Home

It’s important that I introduce my dad. Here is the man that may have actually invented blue steel before Zoolander. Please don’t be offended if he interrupts what you’re saying only to say “hey so and so, look” and proceeds to turn his head sharply to the side and go cross eyed trying to look at his eyebrows and give the puppy dog lip. This happens more often than not and if it can’t be celebrated, at the very least it should be tolerated.

I was in high school when my mom relayed bad news to me about my dad. Even though they aren’t together anymore, this has always been the dynamic. Never mind that my dad would talk to me multiple times a week and see me every other weekend. She told me that my dad might be in some trouble. That he would tell me more, but there was a possibility that he may be deported.

This may be a travel blog, but I think it’s important to establish that I have a home. Shocking, I know. Some people don’t always know that, most likely because I have a Midwest accent and I lack any sense of urgency, much like a southerner. People hear me say I’m from New York and then get intimidated because they think I’ve got a crazy amount of street smarts. While that is still true (jk) home is so much more. It’s like those raccoons sing in the lazy boy commercial; It’s warm, and there’s an enormous chair, and someone who cares. For me, home is where my family is, which can get complicated because they aren’t all wrangled up into one city. But I get by and I call it my home when we get together. Whether it’s in Buffalo, New Jersey, Harrisburg, or Geneva. The reason I can say that I travel is because I have a home. You can’t have one without the other, even if it is more like an area, a country, a metaphor. If there’s no home or no choice to go home, it’s not traveling. It’s floating around, moving through time and space lost and running.

After I found out about my dad, I felt like I was in that suspended, floating space. Somewhere in between fear and confusion. Limbo. Both trying to dance through my life and not get smacked in the head by a low rung pole, and like being in a zone of uncertainty. When would we know? How long would it take? How could I afford to fly and visit him in Colombia? What had he possibly done?

It took over a year to get things figured out. I don’t even remember what friends I told, and I’m a ham for drama. I wrote a character reference for him in between essays assigned for school. My weekends with my dad felt numbered. He was spending all his money on paying a lawyer to defend him. He was always tired, and though not visible to me, I’m sure stressed too.

Let’s get to know my dad a little more. Besides being the inventor of blue steel, I also have never heard him yell once. Granted I was somewhat of a goody two shoes but I see some parents scream at their kids in the superstore because they coughed too loudly.

He’s not like that.

At the time, my dad was 45. He had lived in the US for 41 years and had been paying taxes ever since he started working at the age of 16 when he started his first part time job. He’s worked hard since then. He was only four when he left Colombia, and he hadn’t been back since. While I know he would like to someday; I also know that we have very little family left there. That it wouldn’t have been home.

So what had he done? I know that his brothers put a trench coat on him when he was a little boy living in New York City so that he could steal ice cream from the convenience store. I knew he wasn’t perfect. But what had been the cause? Well he explained to me that he had been caught with weed when he was 19 years old. And I just stared at him wondering what flavor the ice cream had been. Because if it was something like Ben and Jerrys, I would have thought he would have been more likely to be deported for that. I guess that it had been combined with other minor charges and had led to him being sentenced to parole. He didn’t really want to go into details about it, and he has a right to that privacy. He carried out the parole sentence and nothing else was pending.

Apparently the old charge had come up due to a sort of lottery established to check up on resident aliens. Even though there were no pending or new charges, they still followed my dad and finally confronted him. When I say followed, think white van stakeout. And what timing they had. My dad had been planning to apply for a green card replacement because he had gotten his wallet stolen once again. I don’t know that that was the right place to keep his card, but like I said, he isn’t perfect. And right now US citizens that are even remotely ethnically ambiguous should probably be carrying around their birth certificates just in case. Hell, maybe even the VHS from the camcorder that recorded their birth. But then there would probably be the question of whether the mom’s vagina looked American enough.

So the government wasted its time and my dads money, only to find that “Oh yeah you are a tax paying legal resident. Our b, our b. Just give us $300 for the replacement and don’t let it happen again. Cash, check, or money orders only please. Don’t pay us in pesos either, Mr. Garcia”. Thanks a lot peeps for refusing to learn that all Hispanics are not Mexican and that being Mexican is also totally fine. Last I checked, it didn’t mean you were no longer a human being, deserving of respect at the very least. If I hear my dad tell me about one more person that calls him a dirty beaner, I might propose we start building the wall using this new material called “body of a racist”. Stack em high. They’re biodegradable, too!
Since then, my dad has been able to attend both my high school and college graduations. He’s moved around a bit, reestablishing what home is to him, but we had those pivotal moments together while I was still growing up.
My heart aches for children that are worried about their parents right now. It felt like my dad’s case was so sudden and yet never ending. I can’t imagine that happening so suddenly.  Will they come home? They just went on a business trip or to visit family. And there’s no writing a letter to the court. Or even a trial before they are turned away. I can’t describe the amount of respect I have for the lawyers trying to help; for the protestors standing up for their fellow Americans.
On this trip to Iceland I’ve spoken with people from England, France, the Netherlands, and fellow Americans. We are all asking what’s next? How is this going to pan out? A girl originally from Trinidad was joking on the bus that they could try and stop her, but she’s American. Her passport is just not up to date.
She’s American. So if we take that home away from people, aren’t we essentially creating refugees ourselves. Some of those countries are too dangerous to go back to and call home. So those people are back in limbo, waiting to find out if they need to redefine what and where home is for them.
I hope it ends up being a short-lived terror. Unlike the terror that Syrian refugees have been enduring. I think people forget that nothing is certain. They make it too complicated by forming an us and a them. Well it could happen to “us”. Someday the US could be too dangerous to live in, and it won’t be because of the legal Muslim immigrants. To base the character and potential danger of someone off of their looks or religion is to miss the point. Those who refuse to practice compassion pose the largest threat to the safety and progress of this country. And they have proven to be large enough in numbers to support and elect this backwards way of thinking.
I felt I had to share my dad’s story because what could have been for me is actually happening other people in mass amounts. I don’t know how some of us are lucky enough to be born where we are and when we are, while others are not so fortunate. I do know that it needs to be recognized that it is just chance, and that the lucky ones have a responsibility to the unlucky. Keep protesting, keep making those phone calls, and keep an open heart.