Karla Guillen stayed behind after her father was deported and her mother followed. She waits to see them again – and hopes telling her story may help others find a path to citizenship.

Karla Guillen always had a plan: work hard, take AP classes, go to a good college. Don’t get stuck in Salinas. Two months before graduation, a month before prom, two weeks before her eighteenth birthday, that plan fell apart.

Her cell phone alarm sounded at 7am that day in 2011. Guillen pulled herself out of bed, got ready and walked across the street to her godmother’s house to catch a ride to Alisal High.

She was a bright student, and breezed through her classes: English, dance, U.S. government. In the afternoon she walked to Cesar Chavez Library to drop off a book. Her mind was on the things that seemed important at the time: her boyfriend, what she’d wear to prom.

It wasn’t until her mother picked her up from the library that the day took a turn from routine. In the car her mother started crying. When they paused at a stoplight she told her daughter what happened that morning.

“She said they had gotten my daddy,” Guillen says. “At first I thought she was joking. What are the odds that it would happen twice in a row?”

Guillen didn’t get to say goodbye.

And now, two years later, she still doesn’t know if or when she will see him – or her mother and younger siblings, who followed him to Mexico – again.

~ ~ ~

On a recent weekend afternoon Guillen sits at the dining room table of the Towt Street home she shares with her grandmother and grandfather. At one point, when her parents, siblings and extended family were still around, they fit eight people into the four-bedroom house in East Salinas. She remembers Sunday mornings when the whole family would pack around the table in the pink-painted kitchen for grandma’s menudo and homemade tortillas.

“Everyone would sit at this table and just talk and argue,” Guillen remembers. “It was fun.”

“Mucho differente,” says Guadalupe, her grandmother. Things have changed. Two years ago Guillen’s father – whom Guillen says has no criminal record – was picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while heading to his job driving tractors in the fields. ICE put him into immigration detention in San Francisco and deported him that same day.

It was the second time he’d been deported; in 2008 he fell prey to a citizenship paper scam and got turned into authorities.

The year after Guillen’s father was sent back to Mexico, her mother, who is also undocumented, decided to leave Salinas to be with her husband. She didn’t want Guillen’s younger siblings to be split from their father.

Guillen, now 20, has enrolled at Hartnell Community College. The family could no longer afford to send her to the University of California Davis.

Guillen, the oldest of three,had to choose between being with her family in a country she left when she was 4 or staying in the place she considered her home, in California. Unlike her American-born siblings, she doesn’t have papers.

She decided not to accompany her parents, 13-year-old brother and 6-year-old sister to her father’s hometown of Zacapuaxtla in Puebla, Mexico and accept an uncertain future. Not that her future is all that certain here.

“God knows when I’ll be able to see them again,” she says.

She’s waited – only communicating with her family by phone every few weeks or so – without much hope for a reunion. Until now. The U.S. Senate is deliberating an 867-page immigration bill that outlines, among other things, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Part of the bill, which was drafted by a bipartisan group of eight senators, could reunite some non-criminal deportees with their families.

~ ~ ~

Guillen has the affectations of most California teens: She peppers her sentences with the words “dude” and “like,” wears Converse sneakers, and says her grandparents are “butthurt” that she’s too busy with school and a job at a fast food restaurant to be around the house much. She describes her typical day like this: school, work, sleep, repeat.

A confident handshake and willingness to speak openly about her status mask the precariousness of her situation, but she still cries when she thinks too much about it.

“I consider myself to be a positive person,” she says. “I see a lot of people get distressed by so little – it’s like, ‘you’re such a baby.’”

Her grandparents are divided on immigration reform – at least about how likely it is to pass.

Juan, her grandfather, has zero faith in President Barack Obama, Guillen says.

“How many promises has he made?” asks her grandfather, who got his U.S. residency in the 1980s. The president has been promising to tackle immigration reform since the beginning of his presidency, he says in Spanish.

“He’s just a negative Nancy,” Guillen says, with more optimism, of her grandfather. She sides with her grandmother, who says the issue is out of Obama’s hands now.

“I hope the bill passes,” Guillen’s grandmother says in Spanish. But the fate of the bill, like the fate of the family, is less than clear: “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she adds.

~ ~ ~

The local tri-county area has the highest concentration of undocumented immigrants in the state, according to a study by community organizer and UC Santa Cruz sociologist Paul Johnston. Many of them – including those who have no criminal record – are getting deported.

Since 2008, at least 2,300 people have been detained for deportation in Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey counties. More than 80 percent come from Monterey County. They’re picked up for any number of reasons, including minor traffic infractions, and turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

According to an analysis by Johnston of data from Security Communities, ICE’s immigration enforcement program, about 38 percent of people held for deportation in Monterey County between April 2010 and the end of 2012 had no criminal record. An additional 44 percent had misdemeanor convictions for minor offenses, including shoplifting, traffic violations or drinking in public.

The threat of deportation is just another fact of life for the roughly 57,000-65,000 immigrants in Monterey County who don’t have residency papers. Under the Obama administration, deportations have reached an all-time high – 400,000 last year nationwide.

But the Senate bill has brought together an unlikely alliance of reformers, from conservative religious leaders and politicians to left-wing academics and labor advocates. In January, local labor leaders started the Central Coast Coalition for a Pathway to Citizenship, a broad collection of community volunteers and union organizers pushing for tri-county cities to back a pathway to citizenship. So far 17 city councils, including Salinas and King City, have adopted a resolution favoring reform.

The Senate bill comes as the tides shift in immigration politics. In 2012, Obama approved Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which gives some undocumented immigrants two-year reprieves from the threat of deportation. The program targets people who, like Guillen, came to the U.S. before their 16th birthday.
And at the beginning of this year, the second part of California’s DREAM Act went into effect, allowing undocumented students to receive state-funded financial aid. It followed a law last year that granted them access to private scholarships.

In the wake of these changes, young men and women who’ve spent their lives hiding are coming out of the shadows, no longer afraid to share their status.

~ ~ ~

One cloudy Los Angeles day last summer – the same day, in fact, that Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – Guillen and dozens of other undocumented students formed a human barricade in front of the federal Metropolitan Detention Center. They’d linked arms and were sitting in front of the detention center and the freeway, blocking deportation trucks from leaving.

A woman drove near Guillen and her friends, rolled down her window, and yelled at them to “Go back to Mexico!”

“That hurt,” Guillen says, remembering the incident. What hurt more was that the woman was black. Guillen was surprised; she thought a woman of color might understand the struggles of minorities in the country. It was a discouraging lesson.

“If they’re not going through what you’re going through, people just don’t care,” she says.

The peaceful protest was a risky move for young men and women who were undocumented themselves.

“I think after my dad got deported, I didn’t care anymore,” Guillen says. “They basically already took everything that I had, everything that was important. I felt really fearless at that point.”

That fearlessness is part what drives her as a student. She was in L.A. for an internship program called Dream Summer, which aims to turn undocumented students into immigration leaders.

There she met Jorge Cruz, a fellow Hartnell student. Last year Guillen and Cruz decided to form the Central Coast Dream Team, a club for undocumented Hartnell students. They’re part of a broad group of young immigrants without legal papers who call themselves Dreamers. Dreamers across the country have come forward to rally for reform, with acts that include protesting in Washington D.C., sending letters to newspapers and confronting members of Congress.

One of their slogans: “My dream, the American dream.”

But many are still afraid to reveal themselves.

“I wanted to be active,’ Guillen says. “I wanted to do something to help the movement.”

The Central Coast Dream Team played a major role in getting state Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville, to sponsor a clinic to help young people apply for deferred action. During the clinic Guillen told her story to a crowd of a hundred people.

“Just to see her continue fighting is pretty amazing,” says Cruz. “I know she does it because one day she wants to reunite with her family. That’s what she uses for inspiration.”

~ ~ ~

The first time Guillen’s parents were deported was December 7, 2008. She was a sophomore in high school. Her mother and father, desperate for security, had been in consultation with a notario – a word that many Mexicans interpret as lawyer, but simply means notary in the United States – in Salinas for citizenship papers. For at least a decade Jorge Garcia, her father, had worked in the Salinas fields, while Rocio Silva, her mother, worked for a produce packing company. The price tag for the process and the papers was more than $15,000. It was a huge sum for the working-class family, but they managed to cobble together the funds.

The notario turned out to be a scam artist. He took the money and fled, turning Guillen’s parents over to ICE. Guillen says a San Francisco judge gave her parents a choice: agree to voluntary deportation or be deported by force.

They chose the former, and had a month or two to sort out their affairs before heading to Mexico. They left with Guillen’s kid brother and toddler sister.

“They told me not to worry,” says Guillen, who stayed behind with her grandparents to finish school. “I knew they’d be back so I didn’t really trip out as much.”

As promised, her parents and siblings returned three months later. Guillen doesn’t say how they made it back, but many immigrants retain the services of a coyote to be smuggled into the country. Jorge got his old job in the fields, and Rocio went back to the packing company. Life returned to normal.

Guillen isn’t sure of the details of her parents’ immigration case and the scam – and the Weekly couldn’t reach the family in Mexico before deadline – but Salinas attorney Ted Rico describes what happens in a typical scenario in which immigrants are scammed out of cash.

Dishonest notarios promise to help a person earn a work visa by applying for refugee asylum papers on behalf of the immigrant, says Rico, who works for the Center for Community Advocacy, a group that provides education, orientation and legal support to farmworkers and low-income working families. The swindler fabricates a vague statement about why the immigrant is seeking asylum, which allows the immigrant to get a temporary work visa. When the unsuspecting customer shows up in court as the asylum case is processed, they’re outted as illegal without the backstory necessary to be granted asylum, and then they’re detained.

Guillen wouldn’t be surprised if her parents fell for a similar scheme.

“They’ll honestly believe anything,” she says. “They’re so gullible.”

If immigrants have no serious criminal background, they’re sometimes asked if they want to voluntarily deport. Critics of the immigration system say voluntary deportation is unconstitutional because it leaves no legal recourse for immigrants to defend themselves, and effectively banishes them from the country for up to 10 years.

In early June, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. government over the policy.

“When you are in the United States, regardless of your status, you have certain rights. One of those is to have a hearing in front of an immigration judge,” Rico says. “If you’re signing that voluntary departure you’re giving up all those rights.”

Immigrant advocates say that these deportations aren’t really of one’s own volition, but are coerced.

“[Authorities] say all kinds of things, including threatening people with long periods of time in jail,” Rico says. “It’s routinely done.”

~ ~ ~

Guillen goes back to the second time her father was deported, to that day in 2011 when the family was together and happy and so many things seemed possible.

“A lot happened during that time when my dad left,” she says. “It just made it a lot worse personally.”

She tells the story as she remembers it, although some details are unclear.

Her father was heading to work in his car, which was registered to Guillen’s uncle. But a few blocks out of the driveway, he was stopped by ICE officials searching for Guillen’s uncle. She doesn’t know exactly why they were looking for her uncle; she says he doesn’t have a criminal record either.

“After that it was just kind of hard,” Guillen says. “We were going to lawyers, trying to see if we could do anything to bring [my father] back. It was pretty impossible.”

Her grandmother told her how her father and uncle were handcuffed in an immigration center in San Francisco.

“They chained them up, their hands and legs, as if they were going to try to do something,” Guillen says. “They were treated as criminals.”

Her father again faced a choice: get deported or go to a detention facility in Arizona. Because he didn’t want to go to the detention center, he was shipped off to Mexico that day, with only the few belongings Guillen’s grandmother brought him.

This time there was no grace period given: no time to pack, no time to kiss his children goodbye, no time to inform his employers.

The last time Guillen saw him was the day before he got picked up by ICE. When he came home from work, she recalls, she said “Oh, hi daddy.” They talked a bit, then she went off to her room.

“It’s not like I can say, ‘We spent the whole day together, it was great,’” Guillen says. “I wish I had spent a lot more time with him. I miss him so much.”

A little more than a year later, Guillen’s mother left with her two siblings for the second time. There were no reassurances, no “see you in a few months.” It seemed they were gone for good.

~ ~ ~

The immigration enforcement system is failing, says Wendy Cervantes, an immigration expert at Washington D.C. based nonprofit First Focus, a children’s advocacy group.

“Families are being torn apart,” she says. “It’s why we ultimately need immigration reform.”

As the immigration debate rages on in Congress, news outlets are spotlighting lives impacted by deportation. A recent New York Times article tells the story of children of deportees who traveled to an Arizona border town to see their parents. The Times photo shows a woman and her daughter, on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, weeping and clinging to each other through gaps in a fence.

More than 200,000 people who were deported between 2010 and 2012 had children who were American citizens and living in the U.S., the New York Times reports. The number of deportees’ children who are not citizens is unknown.

One provision of the Senate bill would allow deported parents a chance to return to the U.S. if their children are U.S. citizens or permanent residents and the parents meet certain criteria, like not having a criminal record.

Another portion of the bill would enact the federal DREAM act, which would allow people who were brought into the country under the age of 16 to apply for citizenship. The DREAM act has failed twice before in 2007 and 2010, but the new version is the strongest yet, Cervantes says. A version of the act capped applicants at age 29, but the current bill has no age limit. It also streamlines the citizenship process for deferred action recipients like Guillen.

Political leaders say immigration reform has best chance of passing Congress than any time in decades. But if the bill passes the Senate intact, it still faces a major hurdle in the House. Earlier this month the House put an amendment in the 2014 Homeland Security spending bill that would defund Obama’s deferred action program.

And, many House conservatives disagree with a pathway to citizenship.

According to CNN, Georgia Rep. Tom Price, said it was “highly unlikely” he or the majority of his fellow House Republicans would vote for a bill similar to the Senate’s, because they don’t trust the Obama administration to enforce current immigration laws.

ICE Director John Morton, who announced he was resigning to take a private sector job this month, embodies the schism over the country’s deportation policies. Deportation advocates saw him as soft, yet reform activists damned him for increasing the number of deportations each year.

Immigration reform is suddenly a key conservative issue because Republicans want the Hispanic vote, but hardline Republicans aren’t willing to budge on things like border security.

“My nightmare scenario is that it falls apart,” says Cesar Lara, a leader of the Central Coast Coalition for a Pathway to Citizenship. “That they can’t get enough votes to leave the House.”

The Senate is hoping to finish deliberations by July 4.

~ ~ ~

Reform or not, Guillen is revising her plan for the future.

Dreamers often can’t afford college without access to scholarships or financial aid – California is one of the few states that has changed this – and even if they do make it through school, many have trouble finding jobs that will accept them.

Guillen can fall back on her deferred-action work permit for a couple of years, but even that seems to be on the House’s chopping block.

Originally Guillen planned on attending UC Davis, but she couldn’t afford it once her parents were gone.

“Something I always dreaded was to stay here and go to Hartnell,” Guillen admits. “But I couldn’t leave my [grandparents] by themselves.”

She just finished her second year at Hartnell, and she dreams of transferring to New York University to study architecture. She loves to draw, a passion that comes at least in part from her father. One of his Winnie the Pooh cartoon renderings still hangs in her room.

She’s aiming to apply to California schools in November and NYU in February.

She’s built up an impressive resume: She has good grades, even though she’s had to drop some classes to accommodate her work schedule; she spent two summers interning at California Rural Legal Assistance in Salinas; and she can cite her leadership role in founding Hartnell’s club for Dreamers. But the thing that’ll really shine on her application, she thinks, is her personal essay. She has a good story – about facing unplanned events and an uncertain future – and she isn’t afraid to tell it.

“I didn’t want to take this path,” she says. “This way was not my plan. It was more of a detour. But I am going to get where I want to be.”