An American teen in a foreign land

MEXICO CITY — The morning immigration officers came for Ana Reyes, her 12-year-old daughter pleaded with them not to take her mother away.

Julie Quiroz was to graduate from grade school in Burien that day last June.

It was her mother's 41st birthday.

"It was a pretty bad day," recalls Julie, now 13. "I think I was the only kid without my mom at graduation."

More than a week later, Reyes was deported, returning to this city she'd left 17 years earlier. She had not wanted her two daughters, Julie and 6-year-old Sharise, to join her on the government flight to Mexico: "I didn't want them to see me cuffed and shackled."

So the girls came later after Reyes led them to believe it would be only a short vacation.

Neither girl is in school.

"I hate it here," said Julie, shifting easily between Spanish and English.

"We can't go out anywhere; it's so dangerous. I was walking down the street the other day, and these men started whistling at me."

Estimates show 3 million American children have at least one parent living in the U.S. illegally. And while little is known about what happens to these parents after they are deported, even less is known about what becomes of their American-born children.

"You have to think the number has got to be pretty big, considering that the number of families with kids who have been deported in recent years is several hundred thousand," said Randy Capps, of the nonpartisan Urban Institute, who co-authored a report last year about the impact of work-site raids on children.

Whose duty?

Critics of U.S. immigration policies call them "anchor babies," saying they tie their parents to a host of government benefits and, once they turn 21, can sponsor their parents for legal status.

And it's the parents of these children, they say, who should be held responsible for what happens to them.

"Obviously everybody empathizes with these kids ... but no legitimate U.S. policy can take the place of parental responsibility," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

"It's unreasonable to ask the United States to assume all these burdens that result from parents' decision to break the law."

But others believe the U.S. has a duty to these children.

"We are better people than that to hold the sins of the parents against these kids," said Seattle immigration attorney Steve Miller.

When facing deportation, most parents leave their children in the U.S. with a spouse or extended family. A few, once deported, move to border communities such as Juárez, so their kids can attend school on the U.S. side.

An unknown number, like Reyes, take their children with them.

While these kids derive Mexican citizenship from their parents, it gets them precious little in the impoverished towns and cities their parents had fled.

Advocates worry that if the children remain for long in places such as Mexico, they will lose their English skills, fall behind at school and be unable to get a good job later in the U.S.

"As adults, they will be traveling with passports that say they were born in Washington, but will speak no English or English with an accent, raising a red flag with immigration authorities," said Brent Renison, an Oregon immigration attorney.

"They are going to get hassled — even put into custody. ... Those are the difficulties that lie ahead for these kids. We already see it happening."

"Nobody to call"

In the U.S., Julie was the typical American kid, hanging out with friends at the mall or at the library when her mother would let her.

She had lived in the same Burien apartment complex since her family moved to Western Washington in 2001 and had many friends there.

"I was always on the phone, burning up the minutes," she said. "Here I have nobody to call."

She's made no friends in this city where her family lives in neighborhoods so unsafe she never leaves the house without an adult. Her mother worries she and her sister might be kidnapped — or worse.

When a friend from the U.S. sends money, they sometimes go to Pizza Hut or McDonald's, Julie said. "We don't get to go on those trips often because there's no money.

"There's no going to the movies. I'm inside all the time. It's not the same as over there."

A few weeks after she arrived in Mexico, Julie enrolled in the seventh grade.

But she dropped out after two weeks because, she said, she's unable to read or write Spanish well and couldn't keep up. "The teacher said, 'I will help you; you've got to try.' But I would just get mad. ... "

She said the only class she enjoyed was English and she enjoyed talking to the teacher. "Actually, I knew more than her," she said, laughing. "They were doing things that kindergarten kids do in the states: 'Color a tree and write tree at the bottom.'

"I kept asking, why am I here?"

Her mother, equally frustrated, said, "I'd see her come home crying every day" after school. "She was not happy there."

The Mexican government operates a joint program, supported by the U.S., that seeks to provide basic education to students who migrate between the two countries. While it offers Spanish-as-a-second-language instruction for children who speak an indigenous language, it has no such program for those such as Julie who primarily speak English.

Yolo Brito, a coordinator with the Binational Migrant Education Program, said there are many children like Julie enrolled in Mexican schools who speak and understand Spanish but can't read or write it.

Programs must be created, she said, for students who must "learn Spanish as a second language in order to succeed."

Fading friendships

It bothers Julie that her little sister, who'd just finished kindergarten in the U.S., is already losing her English skills. "I talk to her in English and she responds back to me in Spanish," Julie said.

With no school, Julie begins her days around 11 a.m., when she has breakfast and flips on a small television.

Sometimes, she'll go online, if there's enough time left on the Internet-access card the family sometimes buys — their one connection to an old life.

But increasingly, she's found her old friends aren't returning her e-mails. Now that they are in middle school, she says, they've made other friends, and "I think many of them have forgotten about me."

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com