 has been little done to address the uncertain futures of the undocumented community.
Viviana Alamillo, 22, stands in her bedroom Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016, in Lansing. Alamillo immigrated from Mexico to the U.S. at the age of 3 and lived illegally in the U.S. for more than 15 years before applying for DACA status.
Alamillo is among the thousands of people seeking a life in Michigan without proper documentation.
While some of those sojourners illegally crossed borders, many others came into the U.S. legally and overstayed visas they obtained for work, study or tourism.
Of the estimated 130,000 undocumented people in Michigan in 2014, experts believe about 35% are from Mexico, 13% from India and 6% from China.
Many work at construction sites, clean houses, cook or wash dishes at restaurants, plant and harvest fields or work on dairy farms.
Among the papers that undocumented immigrants lack, one of the most problematic is a driver's license, Castaneda said.
Without a driver’s license, immigrants have trouble getting to and from jobs. They're unable to get insurance or open a bank account, they can't take their kids on school field trips, and they face sanctions if discovered by authorities.
Mario and Ana are among the thousands of undocumented people who have driven without a license — a source of constant concern for the Mexican natives who immigrated to the U.S. 15 years ago.
Mario was 23 and “looking for a better life” when he left Michoacan, Mexico, trekked across the Arizona desert and boarded a bus for Lansing.
In the years he’s lived in the state’s capital city, he’s maintained a steady job, met his wife, and raised three daughters, one of whom is now working on her master’s degree in clinical social work.
Because Mario does not yet have legal status, the Lansing State Journal is not using his last name.
Mario’s wife, Ana, entered the U.S. the same year as her husband, in 2001, on a tourist visa. The former school teacher met Mario in Lansing and decided to stay. Her visa expired years later.
When his daughters were still young, Mario was arrested in 2004 by an immigration official while on vacation in northern Michigan and — at the threat of deportation proceedings — agreed to voluntary removal.
He crossed from Mexico into the U.S. again a month later. This time he waded across the Rio Grande to get back to his daughters.
Though he acknowledges his actions were illegal, he and his wife ask people to put themselves in the shoes that crossed that border in 2001 and 2005.
Ana obtained legal status in 2015. Mario also has applied for his green card, though his case is less certain given his two illegal crossings.
The couple admitted that had they known what life would be like in the United States, they might not have made the same decisions they did 15 years ago. And if an immigration judge eventually denies Mario’s petition to stay in the U.S., he and Ana are prepared to honor that order.
“We’ve got to take that decision,” he said.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency removed about 2,431 people from Michigan and Ohio in fiscal year 2015. The two states comprise ICE’s Detroit Area of Responsibility, said Khaalid Walls, a spokesman for the agency.
In fiscal year 2010, the agency removed 8,054 undocumented immigrants from the two states.
Walls said the large decrease in deportations is a result of more targeted enforcement, in which ICE officials prioritize cases involving a felony conviction or a threat to national or border security.
For example, he said, ICE agents took into custody a 20-year-old Brazilian national in October 2015 who’d been arrested by Meridian Township police. The immigrant has a felony conviction for third-degree criminal sexual conduct. A 40-year-old Guatemalan national convicted of embezzlement was arrested by ICE in Lansing in February.
Both undocumented immigrants are detained while they await removal. Walls would not release their names.
But activists believe more than new priorities are contributing to the drop in deportations.
Though the number of deportations are down in Michigan and Ohio, they're not uncommon, Castaneda said.
Walls said the vast majority of people arrested by ICE are criminal aliens who have been arrested based on information developed by ICE officers.
“The agency does not engage in sweeps or roundups, indiscriminately targeting undocumented immigrants,” Walls said in an email.
Castaneda said he’s heard different stories concerning the incidents that lead to deportation, ones where unauthorized immigrants drive onto one of Michigan’s international bridge crossings accidentally or are arrested during a traffic stop.
The anecdotes, when circulated through the immigrant community, can deter people from seeking legal status for fear of being flagged during the process, said Lesley Glennon, director of St. Vincent Catholic Charities Immigration Law Clinic.
Once people are brought to immigration court, they sometimes wait years for a judge’s decision on their future.
The Detroit Immigration Court reported 1,545 initial case completions in 2015, but had 3,878 pending cases as of Sept. 30, 2015, according to the Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review. In 2011, the same court completed 3,812 cases, and had 2,950 pending cases as of Sept. 30 of that year.
Cases still pending at the end of August in Detroit Immigration Court had been pending for an average of 815 days, according to data compiled by the University of Syracuse Transitional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Area lawyers report even longer waits for some of their clients.
Before an additional judge was added to the Detroit Immigration Court in January, judges in Puerto Rico were hearing cases by video conference in Detroit to help with the caseload, said Ruby Robinson, supervising attorney at the Michigan Immigration Rights Clinic.
Cases involving children or detainees were given priority, Robinson said, while cases outside of those parameters were pushed back to November 2019.
“It creates a lot of psychological torment at the very least,” Robinson said.
Castaneda himself is still waiting for a hearing in Detroit Immigration Court.
The Guatemalan national worked for Michigan State University for 16 years before losing his job in 2014 due to an expired work permit.
Though he’s obtained another work permit in those two years, he continues to wait for a hearing to discuss a waiver that would allow him to get a green card.
Oscar Castaneda, an IT specialist with a PhD who worked for MSU for 16 years. The Guatemalan national lost his job in 2014 due to an expired work permit.
From October 2015 through August 2016, 200 unaccompanied children who crossed the U.S. border illegally were released to sponsors in Michigan, a small fraction of the more than 46,000 placed throughout the United States in the same time period, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Students at the Michigan State University Immigration Law Clinic represent many of the unaccompanied children that come to Michigan through a grant from Vera Institute of Justice, which has a contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“The ones we represent are the ones who have no reunification opportunities (with family),” said Veronica Thronson, an MSU law professor and director of the clinic.
Since the clinic started in fall 2010, students have obtained lawful permanent residence for 220 clients, special immigrant juvenile status for 139, U visas for victims of criminal activity for 36, and naturalization for 23.
The clinic currently has about 170 open cases.
“A lot of them are trafficked and a lot of them are kids who have suffered tremendous trauma in their home countries,” Thronson said.
Many of the children the clinic represents are placed with families through Samaritas, a social services agency in Lansing.
Diane Baird, program manager for Samaritas’ refugee child and family program, said children they serve often were abused or neglected, pressured into joining gangs, or trafficked from a young age.
“Lots of different reasons, lots of different journeys that kids take to get here, all of which are pretty traumatic,” Baird said.
The agency finds the children foster families, monitors the child’s progress and reports back to the state until the children are 21.
Transitioning to life as a teenager in the U.S. and finding families willing to foster unaccompanied minors is difficult, Baird said, given what the children have lived through prior to their arrival.
On Sept. 20, Baird received an email seeking placement for 81 children. She had five or six available families, but most of them wanted younger kids.
While Viviana Alamillo made her crossing alongside family more than 19 years ago, she also faced challenges establishing a life in the United States.
Building a future in the U.S.
Initially, for Alamillo, the future after St. Johns High School appeared predestined.
Without proper paperwork she expected she’d make a living in agriculture like her family, have children at an early age, and lead a life in the shadows without the paperwork to legitimize her presence in the U.S.
When she told her mother she wanted to attend college instead, her family laughed. But her mother took out a $3,000 loan from her boss to pay for Alamillo’s first semester at Lansing Community College.
Without that money, Alamillo didn’t stand a chance of paying for school since she couldn’t apply for federal aid without a social security number.
After the first semester was paid, Alamillo obtained a