His wife was spiraling into insomnia, and his children were afraid to go to school, so Jaime Cachua sought out the person he trusted most in a crisis. He sat at his kitchen table in rural Georgia across from his father-in-law, Sky Atkins, the family patriarch. Jaime, 33, hadn’t seen his own father since he was 10 months old, when he left Mexico in a car seat bound for the United States. It was Sky, 45, who had stood by Jaime at his wedding, helped him move into his first house and stayed at the hospital overnight when one of Jaime’s children was sick with pneumonia.
“We have to prepare for the worst-case scenario,” Jaime told him. “There’s a chance we could lose everything.”
“Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” Sky asked. “How? Help me understand.”
Jaime muted the football game on TV and began to explain his new reality as an undocumented immigrant after the election of Donald Trump, who had won the presidency in part by promising to deport more than 11 million people living in the country illegally. Trump’s aides were discussing plans to build detention camps and enlist the military to carry out mass deportations beginning on Day 1. Their local Georgia congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was saying she couldn’t “wait to see it happen.” Jaime’s best chance to become a legal U.S. resident was a new program for immigrants like himself, people who were married to U.S. citizens and had lived in the country for at least 10 years without committing any crimes. But, just a few days earlier, that program had been struck down by a Trump-appointed federal judge.
“There’s nothing to stop them from rounding me up once he takes office,” Jaime said.
Sky had spent much of his adulthood preparing to protect his family in a crisis. He’d learned survival tactics in the Army and had trained in hand-to-hand combat as a Georgia corrections officer. In the last few years, as he sensed the country becoming more polarized and volatile, he’d built up a small collection of firearms and a cache of emergency supplies. He’d been anticipating a moment when the government might rise up against his family, but this particular crisis was one he’d helped to create.
“I’m going to be straight with you,” he told Jaime. “I voted for Trump. I believe in a lot of what he says.”
“I figured as much,” Jaime said. “You and just about everyone else around here.”
“It’s about protecting our rights as a sovereign country,” Sky said. “We need to shut down the infiltration on the border. It’s not about you.”
“It is about me,” Jaime said. “That’s the thing I don’t understand.”
More than anger or even fear, what Jaime had experienced most in the last several weeks was a rising sense of disorientation about the people he loved and the place he considered home. He’d lived all but the first year of his life in Rome, a riverside town of 40,000 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. He was a customer service specialist at the local car dealership, a worship team volunteer at church and the host of family barbecues in his neighborhood cul-de-sac. But lately the trucks at his dealership were festooned with Trump flags, his church group was discussing the “sanctity of borders,” and his neighborhood was lined with political signs, including one that read: “Start shipping off illegals NOW!” More than 70 percent of voters in surrounding Floyd County had chosen Trump and his mass deportations, including many of Jaime’s friends and family members.
When Trump was elected for the first time, in 2016, Jaime had been single and childless, with no real attachments. Now his wife, Jennifer, was up all night on the computer, researching the intricacies of immigration law and trying to hire a lawyer, even though they were thousands of dollars in debt. His 7-year-old twins were sorting out clothing so it would be easier to pack in an emergency. Jaime and Jennifer had considered moving their family to Canada, or Spain, or even Mexico, but Jaime didn’t know anyone there, and his rusty Spanish came out in a thick southern drawl.
“I’ve never felt like a foreigner until now,” he told Sky.
“I’m not going to let anything happen that puts your family at risk,” Sky said.
“It already did,” Jaime said.
“All those criminals that Trump’s been talking about — the rapists, the gang members — that’s not you,” Sky said. He had heard Trump say that he would deport “the bad guys” first and possibly show leniency to immigrants who had been brought to the country as children.
“You deserve to be here,” Sky said. “To me, you’re basically American.”
“But I’m not,” Jaime said.
He had done whatever he could to pass as American ever since he was about 5, when his grandfather first taught him some of the rules of assimilation in the Deep South: no baggy clothes, no bandannas, no lowrider cars, no accent, no speaking Spanish outside the home when he could help it. Instead, he became conversant in the language of salvation and hunting rifles and Georgia Bulldogs football. He asked his teachers and later his bosses to say his name not as hi-MAY, the typical Spanish pronunciation, but as JAY-me.
His younger brother, who was born a few years later as a U.S. citizen at a hospital in downtown Rome, used his government benefits and kept getting in minor legal trouble. Meanwhile, Jaime had never broken a law of any kind. He worked 50 hours each week at the dealership, drove below the speed limit, paid his taxes on time and smoothed the creases out of books before returning them to the library. But no amount of adherence to the rules made up for the one he’d broken before he was old enough to walk or talk, when his family drove him across the border because his mother had found work at a chicken-processing plant outside Rome. More than 30 years later, his presence remained illegal. He wasn’t eligible for Social Security, or food stamps, or unemployment benefits or any kind of health insurance he could afford.
All he had was a temporary work permit because of DACA — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which protects some immigrants who arrived in the country as children from being deported. Recently, Trump had signaled a willingness to work with Democrats to help DACA recipients stay in the country as a “matter of the heart,” but he had also targeted DACA for cancellation during his first term, and his allies were continuing to challenge the program with a pending lawsuit that seemed destined for the Supreme Court. Jennifer didn’t know what to believe or whom to trust, so she had started spending her evenings on a Facebook page for DACA recipients, trying to crowdsource ideas about what to do next.
“Some people are going dark and hiding,” she told Jaime one night, as she scrolled online after all four of their children were in bed. “Should that be us?”
“How?” Jaime asked. “I’m registered because of DACA. They know our address. They know where I work. If they want to start grabbing people, I’m the easiest one to get.”
“You might lose your work permit,” she said. “We should save, scrounge, prepare for poverty.”
He laughed and kept his eyes on the TV. They’d just bought a $120 car battery on installment, spreading the payments out over four months. “We can deal with being broke,” he said. “We’re good at that.”
“This isn’t a joke,” she said. “Why am I the one doing all of the work?”
Jennifer’s family had lived in Rome for generations, and she had barely stopped to consider Jaime’s immigration status in their first months together. She assumed it was a simple paperwork issue that would be fixed by their marriage, or by having children together who were born in the United States, but instead they’d spent years running up against the obstacles and expenses of the country’s narrow pathway to citizenship. She had been manic ever since the election, often forgetting to eat or sleep. She was making to-do lists, researching legal codes, starting fund-raisers and leading prayer circles, even as Jaime sometimes seemed increasingly withdrawn.
“Is there any point fighting what people clearly want?” he sometimes wondered. Rome had chosen this outcome, and now there was a “MAGA Victory Souvenir Stand” off the interstate and a parade of trucks with Trump flags honking their way through downtown. Jaime had taken a few weeks off from going to the church that he loved. He’d slept through his alarm and lain in bed on his phone, scrolling through news stories about Trump and his appointees speculating about reforms to keep immigrants from “poisoning the blood” of the country, such as deporting families together, taking away people’s green cards and ending birthright citizenship.
Jaime believed the only way to ensure his safety was by becoming a U.S. citizen, and in his case that process was expensive, protracted and improbable. A lawyer had told him that he would first have to leave the United States, return to Mexico, possibly wait weeks or even months and then risk detainment by re-entering the country with a legal inspection. Only then could he even begin to apply for U.S. residency, a grueling process that was based in part on a judgment of his character. Jennifer had begun collecting dozens of letters from people in Rome to help his case, and now she took out a folder and started to read a few to Jaime.
“He strives every day to live as a man of God,” wrote a leader from his church. “He has a deep integrity and a huge, giving heart.”
“Many of his customers only want to deal with him because he has the biggest smile,” a co-worker wrote.
“He’s been the friend I counted on going back to middle school.”
Jennifer stacked the letters together and put them back into the folder. “You matter to people here,” she said. “Their politics might not show it, but they care about you.”
Jaime turned away from the TV and looked at her. “How many letters do you think we need?”
“As many as we can get,” she said, because maybe her husband could be saved by some of the same people whose votes had put him at risk.
“What about Sky?” she asked.
A few days later, Sky drove across Rome to visit Jaime and Jennifer and babysit his grandchildren. He brought along candy for the children and his “go bag” of survival gear, which had traveled with him everywhere for the last several years. It contained all the supplies he thought he might need to be self-sufficient in a power outage or a societal collapse: tourniquets, binoculars, knives, whistles, flashlights, water filters, fire starters, a snakebite kit, a firearm, a slingshot, a Bible.
He drove by the small house where he’d grown up on the west side of Rome. The yard was overgrown, and a group of men idled on a corner. “Probably drug traffickers,” Sky said. “I don’t have much faith in humanity anymore.”
He continued past an abandoned Baptist church and then a pizza parlor decorated with a Mexican flag. “MS-13 is starting to operate out of there,” he said, repeating a rumor he’d heard from a friend in law enforcement. “They’re trying to take over the whole neighborhood. Drugs, sex trafficking — you name it.”
This was how he’d come to see Rome through his work as an animal control and corrections officer: as a city of instability and increasing danger. Thousands of immigrants had moved into the area from Mexico and Central America over the last decade, helping to boost manufacturing and revitalize the downtown, but Sky also encountered other impacts of immigration as a part of his work. He captured free-range pit bulls whose owners came from countries that didn’t have leash laws and dealt with local cockfighting rings with ties to cartels. He dealt with drug overdoses that traced to fentanyl from Mexico. He learned to recognize gang colors and graffiti tags popping up across Georgia: Norteños. Mexican Mafia. Latin Kings. MS-13.
He didn’t think of the border issue as some faraway abstraction. It was the gangs, drugs and sometimes also the inmates he dealt with every day. Just a few months earlier, an undocumented immigrant had been trying to flee the police in Rome at 2 a.m. in a supercharged Dodge Charger when he hit another car, killing two people and critically injuring a 1-year-old.
“The blood of these innocent Americans is on the hands of every open-borders Democrat,” Representative Greene had said then, and Sky believed that was true.
“Illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs, replacing your kids’ schools, replacing your culture,” Greene said, and even though the mainstream media dismissed her comments as part of a racist conspiracy theory, Sky wondered if she might have a point. His former elementary school now served dozens of students who spoke English as a second language. The old wedding shop downtown was starting to specialize in dresses for quinceañeras. About an hour up the freeway, the textile town of Dalton, Ga., had become majority Hispanic, with an annual parade to celebrate Mexico’s independence.
Sky pulled into Jaime’s cul-de-sac and carried his go bag into the house. Nowhere could he sense the country’s political tensions escalating like inside his own family. He shared a house with his father, but they hadn’t spoken for 13 months, ever since his father accused Sky of being a “radical foot soldier” for Trump. His sister-in-law was transgender, but Sky refused to use new pronouns or change the way he talked, because, he said, he “didn’t believe in that PC crap.” His wife, a Democrat, had briefly considered moving out a few days after the election, accusing Sky of betraying their Hispanic grandchildren with his vote.
And now he was navigating another divide with Jaime, whom Sky said he cared for like a son. Sky had been skeptical when Jennifer first introduced him to Jaime, worrying that she would complicate her life by marrying an undocumented immigrant, but Jaime had proven himself as “a devout Christian, a great father, a model family man,” Sky said.
Jaime handed his 1-year-old son to Sky and told him about his latest, long-shot plan before Trump took office: to travel back to Mexico, wait for paperwork, re-enter the United States and then apply for legal residency. He and Jennifer had an appointment with an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, and Jaime said they might need help with child care, legal fees and letters of support.
“It’s stupid that they make it this hard for someone like you,” Sky said.
“We agree,” Jaime said.
“I know it might not always seem like it, but I’ve got your back,” Sky said. “I like Trump, but he’s a blowhard. He’s a salesman. He’ll toughen things up on the border, but he’s not actually coming after people like you. Nobody’s putting you on a bus unless they get by me.”
Jaime and Jennifer drove out of Rome, past the MAGA souvenir stand and toward the suburban Atlanta law office of Uriel Delgado. They gave him Jennifer’s binder of evidence, the routine artifacts of a life in the United States. Tax forms. School report cards. Letters of support. Car payments. Mortgage documents. Credit card bills.
“Super organized,” Delgado said. “It’s cut and dry — a perfect case.”
“So it’s easy?” Jaime asked.
“Not exactly,” Delgado said. He explained that Trump had equivocated over the years about how to treat DACA recipients, but now he was stocking his new administration with officials who were eager for mass deportations. “Right now, in terms of how alarmed I am about the next four years, I’d say the situation is a 9 out of 10.” He told them about some of his other clients in the last few weeks — the daily panic he witnessed in his office, the desperation, the devastation when all he had to offer were consolations and dead ends. “So, yeah,” he said. “Make that a 10 out of 10. Even an easy case just got very hard.”
In Jaime’s situation, Delgado said the first step was to apply for advance parole, essentially a travel document that would allow Jaime to leave the United States and re-enter lawfully. The wait time for approval could take anywhere from six to 24 months, unless Jaime had a reason to apply on an emergency basis, in which case he might be able to make it back into the country before Trump’s inauguration.
“A lot of my clients might have a relative in Mexico who’s sick or dying,” Delgado said. “They say they need to go visit, and that’s how they get emergency permission.”
“I don’t have anything like that,” Jaime said. “My family’s all here.”
“No distant relative that might have some kind of illness?”
“No,” Jaime said.
“OK. What about a medical issue yourself?” Delgado said. “Maybe a dental problem? Something where you need to go to Mexico to afford the treatment?”
“Not really,” Jaime said, and Jennifer sighed and nudged his shoulder. She knew that her husband sometimes cost himself a sales commission at work because he refused to exaggerate or take advantage of a customer. He believed in following the rules, even when they were stacked against him.
“We’ll figure something out,” Jennifer said. “But what’s holding us back is finances. What number should I be aiming for — like a total from now until he gets his green card?”
“Let’s see,” Delgado said, and he took out a calculator and started adding up numbers. There were the government costs of renewing his DACA ($555), filing for advance parole ($630), adjusting his status ($1,440) and applying for a new work permit ($410). “Then we have legal fees,” Delgado said. “I’m under market, but that’s still about $4,500.”
“And then there’s my airfare, obviously,” Jaime said.
“Right,” Delgado said.
“And my airfare,” Jennifer said. “I’m not going to be separated, because if something goes wrong and they don’t let you back in …” Her voice trailed off and she started to cry.
“Plus, hotel. Plus, travel expenses. Plus, the time it will cost me at work,” Jaime said. Jennifer leaned her head on the table and started to pray, and Jaime reached for her hand.
“And even if we find all this money and go through with it, there’s still a risk it might be for nothing, right?” Jaime said.
“There’s always a risk,” Delgado said. “You might not get approved. There could be delays. It could drag on.”
“And before anything happens, I might get deported.”
“You might get deported,” Delgado agreed. “But the longer you wait, the bigger that chance gets.”
Jaime and Jennifer gathered their paperwork, thanked him and said they would seek out a loan and send over a deposit once they got back to Rome.
“Rome, huh?” Delgado said. “That’s where I grew up. Small town. Real conservative.”
“There’s still a lot of that,” Jaime said.
“Apparently,” Delgado said.
He told them about his parents, who immigrated from Mexico to Georgia as children and later were given amnesty under President Ronald Reagan. They worked in menial jobs, saved and eventually managed to buy a building in the center of downtown Rome, where they opened a restaurant and a night club. It was a popular place, especially among the city’s growing number of immigrants, but neighboring business owners kept creating new obstacles: challenging their liquor license, citing arcane building codes, filing noise complaints and eventually resorting to outright racism by accusing Delgado’s family of a far-fetched connection to a Mexican cartel. The Rome police kept showing up at the restaurant. The City Council got involved. Eventually, his parents decided to close the business and follow Delgado to Atlanta, where he’d become a prominent immigration lawyer in part so he would be able to defend his family if they suffered discrimination again.
“Every time I drive up that way, I still feel this anger, this thickness in the air,” Delgado said.
“I get that,” Jaime said. “It’s a complicated place.”
“It’s that small-town mind-set,” Delgado said.
“Yeah, but it’s not all bad,” Jaime said. “There’s a lot of goodness underneath.”
“You think so?” Delgado asked.
“I hope so,” Jaime said, and then he followed Jennifer to the car and started driving home.
The post The Alienation of Jaime Cachua appeared first on New York Times.
