Mariana Negron-Quinones
When Mariana moved here from Puerto Rico, she had dreams of being an artist. She would make these huge installations critiquing the War on Terror: spaced filled with objects each representing someone who died, running President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech through software to pull out its musical notation to compose symphonies, the latitude lines of Afghanistan and Iraq becoming staff lines. She wanted to challenge the United States, a country that hasn’t experienced war first hand—hell, that rarely sees the impact of any of its foreign policy first hand—to feel the consequences of its actions. To give Americans the experience of seeing their country from outside in, to make their homeland feel foreign.
Roll forward ten years, and Mariana’s perspective began to change: she married, moved to New York, fostered a boy who they later adopted as their son. “It made it concrete that I didn’t just want to make art, I wanted to directly change things.” She went back to law school at 35, specializing in family and immigration law. Today, she is an Immigration Justice Corps fellow working on behalf unaccompanied minors, kids who were usually detained entering the country and are often alone fighting to get their footing in a new and sometimes hostile country: their fight sometimes forgotten in the midst of this pandemic.
As we talk, she dances between rooms in her Queens apartment as her husband cooks and her son does schoolwork, sometimes sneaking out to the front stoop to catch a break.
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Someone said to me, “Immigration court is like arguing a death penalty case in traffic court.”
That’s what it feels like because they’re just pushing you along. Immigration right now is particularly terrifying.
I’m a “baby lawyer.” I just started; I actually haven’t been sworn in yet. I feel like a deer in headlights all the time.
I originally went to law school to do family law—parental defense—I wanted to help keep families together. Then Trump happened—family separation happened—and my focus shifted.
Right after he got into office: I was working in family court, and I overheard a woman in the waiting area tell somebody else: “I heard that they’re taking the kids.”
I just sat really quietly. There was a woman there whose child had been taken away, and she was clearly undocumented and started freaking the out. I went home that night and started doing research with a friend. We discovered that during the Obama years, because they were deporting everyone and their mother.
About 5,000 kids every six months were ending up in foster care because the parents had been deported. Parents were sent to their home country, and the kids were stuck here. Often the child welfare system would refuse to send the kids back to the parent’s home country. So they would end up in the US, stuck in the foster care system. There was this narrative that Obama was just deporting “criminals,” but this was far from true. These were just normal families—who lived normal lives—until one day the migra showed up and took the parents away leaving the kids all alone.
I do work with unaccompanied minors after they have gotten out of detention. That comes with its own set of challenges, especially right now.
Every single one of my kids has gotten here in the last year. A lot of them make their way to the border in different ways. A lot of them leave in an emergency. Something happens that makes them leave right away.
A kid gets outed as LGTB, there are threats on their life, and they have to leave in the middle of the night.
Some kids will fly to Mexico with a baby and walk the rest of the way to the border.
But most of them get to the border one way or another. Most of them cross the river. They all have gotten different instructions. Word of mouth is really powerful among immigrant communities—I always find that fascinating.
They usually have gotten instructions to cross and get caught. The moment that you see somebody, you say, “I want asylum.” They don’t understand what it means necessarily—and they don’t understand what the process is or if it’s actually being followed—but they know what to say.
Kids usually are kept in la hielera [the icebox], with all the stories of it being really cold and packed. Then they eventually get sent out to different shelters, and they end up in these giant community homes.
And then ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] looks after them. They go through a whole background study and all that other stuff. Even birth parents have to go through the check.
Usually, they have somebody here that they know—and they know how to contact that person or knows someone who can. Very often it’s a parent who was here, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle—somebody along those lines.
So I meet with them once they already have their person. Or some cases are through ACS, destitute children who don’t have anybody and so that qualifies them for a visa.
So by the time they get to me, a lot of them already started school here. The city has programs for bilingual kids, and a lot of them are living somewhere with a sponsor in this whole new life.
My first clients were siblings, and I met them right after they were released from detention. So it’s been fascinating to see their perspective over the last seven months as they become more acclimated to the United States—and all the things that they can find here—which is very different, right?
Things that I wouldn’t have thought about are an issue. You are dealing with kids who grew up in places like rural Honduras. So they’ve never eaten McDonald’s. They think it’s disgusting. There are issues finding food that they can eat that doesn’t make them sick, because they’ve never eaten processed food. Try to convince an eight-year-old who just got sick from eating something to eat again. It’s things like that people don’t think about.
So for my kids, a lot of their experience right now is processing what just happened. A lot of them were separated from everyone they knew, sometimes for months. I have a lot of kids who had pretty fucked up shit happen—and that didn’t traumatize them—but time in detention did.
It’s not the easiest job to do. You feel really impotent a lot. I’ve had that feeling a lot lately. And they’re making it just harder every day.
This administration, I’ve never met people who could write so much and say nothing.
USCIS [Citizenship and Immigration Services], Immigration Courts—everybody has different protocols. It’s just nasty, it’s bad faith. Because there’s no clear instructions, it’s easy for them to say whatever the fuck they want.
While I’m chatting with you, I have an open text box cause somebody’s trying to figure out how to file a SIJ, a special immigrant juvenile visa, in Brooklyn and nobody has any fucking idea. Does anybody know? Nobody knows, nobody knows anything. And that, that to me summarizes what a lot of my job feels all the time.
The way that affects my kids is that very rarely I can give him a concrete answer to anything. I’m dealing with kids that have very little idea of anything anywhere because they just got here. A lot of them have housing insecurity, food insecurity, insecurity in every form. And I can’t give them any form of security, where I think a lot of them expected that or want that.
I cannot promise anything ever.
You have 17-year-old kids from Central America that come here because they want to go to school. And things just don’t turn out the way they expected. The people you are supposed to live with don’t work out—or a relative dies and they end up having to drop out of school and work construction just to survive. In their country, at 17, you’re an adult, and that’s how they see themselves. But here, you can’t do anything on your own… you’re really just a kid.
It’s hard to get kids to talk about what happened to them. I have kids who got really sick in detention and no one listened to them and they ended up in a hospital for a long time. It’s terrifying how kids are being treated, it’s bullshit.
I do a lot of intakes, and you always ask about their time in detention. I’ve heard stories about the assholes who work in detention centers letting the kids fight and betting on who will win. One kid told me about how the men who worked at the shelter decided to just call him burro. They’re just mean for the sake being mean. You hear stories of great social workers too; I’ve talked to a few kids who just lucked out. But the stories are generally not good.
It really fucks with their heads. Because, when you didn’t grow up here, as much as you hear all this shit, you always think things will be better. A lot of them come here with this expectation that This is America. There’s people here that want to help you.
* * *
Coming from Puerto Rico, you have a very different perspective of what the United States is.
Our relationship with the United States is very complicated. My father is pro-statehood, my mother is not. And so I get both sides.
In Puerto Rico, we have a complicated history. We don’t know our own history because we’re not allowed to learn it. Because Americans get to design and run our education system. When my father was born in 1955, you couldn’t sing our Anthem or show our flag ‘cause that shit would get you thrown in jail.
These kinds of things happen in lots of places—even inside the United States—but that’s never talked about.
There’s lots of things that Americans don’t know that this country does. There’s this entire giant history that people here are completely unaware of.
It used to drive me nuts: people would talk about a post-racial America when Obama was in office and I was like, “The fuck are you talking about, dude?”
People kind of let go a little bit during Obama and ignored the giant backlash of white nationalism that was coming. When Trump ran for office, I was a hundred percent convinced he was gonna win. And people told me I was crazy.
And I remember being like, “I don’t think you understand what it’s like all over this country.”
When you grow up in San Juan, you get a lot of cruise ship tourists, which are a very peculiar kind of American generally.
They would go to San Juan and go to McDonald’s cause they’re afraid to eat local food. Wendy’s, the line would be out the door, and it’s tons of people from a cruise ship.
That’s a very peculiar stereotype, but it’s, you know, The States is the best thing that ever happened and everything else is just marginal. Everything else is a Third World country. Everything else is not civilized. A kind of American exceptionalism basically.
I remember in high school working at a restaurant, there’s this American couple talking shit about everybody around them, I just had to be like, “Sir, everybody here understands what you’re saying.”
So, for me, Trump winning didn’t seem impossible. Especially post-Obama where people had gotten so insane.
And in New York it’s easy to be in a bubble.
[Hurricane] Maria to me was a massive turning point for me. I have always felt like this is not my country, I am not an American. But Maria made that really clear.
I realized, Oh, we are really on our own. Before Maria, I had internalized the idea that the US would come to the rescue if shit was really bad, and that did not happen. They just let folks die.
There have been really interesting conversations about the trauma experienced by the people who were on the island and the collective trauma of the people that weren’t. I couldn’t find some of my people for weeks. It changed everything I understood about the world—about the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.
Maria, the wall, all these different things from Trump have led to a similar response with different populations of Latinos. This administration has been a very specific traumatic eye-opening experience for all different kinds of folk.
It feels the same now during the pandemic. We’re all on our own. That’s a strange sensation for some people.
* * *
My clients struggle a lot. That’s never been something I doubted. But trying to “lawyer” during a pandemic…
We don’t know what’s happening in court. Or deadlines—when fucking they decide to tell you they’re opening the court at nine o’clock the night before on Twitter and then all of a sudden everything’s due tomorrow. What the fuck?
The courts have cut back hearings, so they’re only handling emergencies and detained cases. But “what is an emergency” varies greatly, right?
We don’t know what they deem good cause for a motion for a continuance due to Covid. No instructions or guidelines coming from the court, so we all do what we can—there is no consistency. And if your client doesn’t have access to a computer, we’re shit out of luck.
I can’t get in touch with half of my clients—a lot of them don’t have zoom or skype. It’s hard to talk about their case by phone when they’re in a one-bedroom apartment with eight people who can hear everything they say. I’m not going to talk to them about their traumatic experiences and sully up their only safe space.
So in this universe that we live in now, it’s a whole other layer of insecurity on top of everything else. Half of my job has been just checking in on people to make sure they’re okay.
Clients living in homeless shelters, who I can’t get to talk to about their upcoming hearings because I spend the whole time trying to calm them down because they are clearly freaking out for very good reason.
Teenagers who live on their own, who will text you late at night asking for help, because they are terrified and don’t know what to do. You try to identify resources, but those are spent, or just inadequate. Places like ACS—who we should be able to count on them to assist a young person who has nowhere else to go right now—are not reliable. When a social worker straight up tells you they are not sure ACS would step in, it is enraging. I’ve seen them take a kid out of a home because the parent smoked a joint and now, when I need them to actually step in there is a big chance they can’t be bothered.
So it’s seeing systems that exist just totally fail.
The stupid stimulus checks: If you filed jointly with somebody who doesn’t have a social [security number], you as a citizen are not eligible for the check—and neither are your children, even if they are US citizens. So if you’re married to somebody who’s undocumented, you’re fucked and your kids are fucked.
You have places like California, that came up with this giant fund to provide for undocumented people. In New York, Cuomo just flat out refused. So here in Queens, half of the people in this damn borough get zilch even though they contribute every day.
In New York, we are still having ICE raids. Yup, that’s still happening. They made sure that ICE had all their masks and all their equipment. While fucking doctors at Elmhurst couldn’t get shit.
We don’t know what the hell is going on, and the federal government gives two fucks.
I have this asylum case—and I feel it’s a pretty strong case—now who knows when it will get to court. The reality is that my client is at risk of deportation: Every. Fucking. Second. A lot of these people might have actually been able to resolve something—now who knows when the hell that’ll happen. That’s a real risk, especially when everybody’s at risk of deportation.
A lot of what I do happens in person.
You’re talking to an 11-year-old kid—who you’re pretty sure is gay and that’s why he was persecuted—but he’s 11, so it’s going to be a long process. Because most 11-year-olds haven’t fully fleshed this out, and they don’t really want to talk about it. So you have to build a relationship, make sure they know can confide in you, because chances are the people they currently live with are not ok with them being gay either. And they want to know you will keep their secret.
I can’t do that overnight. That is months of work of making sure that I tread lightly because if I cross the line, the kid will shut down and the case will suffer. That doesn’t happen over the phone.
No, it happens sitting in an office over and over again. Me finding out what cookies you like and scoping them down—even if they’re from Honduras I will order them on Amazon.
Half the conversation I have with you is, “What’s your favorite show?” And it might be shitty, but I’ll go watch it because I need to build a relationship with you.
We are storytellers: I have to tell your story, make it compelling, and make sure that they don’t pass you by. Some stories are worse than others. It’s the ones that aren’t as bad that are the hardest—because people get jaded and judges are people.
So when you have a story of a young woman who was raped by her dad and eight people, that’s one thing.
But when an 11-year-old has been harassed his whole life ‘cause people thought he was gay, and it could potentially get him killed—it’s very real, the risk is real—but that’s harder.
I happen to have a lot of experience with trauma informed practice. That’s come in really handy. I know that if I push a kid too much, I can break them. I want them to stay here, and I want not to break them, because I want them to have the lives that they want and do what they want. That’s a thin line.
I’m grateful for this work because it allows me to be in a space where I can actually help people that need it. The moment they lift restrictions and open the court, I can go back in and continue trying to find ways to help. That’s not reality for most people. Most people are going to need help themselves.
Having conversations with people about how hard this whole lockdown has been, how hard it is to deal with the uncertainty I found myself telling them; “That uncertainty that you’re feeling is the shit that my clients feel every God damn day.” They don’t know if they’re going to be allowed to stay here. They don’t know if they’re going to be deported at any moment. You have literally no idea what is going to happen.
Sometimes going through collective misery creates empathy. And we need a lot of empathy going forward. We need to harness that. Cause it’s real—and it’s real for lots of people all the time. All the time.
For immigrants here who don’t have papers, that is their daily reality. The quarantine is shitty and stressful. Many of my clients have lost their jobs, some don’t have a place to live, but many are more worried about their case. The uncertainty about their status still exists. If we were to find a vaccine tomorrow and everybody could be cured, their uncertainty would continue.
I’m hoping what is happening now will cement in people’s brains that we need to have systems to help those who are struggling. I worry that five years down the road we’re going to go back to the same bullshit narrative. You see it in all kinds of social welfare programs, right? In child welfare; a kid dies in foster care, funding goes through the roof for three years, they agency gests everything they want. But the next year nobody dies, so they start chipping away at the budget, and ten years down the road, a kid dies again. And everyone is outraged again. It’s a cycle.
This is going to go on for a long time, and the reality is that we’ll probably have a second wave. We have to react because the consequences are so massive. It’s a make or break moment.
I feel we’re staring at the edge of a cliff. And either we build a bridge to get over it, or we’re going to go straight down.