Campaign Action
A group of U.S.-citizen kids who could become separated from their parents following the termination of their immigration protections traveled from the Boston area to Washington, D.C., last week to stage a play for lawmakers and aides featuring their real names, their real stories, and their real fears. Should their parents lose Temporary Protected Status (TPS) without permanent protections from Congress, this will become the next family separation crisis.
One of the participants was 17-year-old Jacqueline Landaverde, the eldest of four children. Like other teens, she wants a chance to continue furthering her education, but if her parents are deported to El Salvador, she may have to give that up to become her siblings’ new guardian. “I’m afraid I’ll have to give those dreams up and become a mother to my three younger sisters,” she said.
This is a decision that no young person should ever be forced to make, but it could become a reality for thousands of other children of TPS recipients. Nearly a quarter of a million have TPS parents. Do they take their American kids with them to a country that isn’t theirs? Do they separate, maybe leaving them under the care of a relative? Or do they go underground together? It’s a heart-wrenching situation that “The Last Dream: Stories Created and Performed by the Children of TPS” hoped to convey.
13-year-old Brian Pineda, one of the 13 children who participated in the Boston Experimental Theatre Company production and was hosted by Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, was asked by PRI’s The World why he was participating. “’For my dad,’ he said, bursting into tears.”
A lawsuit has blocked the Trump administration from ending protections for immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Sudan (a lawsuit on behalf of immigrants from Honduras and Nepal was just filed), but like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, these are families that have called the U.S. their home for decades now. They shouldn’t have to live their lives from court decision to court decision. They need certainty.
So do their children. In one scene in the play, a group of kids is cheerfully decorating a Christmas tree when one child speculates, “Next Christmas, none of us will be here.” Brian added that “it makes me feel like I’m doing something productive and something that would help other people. Because, like, what we’re getting in return for this is having our parents here. And other kids are going to get to have their parents here. If we do this, it would be amazing.”
These are incredible children, but that’s also what they are: children, and children who have been unfairly burdened because of one administration’s racist policies. After the play finished, the children could not be help but be overcome by the emotion of the day, bursting into tears in a hallway of the Cannon House Office Building. Stepping in to comfort them, Pressley asked them to keep being brave while she fights to keep their families together here, where they belong.