On a November morning last year, my phone rang right before I was headed to class during my first semester of graduate school at Northwestern University. It was my mother. “Your father, he’s being deported,” she said.
My father, who had lived in this country for nearly three decades and worked himself to the bone for me and my siblings, was being sent back to Mexico.
I walked into class and stared at my laptop in a daze of confusion, feeling something I couldn’t name yet. It was a type of grief immersed in guilt and a widening gulf.
As a Latina and the oldest daughter of three, guilt is something I often carry. Like most children of immigrants, I shoulder the expectation to make my parents’ sacrifices and migration to this country worth it.
Many of us grow up watching our fathers come home in dirty clothes. Sometimes we see them for a few hours at night before going to bed. Manual labor, along with the multiple jobs many fathers and mothers take on, becomes the language of love, a warm security blanket that ensures we may have what they never did.
When I finally did it — move away for college for opportunities my parents made possible but will never experience themselves — the guilt followed like a shadow.
“Hija, tienes que hacer más con tu vida. Do better. Be more.” That mantra I heard in my childhood never stops ringing in my head.
So when I learned my father was being deported before walking into the class of a university I had worked so hard to enroll in, I was devastated.
I couldn’t control what would come next, yet I felt as if I was drowning. Was my father going to be safe? How were my siblings going to react? What was going to happen to our relationship?
My father was taken into custody after a traffic stop on his way back home from work fixing a roof in Indiana, where I grew up.
Within days of getting arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, my father, now 47, was back in his hometown of Aguascalientes, Mexico — a place where he once fled and now barely knows. His parents died there while he was living in the U.S.
The rest of my father’s family, his siblings and his life remained in Indiana.
My father was just a teenager when he first arrived in the U.S., searching for opportunities that could better him financially. Soon after, he met my mother. When we came along and grew older, all of us — U.S. citizens — tried to change my father’s immigration status, but we were unable to due to the red tape and complex laws.
So he ended up back in Aguascalientes where he stayed with a family friend and slipped into alcoholism.
Our conversations back then, when they happened, centered on the same pain: how hard he had worked, how he had lost everything, how he had nothing left.
I had to learn how alcoholism affected our interactions, how some of his ordeals were real, how others weren’t, reminding myself I couldn’t fix or save him.
My father started to feel like a ghost. The distance wasn’t just physical. It felt as if I was losing the man who raised me.
Although we didn’t communicate much, I thought about him constantly, if I could have done anything for things to be different. Sometimes I’d get the urge to call him and ask how to make the sopa de fideo — noodle soup — he used to make or how to fix something around my apartment.
Those ordinary moments became reminders that a parent is also an archive of knowledge we sometimes take for granted.
In April, I got another call. My father was back in custody at an immigration facility in Texas.
He tried to reenter the U.S. because he was desperate, jobless and alone, he told me at the time. He didn’t feel a sense of purpose anymore and was searching for that drive that would lift him up.
My father did break the law by crossing the Southern border without authorization. But he did so to go back home, a home in the U.S. where he spent more than half his life building something that was erased with paperwork and inhumane policies.
My father remained at the Texas detention center until October. During those six months, he went completely blind in one eye and lost most of the vision in the other, because he wasn’t receiving adequate medical care for his Type 2 diabetes. But he also got sober.
I don’t know when I will see my father again. For now, I carry the weight of his sacrifice while navigating the gaping hole left by his departure. I am the daughter who made it, who did better while knowing that “better” came with a cost.
Deportation has taken away the father I once knew and given me back a person I no longer recognize.
For those of us left behind, we bear witness helplessly, watching our loved ones disappear slowly — out of this country, out of our lives and out of the personalities that made us smile.
Vanessa Lopez is an audience engagement specialist at the Sun-Times.