Karina Velasco was 14 years old and had just finished ninth grade in her home village near Mexico City. Carrying only a small book bag packed with family photos, a few favorite poems and a change of clothes, she climbed a ladder, jumped over a wall and landed in the United States.
“When I crossed the border and started walking through the bushes, the pants that I was wearing that day, they got ripped,” she says. “I still keep the book bag, I still keep the pants.”
Much has changed since that day for Karina, who lives with her family in Takoma Park. Now 24, she works for a nonprofit agency that ministers to young immigrants and is studying for a degree in social work. She pays her mother rent, finances her own education and sends money to her grandmother in Mexico.
Karina Velasco is a hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding young woman. But the torn pants and small bag are reminders that one fact has not changed: She is still an illegal immigrant.
Last year she qualified under a federal program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that protects young newcomers from deportation and grants them permission to work. But the program is based on an executive order, signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, that could be revoked by the next president.
Until Congress passes a law providing immigrants like her with a permanent pathway to citizenship, she must cope with constant uncertainty.
“I feel like I’m in limbo,” she says. “Even though I don’t have to worry about my immigration status right now, when people ask me, have you gone back to visit your grandmother in Mexico, I can’t."
“When I left Mexico,” Karina continues, “she said to me, ‘I wish I could be a little bird to fly over there and be with you.’ I got very emotional when she said that because I wish I could be with her. That’s something that I have to live with every day.”
That’s something every immigrant has to live with. No matter how well they adjust to their new country, they leave behind lives and loves, graves and grandmothers. The pain is even sharper for undocumented immigrants like Karina who cannot travel freely.
About one-third of Montgomery County’s one million residents were born abroad, and about 60,000 are here illegally, according to unofficial estimates. We see them every day without knowing who they are—standing at the bus stop and studying in the library, trimming our lawns and tending our children.
Karina and I talk in her tiny office at the Maryland Multicultural Youth Center, set in a strip mall near the Fort Totten Metro stop. Her grandmother instilled in her a strong work ethic when she was very young. As a child of 9 or 10, Karina sold candies in front of her grandmother’s house in Mexico. “It wasn’t just to have an income for the house,” says Karina. “It was for me to learn how to be independent, to work hard for what I want.”
Karina’s parents came to America first, settled in Montgomery County and sent for her younger brother. By the time Karina jumped over that wall and joined them here a few years later, her mother was working several jobs, cleaning restaurant kitchens and office buildings. Early one morning she met her mother at a Starbucks in downtown Washington after her shift ended.
“My mom ordered two coffees and two chocolate doughnuts and we sat down to have them,” Karina says. “Suddenly, as my mother sat there resting her chin on one hand, she fell asleep. It was the first day I really recognized all the sacrifices my parents had made.”
Karina adjusted slowly to her new world and worried incessantly about her illegal status. “One night I woke up with a nightmare,” she says. “My mom and dad were being deported; I was crying and crying and called my mother. I was like, ‘What am I going to do with my brother here by myself? Who am I going to turn to?’ ”
Her mother worried more about the culture than the cops and warned her away from her fellow students at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring: “My mom always told me, ‘You’re not the same as the others, you don’t belong in that group, you’re not going to be that girl who gets pregnant and drops out of school.’ ”
Karina’s mother had her usual answer for the temptations of adolescence: Work. And during her daughter’s senior year in high school, she convinced her supervisor to hire her. “I said, ‘No Mommy, I don’t want to work,’ and she looked at me and said, ‘Yes you do want to work.’ ”
That was her life for the next five years. During the day she went to school (first at Montgomery College and then the University of Maryland, Baltimore County). From 6 to 11 she cleaned office buildings. After midnight she did homework.
Her mother wanted her to be a nurse, but Karina had other ideas. She was surrounded by young immigrants—friends, classmates, co-workers—and she realized they all suffered the same nightmares. Being caught. Being left. Being betrayed.
She had found a calling, and when she changed her major to social work she explained to a professor that many young people suffer from stress and depression after crossing the border and living in limbo. “I was talking about me,” says Karina. “I was talking about the emotions that I felt.”
She did an internship at the youth center, and last year they offered her a full-time job with flexible hours so she could finish her undergraduate degree, but on one condition—stop cleaning buildings and get more sleep.
She agreed with a “heavy heart.” That job had helped her grow up, pay for school, find a path. But now she was ready for a new life, beyond scrubbing toilets and emptying waste baskets.
When I ask her about future plans, Karina mentions attending law school and focusing on immigration policy. But seeing her grandmother again is never far from her mind.
“One promise we made to each other is that she wouldn’t die on me,” Karina says. “She would wait for me to have my first baby. I want one day to go back and be able to present her with my baby.”
Steve Roberts teaches journalism and politics at George Washington University. His student, Gloriana Sojo, contributed to this column. Send suggestions for future topics to sroberts@gwu.edu.
