David Freed is a novelist and former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where he shared in a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots. He teaches creative writing at Harvard University’s Extension School. A version of this piece was first posted on Facebook.
Miguel, my gardener, called me the other day from prison. That’s not his real name, and to describe him as simply “my gardener” doesn’t begin to reflect the depth of our friendship, but my telling his story — the story of President Trump’s America — has to start somewhere, so this, I suppose, is as good a place as any.
Miguel was born in a Mexican village near the Guatemalan border. He arrived in the United States with his parents and without documentation when he was 6. He quickly learned English, attending elementary, middle school and high school in Santa Barbara, where I live. After graduation, he started what would become a successful landscaping business here and, eventually, a family.
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One night when he was in his mid-20s, Miguel told me, he and a buddy had a few drinks and decided to grab something to eat at McDonald’s. They were pulled over by the police. Miguel was arrested for drunk driving. Unable to post bail, he stayed in jail until he was granted probation and released.
Santa Barbara is an expensive place to live and the fines from his DUI were steep. To save money, Miguel found cheaper rent in Oxnard, some 30 miles away. Amid the commute, his long hours of work and having his first child, a daughter, he stopped checking in with his probation officer.
Then in December, Miguel, now in his mid-30s, got pulled over again in Santa Barbara, this time for talking on his phone while driving his truck loaded with gardening tools. The cop ran his name and found an arrest warrant. Failure to appear. For the second time in his life, Miguel, a compact, soft-spoken man with a wispy mustache and a peacemaker’s demeanor, was arrested.
Weeks passed in confinement. A hearing finally was set. Pay the fines, the judge said, continue meeting the terms of your probation, and you’re free to go. Only he wasn’t. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were waiting for him at the courthouse.
Savannah Holguin
Miguel was driven to a holding facility in Camarillo, then to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a massive, for-profit detention complex in San Bernardino County, where nearly 2,000 undocumented immigrants are housed, all facing trial and/or deportation. He was assigned to a cell with eight others, men from Mexico, Central America and one from the Philippines. Roofers. Truck drivers. Ditch diggers. All had been in the United States for years. None, they told him, had committed anything remotely close to a violent crime, or much of any crime beyond being born brown, beyond being sin papeles.
Miguel decided to fight deportation. He was determined to wait however long it might take to plead his case before an immigration judge. The problem is, there are only five such judges at Adelanto. As the time passed, he began to realize how distant his day in court might be — possibly a year or more — and that in the end, given the administration’s war on undocumented immigrants, the likelihood remained that he would be removed from the country.
Back in December, the first time he called me from Adelanto to let me know he’d been taken, I asked him what he needed. Name it, I said, and I’ll do everything I can to help you.
All he wanted, he said, was a Bible.
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Earlier this month, Miguel called again to say he was giving up his fight. Missing his family and exhausted from the kind of restless nights known only to the unfairly incarcerated, he’d decided to be voluntarily deported to Mexico, where at least he will be able to enjoy periodic visits from his partner and two children, all of whom are U.S. citizens.
“I’m an immigrant,” he said from an Adelanto pay phone, “so I am a criminal.”
When I think of my friend Miguel, I struggle to find words to adequately capture his caliber. Smart. Reliable. Gentle. Impossibly hardworking. And despite the cards he’s been dealt, still optimistic. I look around outside my house and see his handiwork everywhere — the flowers he planted, the shrubs he trimmed, the stone paths he constructed in the hot sun. He talks of perhaps buying a house in the land of his birth, a land he no longer knows, and of waiting for things to get better in the United States. Maybe after Trump is gone, he says, the laws will change and he will get to come home.
Maybe.
What I cannot stop thinking about is this: Miguel learned to read here. He learned to work here. Played soccer here. Fell in love here. He was raising children here who pledge allegiance to the same flag my own children and I pledge allegiance to. We like to tell ourselves that America is defined by its ideals — fairness, opportunity, mercy. But nations ultimately are defined by their choices, too. And in hundreds of thousands of cases like Miguel’s, America has made a choice.
Jim Newton
It has decided that the place where he grew up, found meaningful work, dutifully paid taxes, supported a family and was a productive member of society — the only place he has ever known as home – is in fact not his home. It has decided that a single DUI, a probation violation and his parents’ decision to migrate outweigh years of decency and accomplishment. It has decided that a man who planted and built and cared for others must now be banished as a threat.
Soon, Miguel will stand on the other side of a border he does not remember crossing, in a country of which he has faint memory. His children will remain here. His tools will remain here. His work will remain here, in the flowers he tended, in the evidence of a life lived honestly and honorably. America will go on without him.
All of us will be the lesser for it.
