Farin Martinez

Unprecedented Times

The dry dirt of my husband’s homeland crept over the edges of my chanclas and onto my toes as I stood among the clotheslines under the beaming México sun. His tio’s jeans and patched long-sleeved shirts surrounded me, ghostly half-bodies stained with the sweat of hard labor on the family’s ranchito. I was looking for a spot of reception to download the photos my neighbor had texted me. She had happily agreed to check our mail and feed our dog and cat while Toni and I took this emergency trip.

When I saw the photo of an envelope from USCIS, I asked her to open it as soon as possible and send photos of all of its contents, front and back. I dragged my thumbs across my Samsung’s screen to zoom in on the image of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services document. My husband’s hopeful eyes stared back at me from the grayscale passport photo printed on the bottom of the page. 

Red text firmly stated its purpose: This document authorizes a single departure from the United States on or after 01/23/2025, and a related return on or before 02/21/2025.

I don’t remember breathing as I stomped the dirt from my chanclas and made my way into the cramped bedroom of the concrete-and-brick house my husband had grown up in. Its kitchen and bathroom were in separate concrete buildings, connected by a driveway of red hexagonal pavers. I loved his retelling of the mischief he and his brothers got into in this two-bedroom, three-building home on Calle Libertad – Freedom Street – in Tiracoz, Oaxaca, population 359. “My poor mom had to try to control us four boys. Imagine?”

Upon seeing the place again after 22 years, Toni had marveled at how small everything seemed now. “¡Estos arcos me hacían enormes!” he told his tía, emotion glossing his coffee brown eyes. The terra cotta brick archways had appeared enormous when he was a child; now he could easily reach the top of them by extending his muscular arm, not even needing to lift his five-foot-five frame onto tiptoe. The smile lines that spread from the corners of his eyes matched the cracks in the gray handmade walls. His dimpled smile appeared quickly and often throughout our visit as we met relatives he hadn’t seen in decades, and he proudly introduced me as his esposa.

Spilling the contents of his blue Adidas backpack onto the bed, I grabbed the white envelope I was looking for – the one that contained the travel document Fresno immigration officials had handed Toni four short days ago. The form granted emergency advance parole, a travel permit issued to DACA recipients that allowed them to visit an ailing family member in their home country – and permission to come back into the United States legally. This trip would be the next step toward a green card, which, contrary to popular belief, is not just handed over when you marry a U.S. Citizen. 

The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), enacted in 2012, shielded 800,000 “Dreamers” from deportation, including Toni and his brothers, who entered the United States with their parents under a cloud-covered sky in December 2002. Toni was 14 years old. He enrolled halfway through freshman year at his neighborhood high school – where the student population was six times the number of residents in the small town he had just left – without knowing any English.

Undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children were allowed to remain in the country under DACA and obtain work permits and social security numbers. When Toni, the oldest, officially became a Dreamer, he dropped out of college to swing 80-pound hammers and repair oil refinery pipes in the Bay Area and Texas. The backbreaking 60-hour-a-week gig enabled him to buy a home for his undocumented parents and three younger brothers, moving them out of the one-bedroom apartment they had been sharing with their uncle. 

The next brother in line for DACA started a folklórico dance group and continues to keep Mexican traditions alive by teaching little ones to stomp their boots and swing their floral faldas. He imports textiles from Oaxaca, which he then hand sews and embroiders into vibrant dresses and skirts.

The second-youngest brother used his DACA employment authorization to become a licensed contractor and remodels million-dollar homes all around California while dreaming of owning one himself. 

Their youngest brother, brought into the United States while still in diapers, pacifying himself with this thumb to stay quiet on the multi-day journey, was finally old enough to work on his DACA application when Donald Trump became President of the United States the first time. By the time his biometrics appointment was scheduled in 2017, the Trump administration ended the program, blocking new applications and leaving the family’s youngest would-be Dreamer vulnerable and undocumented. While waiting for DACA to reopen, the youngest brother has earned three associates degrees and will soon complete his first bachelor program.

All four of them work harder and smarter than any American I know. 

        With Trump in office again, business for immigration attorneys was booming. Panicked immigrants sought advice for keeping their families together and avoiding deportation. My husband and I asked for the quickest way to make him eligible for permanent residency – the coveted green card – and we were now on the trip of a lifetime in a race against time and lunacy. When Trump took office again on January 20, 2025, he began scrawling his barbed wire signature on a slew of executive orders. Our immigration attorney had given us one piece of advice for our trip to México: “Just get in and out as soon as possible. With this president, things can change very quickly.”

My eyes scanned through Toni’s advance parole document, noting the subtle differences between the one I held in my hand and the one that had been mailed to our home, now 2,334 miles and a border wall away. My left thumb slid away from the corner of the document, revealing the word Copy. My eyes shot back to the top of the document where, in red letters, it stated, “Presentation of the original of this document authorizes a transportation line to accept the named bearer on board for travel to the United States…” 

I tried to hide the panic in my eyes as I found Toni in the kitchen with his tía, drinking agua de limón and snacking on guava and star fruit dusted with sal de chapulín. Just the night before, my sweet husband had flashed me his toothy dimpled smile as he triumphantly held up the small plastic bag of grasshopper salt he found among the papayas and potatoes. A little darker than the pink Himalayan salt I sprinkle on everything in my own kitchen, this sal de chapulín is made from crushed wild adult red grasshoppers, Oaxacan chiles, sea salt, and a zing of lemon – the taste of my husband’s childhood.

I wanted to shield him in this nostalgic bubble, enveloped in the sights, sounds, and sweet corn smell of Oaxaca, as long as I could. Here his shoulders softened as he bantered and joked with people who spoke his own language. Here he didn’t need to think or speak in English. Here he slept soundly on the thin mattress and pancake pillows and dreamed in Spanish without grinding his teeth. Here he was lulled into a deeper sleep by the purr of motorcycles that bumped over the dirt roads at all hours of the night. Here he was not a prisoner to the hustle of American culture. Here he was not illegal. Here he was welcomed and wanted.  

“We need to call the lawyer,” I said, holding up his travel permit. “I don’t know if they’re going to let you back in with this.” 

We stepped outside and I showed him the discrepancy. We were carrying a copy of the original document, while the original sat on the tiled kitchen counter at home. My husband had already taken a risk by requesting advance parole and leaving the country the exact week Trump started his second term as POTUS. Trump took office on Monday, Toni was granted his travel permit on Thursday, and on Friday we flew out of San Francisco and landed in Oaxaca. After three very short days in the Oaxaca sun, our return trip to stormy California was scheduled for the following morning at six. With a copy, not the original travel permit in hand, I feared U.S. Border Patrol agents would not let him reenter the country.

As he dialed the number to the attorney, I envisioned his brothers meeting us at SFO to bring me the original document. I imagined begging TSA to allow me to bring the travel permit to customs, to show them my husband had permission to leave and return to the country he’s made a life in. I saw myself delivering a tearful speech. He belongs in the United States. He has a home here. He got married here. He pays taxes here. He has parents and siblings to take care of, a wife who loves him, and two stepchildren to help raise.

As he waited for the attorney to return his call, he silently read over the page he had in his hand and the photo of the one I had forwarded to his phone. I sat on a chair carved from a tree trunk and stared out at the field of knee-high dry grass. I imagined him staying here, on the land his mother owned, feeding the cows and chickens and driving 20 miles per hour on the potholed roads with its gigantic speed bumps. I imagined myself driving to Fresno alone, opening the door to our yappy dog expectantly waiting to see his favorite human. How could I explain to our fetch-obsessed poodle mix that his dad wasn’t coming home?

Toni rubbed the back of his head with his open palm, stopping to scratch behind his right ear. I remembered his contractor brother telling him to stop doing that. “You do that when you’re nervous, now you’re going bald right there.” 

My husband stood and walked toward the front of the property, past the bathroom, through the open gate, and down toward the well. My phone began to vibrate. The attorney’s number appeared on the screen and I swiped the green arrow to answer the call.

My husband’s phone apparently didn’t have reception where he was standing, so they had called me as his alternate contact. “What you have in your hand with you is what everyone else has used to leave and come back,” our attorney told me. “It’s signed by the Fresno field office. It doesn’t matter that it says Copy. That is the one. They should let him back in with it.”

“I don’t need ‘should’, Fernando,” I said. “I need ‘will.’”

“Well, yes, they … they should let him in, it’s worked before for everyone else,” he said, unable to confirm that my husband would be able to come home with me. “I’ve talked to other attorneys in the office and paralegals, they all say it should be fine. What we think happened is someone made a mistake. He was approved by the Fresno office but his application was also submitted in the computer and someone else approved it and sent a second travel permit. That’s never happened before.”

The phrase “unprecedented times” came to mind. Such a mistake must be unprecedented. Extraordinary. Unique. Unmatched. Never before seen. How many more unprecedented things would we witness under the rule of this president?

I found Toni looking out at the horizon toward the mountains, arms crossed with two tiny drops of sweat beading on the back of his sun-darkened neck. “They said you should be fine with the document you have,” I told him. “They think you got approved twice.”

He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, allowing his shoulders to drop and his jaw to soften. Despite the anxiety and frustration held entrenched in his body, his toothy dimpled smile lit up his face, carrying the deep smile lines from the edges of his eyes all the way to his hairline. “Does that mean I can do a second trip?”