When Your Dad Gets Locked Up—And Then Deported
“It started to sink in that I wouldn’t really get a childhood.”
I crossed the border from Mexico with my parents when I was 6 years old. I remember walking for a day and a half and wading through a river. I remember sitting on my dad’s shoulders, feeling his skin peeling and blistering.
In Mexico, we had worked on a farm, growing and selling tomatoes and potatoes and carrots. My dad taught me to work hard. His motto was: Work to live another day. When we got to Houston, I enrolled in school while he worked in construction, and my mom stayed home with my younger siblings. Things were good for a while.
Life Inside Perspectives from those who work and live in the criminal justice system. Related Stories
But less than a year after we arrived, my mom got a call, and I heard
