His friends and family members in Rome, Ga., voted to support mass deportation. Now he’s scrambling to stay in the country.
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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.”
...
“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.”
...
“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.
...
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.
...
“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.”
...
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.
...
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.”
