The northern border
DETROIT, MI – A couple of years ago, I received a phone call from a person who I did not know. She asked me in Spanish if I could drive her to the Greyhound Station to buy a ticket. I was impatient as I was about to go out the door to teach my class. She said it would only take a minute and explained that ICE was everywhere and she could not enter the station.
I agreed and asked where I should pick her up. She told me she was outside my house. I walked outside and there was an SUV with two women in the front seat and a load of little kids in the back seat. She explained that a relative of hers who had been deported some years earlier told her to call me. We went to the station. I went in and got the ticket and handed it to her. I did not hear from her for a while.
When she next called me, she asked me to pick up someone from the bus station, which is very close to my house. I did not know who I was picking up and the woman was traveling without a phone. She had a small child with her. She was pregnant.
I waited at the bus station. When the last bus was emptying out, I thought to myself: I do not even know who I am waiting for and there is no one left. Then a woman and a small child exit the bus. We were the only ones left in the station. We introduced ourselves and got into my car. I handed her my phone. She called her sister, who had asked me to get her from the bus. She spoke a language I had never heard. I asked her what it was. “Idioma de allá.” I said, “That’s the name of it? “She said Nan. It’s Nan. I already knew from the Guatemalans I had met over the years that I know nothing. Nothing.
I asked the woman why she was coming here and she told me she was 28 years old and she had come at age 14 with her father and brothers who were since deported. She has a sister here. She explained that she had spent more than half of her life in Detroit.
Her man left her and she decided she would have this baby here. Why? “Porque soy de aquí.” Her little one with her was born in Detroit before they got deported. Her daughter is a U.S. citizen and she wanted the next one to be born here, too.
I am Madrina to the niece of this woman. She was an unaccompanied minor from Guatemala and has waited for things to get better. She has worked all these years, day, night, afternoons, through the pandemic. She has never stopped working. She sends her family money every month. She has a baby coming in a few weeks. We will celebrate this birth in this promised land because we are from here.
P.S.: From around 2006 to 2010, ICE and CIS used tethers to keep tabs on immigrants if they had a way to call in from a landline on Saturdays. No one had a landline, so I had one installed. During that period, many people on tethers came to my house to call in to their officers. That is part of the reason so many people know where I live. Because I am from here.
