I was 12 when my brother was deported.

I remember coming home from school that day, not fully understanding what was happening, only feeling the urgency in the room and the tension in my parents' voices. There were frantic phone calls being made, trying to reach extended family back in Mexico, trying to plan, trying to make sure he would be safe. At that age, I felt confusion, fear, and a new responsibility for my parents I didn't yet have language for. Overnight, our family of five became a family of four. There is a specific cruelty in how quickly someone you love can be taken from your everyday world and turned into a voice on the other end of a line. And that’s if you're lucky.

I grew up in a small rural town as the child of Mexican immigrants. My parents worked wherever they could, starting in the potato fields and later in restaurants, doing physically demanding labor that often went unseen, underpaid, and undervalued. Our life there was shaped by limited access: to transportation, to immigration resources, to disability support for my dad’s rapidly increasing blindness or my mom’s stroke recovery, and to social systems that understood or had room for families like mine with poverty, disability, immigration status, and language barriers in the mix.

When I started school, the school district saw two Spanish-speaking parents and assumed I only spoke Spanish too. The reality was that I already spoke both English and Spanish fluently. I was born in the US and had two older brothers who mainly spoke English. But the system wasn’t prepared to see the difference, and not one person took the time to ask or clarify. I was pulled out of class several times a week to “practice” my English at an insultingly basic level. The skill I had of being fully bilingual practically from birth would have been celebrated and applauded in an upper-class family, but paired with my poor, migrant family, it was treated like a weakness and nuisance instead. I remember going home confused and telling my parents about the lady who kept disrupting my learning and taking me out of class. Even with limited English themselves, my parents advocated for me. They called the school, got transferred around until they could find someone who spoke Spanish, and explained that their son did not need remedial English “practice” simply because his family was Mexican. My mom was a teacher back in Mexico. If she thought I needed extra support, she would have asked for it, she said. Why was her child being singled out with no parent communication? The school admitted I was far surpassing all the benchmarks and stopped pulling me out of class. 

Through my childhood lens, I had an ordinary life. We had dogs. My parents worked hard. We laughed loudly. My friends and I spent entire summers outside riding bikes from morning until late at night, skating through parks and trails with maybe five dollars between all of us. Our small-town felt connected. Neighbors looked out for each other. My mom cooked meals that made the house smell like home. Everyone ordered in bulk when she made tamales. My father did manual labor, and I worked beside him on the weekends. I translated at doctor’s appointments. I translated at the bank. I translated for the landlord. I translated for the immigration lawyers and the government workers and the parent-teacher conferences. I translated mail and official documents and parent forms. I learned details about my parents’ health, finances, and fears far too young because there often wasn’t anyone else there to bridge the language gap. But I was a child, and in my child mind, it was a normal little life.

My mom used to tell me, “Culturally, you are Mexican. But you were born here, so be proud to be American. Practice your Spanish. Don’t forget the recipes. And keep pushing your dreams forward.”

It wasn’t until we moved to a mid-sized city in high school that I started to understand how differently people experienced identity and belonging. In our farming town I had mostly experienced small-town community, massive systemic barriers to access notwithstanding. But in the city, I became more aware of division, of cultural expectations, of the ways people categorized each other. I found myself questioning things I had never questioned before: who I was supposed to be, how I was supposed to act, who I was allowed to become.

I started reading more deeply about culture, race, immigration, and identity because I was trying to make sense of the gap between how I saw myself and how others saw me. I struggled to understand the animosity I experienced. I struggled to understand why people who shared language or heritage could still feel worlds apart from each other. I struggled to understand why some people, when they heard how my brother was taken, said that he deserved it—that we deserved it—when all I could see was my dad’s anxious, shaking hands, and my mom’s face soaked in tears. 

Even then, I knew that no family deserves to be forcefully separated. 

And yet, despite it all, my parents built something steady. They taught me resilience, generosity, and dignity. They showed me what it meant to keep going, to give even when you have little, and to hold onto faith and community as anchors. Those values are my foundation. I am who I am because my parents gave everything they have to create possibilities they themselves never had access to.

Now, I find myself leading a nonprofit that primarily serves the immigrant community, at a time when the United States Supreme Court has ruled it acceptable to detain people based on appearance, ethnicity, or lack of English fluency. My professional role is deeply personal, and I carry both the responsibility and the privilege of serving a community that reflects my own story in so many ways. Much of our work at my organization centers on access, especially access to food. But beyond food, we are building trust, responding in real time to fear and uncertainty, and working to ensure that every person who comes through our doors feels seen, respected, and cared for. 

This is why how we respond to this moment in history matters so deeply to me. This is why I do the exhausting, often heartbreaking, work that I do every day. Because behind every conversation about immigration policy, deportation, language access, or public assistance are real families: real families trying to survive, real families loving each other, real families trying to build stable lives with the tools they have. 

Families like mine.