‘Hope Is A Difficult Thing’

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After 15 hours of walking through the desert between Mexico and Mexicali, Damian Herrera and six other immigrants made it to US soil. Their guide, whom they had paid to lead them to safety through miles of September-hot border wilderness, had abandoned them just a quarter of the way into their trip.

Herrera and the others finally arrived at the meeting point where another guide, or coyote, picked them up in a car and continued the journey north.

His risky trip through the desert in September of 2020 was not his first. Herrera made his first crossing in 2002 in the hopes of finding a better job in the US and sending money back to his family. He spent several years in Northern California, where he met Amy, before they moved to Santa Fe in 2008 and made a life. Ten years later, Herrera returned to Mexico to apply for a visa. Amy says she thought her husband would be coming right back after a successful process. She was wrong.

When the consulate denied his application, Damian made a desperate attempt to return to his wife, whose father had fallen ill, and to the nighttime drive north with the other immigrants and the driver.

It wasn't long into the journey by car before immigration agents pulled them over on Interstate 8, detained everyone inside and took them to the US Marshals Service at San Luis Regional Detention Center in Arizona.

Herrera would spend the next two months there, experiencing the well-known trials of immigration detention—freezing temperatures, racism and bad food—before testifying against the driver of the vehicle. For his troubles, the 39-year-old was unceremoniously deported back to Mexico.

The deportation, after nearly two decades of living in the US, would seem to effectively end Herrera's long-fought bid for citizenship. But Herrera and immigration advocates hope the newly-minted Biden administration could be pressured to make widespread policy changes that just might change the Herreras' circumstances.

Talking to SFR from Peto, Mexico, where he grew up in the Yucatán Peninsula, Herrera tells SFR he misses "everything" about his former life in the City Different. While he is teaching boxing classes in the evenings in the small village and running a health food cafe, it is not the same as his life in New Mexico.

"I miss my friends and the community, I miss my wife, I miss the land itself," Herrera says. "Santa Fe became my second home since the moment we moved there."

In 2018, after a decade of marriage, the Herreras began to work on Damian's application earnestly, gathering co-sponsors and putting together their tax returns to show his productiveness in US society. Their lawyer at the time, Santiago Juárez from the Albuquerque-based law firm Amparo Alevante, recommended that Damian return voluntarily to Mexico to apply for a visa at the US Consulate.

But after a year-plus of tenuous hope and interviews, the consulate denied Damian's application, citing a Trump-era policy—the "public charge" rule. The policy which advocates say is aimed at keeping out anyone except the wealthiest immigrants, attempts to penalize immigrants based on the assumption they will use social services like food stamps and Medicaid. The consulate told Damian that Amy had not made enough money in the first year of owning her business to keep him from potentially needing state or federal aid.

The Herreras filed appeal after appeal, spending thousands of dollars. But each time they were denied. The consulate's denials also meant Damian would be prohibited for 10 years from entering the US because he had originally entered the country undocumented in 2002. (The deportation from Arizona holds a five-year bar, which just folds into the 10-year prohibition.)

Amy tells SFR the denials are a combination of "paperwork error" on the part of their original lawyers and the Trump-driven shift in perspective on immigrants.

"Someone on that side of the border that's a US citizen was told that, in my opinion, if somebody does not make enough money in their family…do not let them get a visa," Amy says. "Do not let them get a green card. Do not let them become a citizen. We don't want people that don't make enough money here."

Juárez, the family's former lawyer, declined to comment on the specifics of the case but writes to SFR via email that, "Hopefully, there can be some relief provided with the [Biden] administration."

Amy is now at a loss as to what to do. She runs a local colonics center and says she now makes great money after years of building up her business.

"I need to also take care of myself, too, and these last two years, I have not," Amy tells SFR. "The stress has almost really, literally almost killed me. The stress of somebody that you love more than anything, thinking that they're dead in the desert because you didn't hear from them for a couple days and just the stress of getting through paying the lawyers that we paid."

While Herrera's story has received local coverage and outrage from the Santa Fe community, it strikes similar chords to those of thousands of other deportations in New Mexico that have split families apart, oftentimes for years on end, according to Allegra Love, immigration lawyer and founder of the local nonprofit Santa Fe Dreamers Project.

"This kind of thing is happening to tens, hundreds of thousands of people right now, this exact same thing, and it's not a case of just flagrant injustice in one person's case," Love says. "This is representative of the massive injustices of our immigration system."

Love represented Damian for a brief time as she tried, unsuccessfully, to stop his removal from the US. She says that Damian's return to Mexico in 2018 was "perfectly horrible" timing in that it coincided with Trump's public charge policy.

It's not clear what could now be done in Damian's case. Love says the best hope is for a radical change in law, such as lifting the 10-year bar or reparations for people who had their visas denied because of the public charge rule.

But the Herreras' reunion in the US is not a "foregone conclusion" either, according to Love—she tells SFR it's impossible to know when a tweak here or there could change the course of an immigration case.

For now, Damian and Amy remain apart, and currently without lawyers as they work out, together, what their next move could be.

"This is a procedurally complicated case and so speculating on things that could possibly happen that could affect it is, I think, really dangerous," Love says. "Hope is a difficult thing when you're working with immigration."