The Current1:14:23America Votes: Stories from the Arizona border, its politics and its people
When she turned 16 a few years ago, a young woman in Arizona thought she had reached the typical teenage milestones of applying for a driver’s licence and gaining more independence.
Instead, she found out that her family had illegally immigrated to the U.S. almost 20 years before — and she was still an undocumented migrant.
“I talked to my mom … and then my sister was like, ‘Yeah, we came when you were like a baby,'” said the woman, who just turned 19.
“That was the first time that I knew I wasn’t … like, normal,” she said. “I always had an idea, but, like, it was never told.”
The CBC is not naming the woman or her family over their fears of being deported. She said they came to the U.S. from Mexico when she was just a year old, but she didn’t feel any impact from her undocumented status as a child.
We don’t want to be separated from our families– An undocumented migrant in Arizona
Her family started a small business and built a successful life in their new home. But now as an adult, she can’t get a driver’s licence in Arizona — and faces challenges around things like applying to colleges to continue her education.
Despite those barriers, she said she will always be grateful to her parents for making the decision to bring their family to the U.S.
“My family wouldn’t have been able to start this business or buy a house or be so close to family or have the opportunities that I do have right now,” she said.
“They wanted a better future for me and my two siblings.”
The young woman is worried that all of that work to build a new life could be snuffed out. Republican nominee Donald Trump has pledged that he will deport up to 11 million undocumented migrants if he wins the U.S. presidential election next week. Voters go to the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
In Arizona, the ballot paper will include Proposition 314, which would beef up local police power to arrest anyone suspected of crossing the border illegally. It would also discourage the state’s estimated 250,000 undocumented residents from applying for public benefits.
The young woman who spoke to The Current said she’s very worried about the proposal, in particular because many households have a mixture of immigration statuses. Her older sisters were able to become U.S. citizens through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but she and her parents are still undocumented.
“We don’t want to be separated from our families,” she said.
Trump pledges ‘deportation force’
The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. without authorization has grown steadily since the pandemic. U.S. officials recorded 249,741 “border encounters” — or apprehensions of migrants — in just December last year, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
U.S. President Joe Biden initially took a gentler approach on immigration after he took office in 2021, but imposed fresh restrictions to curb crossings in June. Coupled with increased enforcement in Mexico, border encounters dropped 77 per cent to 58,038 people by August.
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris visited Arizona last month, where she pledged to toughen the asylum laws enacted earlier this year, as well as crack down on drug smuggling. Harris has repeatedly said the immigration system needs reform that should include what she describes as “an earned pathway to citizenship.”
In the middle of the night, volunteers with Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans headed into the Arizona desert to help migrants making the harrowing journey across the U.S. border. The group provides humanitarian aid for migrants before they’re processed by border officials. CBC Radio’s The Current joined them.
Trump has discussed deporting undocumented migrants multiple times on the campaign trail, pledging to create a “deportation force” to round up migrants. The proposal has drawn criticism for both its moral implications and the financial costs of both the deportations themselves, and their ripple effect on the U.S. and global economy.
Yvette Serino agrees with Trump’s pledge, and says the former president does want people to come to the U.S., but only through the legal immigration processes.
“The ones that have crossed illegally, I think that they should be deported,” said Serino, a staunch Trump supporter and chairwoman of a group campaigning for a local Republican candidate.
Serino thinks that should be a blanket rule for recent arrivals, but said there should be a path to citizenship for families who have been in the U.S. for a long time, who “have already established themselves, that pay taxes.”
“There are very good people that do a lot of the jobs and … we couldn’t live without them, right?” said Serino, who lives in Tucson, Ariz.
She’s confident that Trump would be open to hearing them out.
“I know that he’s the type of man that would do that. He would definitely listen and see what he could do,” she said.
Serino comes from a long line of Democrats, but became disillusioned with how she felt that party treats Latino voters. She’s now chairwoman of Latinos for Lake, supporting the senate bid of Republican Kari Lake. Lake has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen from Trump, and made similar claims about her own loss in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election.
She said she isn’t put off by some of Trump’s comments about undocumented immigrants being criminals, rapists and drug dealers who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“He’s not speaking of every single person that crosses the border,” she said.
“There are many that are definitely very dangerous people — those are the people we don’t want in our country.”
Four “Dreamers” share personal stories about life as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S.
An uncertain path to citizenship
In the last decade, tens of thousands of undocumented migrants found a path to citizenship through DACA, a federal program which provides status to ‘Dreamers’ who had been brought to the U.S. as children.
But DACA has been mired in ongoing legal battles in recent years, leaving the young woman in Arizona unable to complete her application, and unsure what the future holds.
She sees the stories of migrants crossing the border, or dying in the attempt, and thinks of her own family, who brought their hopes and dreams across that border almost 20 years ago.
She wants to share her story so people can see that she’s just a normal 19-year-old, working and going to the movies and seeing her friends. She wants to go to college, major in economics and get a good job.
“We’re normal people,” she said. “We just want to start a better life.”