The program would be structured so that workers can move from employer to employer with ease. That would make it distinct from work visas today, such as the H2b, where mobility is restricted and legal workers become something of a captive labor force.
“That is a huge problem,” said Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It is not a good wage environment.
“There is no year-long visa for workers in construction,” added Nowrasteh. “You would want to have a visa for the industry that hires illegal immigrants so that they don’t have to anymore.”
Efforts have been made to establish such visas. A small program was included in 2013 federal legislation aimed at a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. That measure failed. In 2015 in the Texas legislature, a measure was proposed to create a state guest worker program. It, too, failed. In the interim, there’s more chaos in the construction job market and more math trouble ahead.
The U.S. economy had 7.3 million job openings in June, for example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were about 6 million persons looking for jobs. So even if all 6 million were qualified for those jobs, there would still be jobs open.
“That happens during boom times,” Nowrasteh said. “Basically that means we are at full employment.”
A bitter-sweet American dream
In the evenings, in the bedroom the Trejo boys share, Marcos sometimes breaks down into tears. The fourth-grader is turning into a fine athlete; he’s filling a shelf with trophies for his participation in fútbol Americano—American-style football. Marcos has his mother’s oval face, wide-set eyes and curly hair. Max, Jr. tells him not to cry. Their father is a good man, and there’s always a chance that he’ll win permission to stay legally in the U.S.
“He’s done nothing wrong,” Max says.
The boys didn’t want their mother to work that second job, fearing she might not return at all because she now feels exposed in the community, when she’s away from the protection of their home. After Max Sr. was released on bond, the younger Max said they all felt a sense of relief at home. “We function so much better with him,” he said.
Around the nation, psychologists and child advocates worry that children of immigrants face a persistent stress they call toxic. It’s not just immigration advocates warning of the damage to a generation of Latinos. The stress of potential deportations can lead to “perpetual outsider-hood,” said researchers from Harvard and New York University in a 2011 study.
Nationally, there are about 5.9 million children under 18 who are U.S. citizens with at least one family member who is undocumented, according to the University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. More than 16.7 million have at least one unauthorized immigrant in the household.
Children are resilient, said Wendy Cervantes, immigration director at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Law and Social Policy. But this level of stress is unprecedented. “We are really destabilizing families pretty much from every angle … I have never seen this type of strain.”
Cervantes seemed shaken after a recent visit to North Texas. She interviewed parents and children impacted by a factory raid in April in Allen, Texas, about 25 miles north of Dallas and 30 miles from Max Trejo’s home. About 280 workers were apprehended at a business that refurbished cellular phones. Many were women who were later released on humanitarian grounds because they were their households’ sole caregivers.
Those deportation cases continue to wind through immigration courts. Cervantes described one of those on the deportation hook: “She is teaching her daughters how to cook and clean so if they are left behind, they are not a burden on the families that take them in. The children are 6 and 7 years old,” Cervantes said. “The mother cries as she teaches them.”
Another family has a six-year-old son who wakes up multiple times in the night crying and wondering if his father is still there, she said.
Well-televised raids in Mississippi food processing plants resulted in nearly 700 workers being taken away in early August. That, too, caused a fresh wave of trauma as children worried whether their family could be next, Cervantes said.
Jenifer Williams, a Dallas-area psychologist who has worked with immigrants, said separation from parents or fear of separation can impact a child’s brain, making it a struggle to focus.
Educational development becomes difficult. Some children become depressed and have crying bouts.
“The research shows clearly that there is an increased risk for a lifetime of PTSD and even for cancer, heart disease and diabetes,” Williams said.
Other children may move into a state of “hypervigilance,” she said. “It is an exasperated sense of danger or need for safety. It is very common.”
“It is toxic stress. It has an effect on brain development. Neuro-development continues in the teens and early 20s. It is not specific to only young children”
One beer too many
Often the stress felt by a Latino family these days is rooted in what for many might seem a minor offense—or at least might fracture a family across borders."
For Max Sr., it was the beer he drank after work on March 3, 2017. He got behind the wheel of his vehicle and was pulled over by police in Irving. A drunk driving conviction followed. Max Sr. had no idea it would potentially lead to his deportation. He paid a fine. But the conviction put him on the ICE radar screen, his Dallas lawyer Michael Canton believes.
By the time of Max Trejo’s drunk driving episode, Donald Trump had been in the White House as president for six weeks. Life for immigrants, whether in the U.S. lawfully or unlawfully, was growing steadily worse.
Measures to make life harsher have, seemingly, been endless. They’ve targeted refugees with restrictions, legal immigrants who might become “public charges,” and stripped children from migrating parents who claimed asylum. This has all come down, accompanied by bellicose tweets from Trump—screamers that when read, ring like a soundtrack to America’s identity wars and a perceived “invasion” by immigrants.
Canton, Trejo’s attorney, is seeking to end to his client’s deportation process with a “cancellation of removal.” It’s a difficult path, but it’s one of a few that remains open to immigrants who are in deportation proceedings and who have been in the U.S. for more than a decade, among other requirements.
His attorney must prove Trejo’s good moral character and that the deportation would be an “exceptional and extremely unusual” hardship on the U.S. citizen children. If Canton succeeds, Max Sr. might even get a green card, cementing his legal residency.
Canton views the hardship test as the most difficult in this process. “It has to be exceptional and extreme beyond what a normal family would go through.”
In the interim, the family is living as normal a life as possible, given the huge stone that’s figuratively poised overhead, ready to drop in the near future. There are the all-American breakfasts with pink and yellow Fruit Loops cereal, and the Mexican suppers of cheese tamales steamed inside in corn husks.
And, for a time, Friday nights were all about football—as Texan as you can get.
Max Jr. plays tuba in his high school band. Football games were his time to shine. The skinny teen would lift the huge silver tuba, fill his lungs, puff out his brown cheeks and blow out a feel-good tune.
This is Texas normal, but for the Trejos, normal right now means adjusting to reality of a family under threat:
While Max Jr. played, his parents watched from the fence, where they could glimpse their son and that silver tuba. With so many bills and an insecure future, the parents decided against paying $16 for a pair of game-night tickets. There was also some $200 needed to pay for Max Jr’s band uniform fee.
Within days of that balmy Friday night, Max Jr. saved them $200 and dropped band. He loved the tuba. But he loved his parents more.