Journalist Caught In Immigration Web For Two Decades, Still Seeks Asylum

After two decades Miguel Gonzalez is speaking out about his family’s struggles to get asylum from Colombia in the United States, because he dreams of the day when he and his family don’t have to live and work in the shadows.

Miguel was born in Colombia but his memories of it are few. 

MIGUEL: My life in Colombia, to me, it was like a dream.

Miguel remembers hugs from his aunts and playing with his cousins and the week leading up to Easter. On Good Friday someone always dressed as Jesus and carried a cross in the procession. Everyone in his community joined in. When he was six, Miguel’s mother dressed him as an apostle.

MIGUEL: Holy week is like as popular in Colombia as a county fair…there was like this parade. We had to go through the city and dress up as one of the religious figures …I had to wear had to look like some kind of apostle or something.

But most of Miguel’s memories are in the United States, because most of his life – the last 22 years – has been spent here. Miguel, the oldest of three boys, is epileptic and visually impaired. He experiences tunnel vision and his seizures have caused him to have slurred speech at times. His parents wanted him to receive special education services in the U.S. that would help him learn and to give him and his brothers more opportunities. Not to mention Miguel’s dad feared for their lives. 

You see, Miguel's dad José was politically active at a time when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas or FARC were trying to overthrow the government. José’s cousin was well connected with government leaders and got José work engineering highways and roads in Colombia. 

MIGUEL: Someone threatened my dad and the whole family. So one, one of the reasons we left it seems was because, uh, we were under threat since … my dad's cousin used to do a lot political work and my dad used to help him a lot. … So it scared my dad off.

The FARC made several verbal threats against José. He reported them but the Colombian police were overwhelmed with the number of threats and kidnappings that were occurring at that time. The guerillas set up a meeting with him. José suspected they were going to kidnap him so he planned an escape. When Miguel was eight years old his parents told him they were going to visit his aunt in Tucson and in November of 2000 he, his parents, and two brothers fled to the United States on visitor's visas… but they intended to stay.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales. 

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Moving from the mountains of Bogatá to the desert of Tucson was an adjustment for the Gonzalez family. 

MIGUEL: I never actually lived in a, a desert. It kind of reminded me of the whole Looney Tunes desert. 

…complete with cactuses, coyotes, and roadrunners. He rode a school bus and one day about six months after arriving, he got off at the wrong stop.

MIGUEL: So I remember one of the times when I got back from school, I kind of lost my way and I was wandering around the neighborhood and, and everybody got freaked out. I, I think I remember that they all, they were close to calling the cops.

He could hardly speak English and didn’t know how to ask for help. 

Miguel’s mom Gladys says life for the family felt isolating.

GLADYS: The most I miss was my parents, siblings, friends, the life I had and the social position class… I felt sadness, nostalgia, suffered pain to leave everything our house, our business, our workers, our life. In the United States everything was different… Everyone mind their own businesses.

Miguel says he eventually learned English from watching TV.

MIGUEL:  …a lot of cartoon network, a lot of the Pokemon and all that stuff. Yeah. Every Saturday morning… I had to learn English from scratch. So I got a couple things confusing... So a lot of people used to take advantage of that.

Once in the third grade some kids were picking on him for his English.

MIGUEL:  I used to confuse myself with my ‘gs’ and I remember, I think once in third grade, someone tried to trick me into, uh, the definition of word gay… I was a new newfound immigrant with special needs and I was learning in, I was learning a new language, a new culture. So of course there was some jerks that wanted take advantage of that.

In the US Miguel was able to get special tutoring for visually impaired kids and mentoring to learn how to be more independent and self advocate. And he eventually made friends with other kids who spoke Spanish. 

Miguel and his dad were close. When he wasn’t working his dad took him to see movies. Miguel is a huge Harry Potter fan and couldn’t wait to see the movies when each came out.

He and his brothers were kept in the dark about their immigration status. Gladys and José were stressed about it. But Miguel only remembers occasional visits to the courthouse. 

 The family faced one challenge after another. The first barrier was the language. They took English as second language classes. José says it was difficult to adapt.

JOSE: It is very complicated learning a new language, culture, social status fell apart… 4 you lost everything including your self esteem.

José and Gladys took menial jobs below their skill levels even though they had gone to college in Colombia. In their home country his dad was an engineer, his mother a teacher. But in the U.S. José was a caregiver and an airplane mechanic and Gladys, a custodian at the University of Arizona. 

MIGUEL:  And they both brought their diplomas obviously, but here in the US, they don't work. They don't have those professional jobs. English matters and the whole immigration thing matters. …they've been paying work permits for over 20 years. 

When the family’s visitor visas expired in 2002, José filed for asylum and they’ve been caught in a tangle of setbacks ever since. While they wait, José and Gladys have been able to get work permits.

Miguel’s parents actually pay the federal government to work. They each spend about 400 dollars a year for a work permit from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. But they must work to get health insurance for the family and Miguel’s mother took the custodian job at the university to lower the cost of her sons’ classes. Soon all three will have degrees. 

In high school Miguel started to ask questions about his family’s legal status when anti immigration laws passed. In 2010 Arizona’s governor signed Senate Bill 1070 into law. It’s objective: to identify, prosecute, and deport people who were in the US illegally. 

But during Miguel’s senior year he recalls his teacher bringing up another proposed law that would have positive implications on him and his brothers – the DREAM Act. That summer after school was out President Obama told the story of Miguel and so many other kids like him on national television.

OBAMA:  …These are young people who study in our schools, play in our neighborhoods, are friends with our kids, make the pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their hearts, minds in every single way but one on paper. Imagine you’ve done everything right your entire life… 

President Obama told the reporters gathered at the White House rose garden that the Department of Homeland Security would take steps to lift the shadow of deportation for these young people. 

Upon hearing this, Miguel felt relief wash over him. But his happiness was short lived as he learned that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA was not a permanent fix. It would not provide a path to citizenship that he and his family so desired. 

MIGUEL: Barack Obama was for all for it, but the government held him back.

DACA did help Miguel and one of his brothers get through college but by the time they graduated and looked for jobs, Donald Trump was in office.

MIGUEL: It's hard. Yeah. It's hard. Especially for people like me that need a job. I may have a degree, but without the work permit or at least a, uh, green card or citizenship, I can't live a normal life that everybody else around me does. This government has been playing us, screwing us over, a bunch of people over, but mainly my family, which we've been through a lot, been here 20 years. We deserve to have everything everybody else has.

LAUREL: It's probably been like a roller coaster, getting your hopes up with a different administration or

MIGUEL: Yeah… my brother and I applied to DACA due to some kind of administration thing, but right on the way it got frozen, then our original work permits expired. Trump messed everything up and literally took down...he had something against immigrants for some reason. And he literally shot down 90% of the possibilities we had of getting everything.

Miguel’s dad José Gonzalez…

JOSÉ: The immigration system in this country is broken…the senators and the government don’t care about the situation for immigrants and they refuse to solve the problem because it doesn’t benefit them.

At the time Miguel and his family fled Colombia in 2000, the FARC was listed among the U.S. State Department’s International Terrorist Organizations. The group originally formed to fight for the poor in Colombia but funded its activities through organized crime such as contract killing, kidnapping, and racketeering. 

Soon after arriving in the US, José filed an application for the family’s asylum. But in December of 2002 the US asylum officer found [quote] “no past persecution” and that José “did not establish a reasonable possibility of future persecution.” Miguel recalls his parents being stressed by this news. 

MO:  It basically means that, you know, the case is set aside for now. 

The family’s immigration lawyer Mo Goldman says in 2002 José’s case was referred to an immigration judge, but the rest of the family was not. Mo says this is where things got out of whack…The immigration judge denied José’s claim for asylum. So José appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals and the case was taken up to the Ninth Circuit. Mo says the rest of the family filed a separate asylum application. 

MO: Their case has been put into a dormant state where it's not terminated completely, but it allows them to still be able to get employment authorization. 

Mo says there are so many cases flooding immigration courts.

MO: … We're talking about nationwide, probably like a million and, and a half, um, cases in the queue. And it's mainly to try and, uh, limit the number of cases and focus on the cases that are more of a priority, uh, which would be for example, somebody with a felony, um, conviction or people who are considered more of a threat to the United States. Um, not families like the Gonzalez family. 

In 2012 the Obama administration tasked the Department of Homeland Security with prioritizing cases. Those considered lower priorities like the Gonzalez family’s were shelved.

MO: But then the 2016 election came and everything has been haywire ever since.

Trump dismantled DACA and temporary protection status, and all but put an end to asylum. At one point the family was called to court periodically not knowing whether they’d be deported.

MIGUEL: I don't wanna be deported. I don't want my, uh, to be separated from my family or any of that. I, uh, even, um, even then we worked to return to Columbia. Wouldn't be the same, cuz we've been here for 20 plus years. We adapted, I grew up here. So as much as I may be an immigrant, I still call this place, my home cuz I am part of, I'm part of this place. So being forced to leave would be really horrible. It, it would, it would be like, it would be like an insult to my whole family because all of us, not just me, we been here for 20 years, surviving, growing up, my parents had been workings, their butt offs for 20 plus years to give us a good life and stuff. And then the, if the government just closed our case and kicks us out, I mean, how's that fair? 

Miguel thinks about the title of the podcast 2 Lives and says coming to the US gave his family the potential for a new life but this dream isn’t completely realized yet.

MIGUEL: Firstly, my parents, I would love them even though they, they, they can't right now cuz they're close to retirement at their age, but I would love to have them work at their job, the job they, the, the, the job that they are specialized in. I would’ve loved to see my mom 10 years ago as a teacher, or my dad as an engineer. I would’ve loved us to be, at least get the green card citizenship, be able to at least to go on vacation, go out of the country to go to on vacation to Columbia and visit the family for a little bit and then come back. I would love for us to stop having to rely on work, permits to to work there. I would loved for me and my dad to get SSI to for, uh, dis civilian retirement purposes.

He says his parents are in their 60s and want to retire soon.

MIGUEL: My dad deserves to get, have retirement benefits…I deserve to have SSI and my parents deserve to be working or have, should have worked with their own degree professions instead these lower paying jobs.  We deserve to have access to all the benefits…what the government's doing to us and millions, others is unjust, inhumane. It's completely wrong and messed up… People like us who grew up here, especially me and my brothers who grew up here from knowing, uh, zero English to where we are now with the I limbo immigration status.

LAUREL: Where are you on the hope scale? 

MIGUEL: Right now? I'd say I’m like seven or eight because of things that are beyond my control. 

Miguel perseveres despite every barrier he’s faced. For now he works as a freelance journalist and prays for the day when immigration reform sorts out his family’s cases and they can live outside of the shadows.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

This episode was written and hosted by me. Camila Kerwin of the Rough Cut Collective is the story editor. Halle Hewitt is our assistant producer. Music from Blue Dot Sessions. Annie Gerway designed our podart and website 2 lives dot org 

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