Mayra Garibo was counting the days when she would see her family in Mexico again.
The trip was set for December 2017, the first Christmas she would spend with her family in 20 years. She hadn’t seen them since she was 7, after coming to the United States with her mother and brother.
The memories of her home country are sparse, but she remembers the sounds of waves on the sand, and the smell of fresh fish caught by her relatives in the morning.
“Being able to go back is something I’ve dreamt of for so many years,” Garibo, 27, said. “Maybe it’s just me, but I always felt incomplete. I feel like I belong here, but I feel like I belong there too.”
Garibo, an undocumented student at Cal State Dominguez Hills, was going to travel to Mexico with a group of 15 other local Dreamer students with advance parole, which allowed undocumented immigrants to temporarily travel abroad and return without penalty. But it never happened.
Since 2012, people under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – the program created under the Obama administration to give a pass from deportation for youth who came to the country as children – could apply to travel abroad for humanitarian, labor or educational purposes.
But amid uncertainties for DACA in fall 2017, when the Trump administration ordered to phase out the program, it halted the approval of the travel applications, including the applications for Garibo and her peers for their study abroad program.
So this month, one year after the Mexico trip would have been, some of them are going to Washington D.C., to fight to bring the permits back. They’ll arrive Tuesday, Jan. 15, and stay for a few days to meet with members of Congress and try to persuade Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.
The study abroad program was created in 2015 by Cal State Long Beach professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos, who will be leading the students to Washington, D.C. Normally, students submit advance parole applications months in advance and they are usually cleared without issue, Vazquez-Ramos said.
During the program, students study Mexican culture and language, with an added bonus for a few days to visit family.
“It’s inhumane, what they’ve done,” he said, referring to Homeland Security, which issues the re-entry permits.
Garibo said it broke her heart to tell her family members – who were already asking her what she’d like to eat when she came – that she couldn’t make it. But on Jan. 11, 2018, a phone call turned Garibo’s disappointment into devastation.
Her father died in a freak accident.
“If I would’ve gone on this trip, I would’ve gotten a chance to spend Christmas time with my dad,” Garibo said.
Immediately, Garibo filed paperwork on humanitarian grounds of advance parole. She wanted to say goodbye to her father.
But it was denied.
“My family delayed his burial,” said Garibo, holding back tears. “Because usually, they’ll bury them the next day, but they kept waiting. They were willing to wait longer for me to have the opportunity to be there. But since I was denied, they couldn’t.”
Garibo has reapplied multiple times, a $575 fee each time. She can recite the advance parole policies by line and her last application was nearly 100 pages long.
She’s one of the students traveling to Washington, D.C., with Vazquez-Ramos to express to legislators how advance parole would benefit Dreamers’ lives.
“Yes, initially DACA was rescinded,” said Lidieth Arevalo, a Cal State Long Beach alumna. “But now that it’s somewhat back in place, why is advance parole not back in place in the meantime? How would we be harming the country or the economy?”
Arevalo, 27, completed the study abroad program three times. She went to her home country of El Salvador on two of those trips to visit her family, including her older brother and father.
“When I got a chance to go, it was really moving,” Arevalo said. “I forgot what it feels like to have family. To have actual relatives next to you and hug you, to show you love. It was great, but at the end, when you had to say goodbye – it was really heartbreaking.”
Arevalo was disappointed when she couldn’t go back in December 2017. And she channeled that heartbreak by telling Garibo’s story through a 30-minute documentary called “Advance Parole” that premiered last year.
But, now a graduate student studying film at Chapman University, every advance parole rejection becomes harder to swallow.
Arevalo got accepted to an international documentary program with a full-ride scholarship to travel to Australia to produce three short films. She would’ve traveled from May through June.
“I tried my best,” Arevalo said. “I talked to my dean, I talked to all of my professors – got letters of support – and thought since it was education and for my career – well, it wasn’t enough and I lost that opportunity.”
Using education for activism
Vazquez-Ramos is from Mexico but grew up in East Los Angeles. He graduated from Lincoln High School months before the first protest of the school walkouts in March 1968, when Chicano students and teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District protested unequal conditions in schools. As a Cal State Long Beach freshman, Vazquez-Ramos returned to his alma mater to join one of his role models – social studies teacher Sal Castro, a prominent leader of the East LA School Walkouts.
At Cal State Long Beach, Vazquez-Ramos earned a bachelor’s degree in Mexican-American studies and a master’s in psychology. He eventually became a professor and one of the founding members of the university’s Chicano studies department.
The study abroad program is his passion.
Vazquez-Ramos, 69, gets a thrill seeing his students reconnect with their home countries.
“Many of them travel to Mexico,” he said, “and they come back feeling Mexican. There’s no longer this emptiness many of them feel.”
After retiring in 2010, Vazquez-Ramos is at the university part-time, and created the California-Mexico Studies Center, a nonprofit that advocates for educational and cultural organizations. The nonprofit is based in his Long Beach home, abundant with Mexican literature, decor and art.
The most notable piece is on his backyard wall: a large, colorful mural that highlights moments of Mexican and California culture and history. Politicians and activists dot the mural from past and present, ranging from his former teacher Castro, to his former Cal State Long Beach professor – and now congressman – Alan Lowenthal.
Lowenthal, for his part, has been working with Vazquez-Ramos to reinstate advance parole application acceptances. In December, he drafted a letter with Rep. Nanette Barragan and 12 other representatives to Secretary Nielsen. The letter urges Nielsen to restore advance parole and allow DACA recipients to travel outside of the U.S. for family emergencies and education programs – citing California-Mexico Studies Center Dreamers’ Study Abroad program.
But Lowenthal said letters only go so far. Many people aren’t aware of what advance parole is, he continued, so the goal is to educate.
“Nothing is more important than hearing from the very people affected by this,” Lowenthal said of the students coming to Washington, D.C.
Lowenthal said he’s worked on various projects with Vazquez-Ramos for years. It’s unsurprising to him that members of the Cal State Long Beach community are coming together at the capital for a cause they believe in.
“The university has been a great home for the Dreamers, by encouraging them and developing these projects in Mexico,” Lowenthal said.
One of the Cal State Long Beach students hoping to go to Washington D.C. also is Citlalli Ortiz, a commissioner for undocumented students for Associated Students, Inc., the university’s student governing body. But she, along with other students hoping to go on the trip, are trying to raise funds for travel expenses on the fundraising website crowdrise.com.
Ortiz, 19, also came from Mexico to the United States as a child. She grew up in Long Beach and graduated from McBride High School.
But she also hopes to visit her roots.
“This is where I come from,” Ortiz said. “Why can’t I visit my home country? To me, it makes no sense. What’s so harmful?”
Vazquez-Ramos is still in disbelief that advance parole hasn’t been reinstated.
“It’s an emotional tear to not be able to be with your loved ones,” Vazquez-Ramos said. “So we’re going to do a seminar in Washington, D.C. – an educational and informational presentation – where the students can all talk about their own (experiences).”
And for Garibo, the clock is ticking.
Her deceased father was her grandparents’ primary caregiver. They’re both sick and she doesn’t know how much time they have left.
But just a couple of weeks ago, she got some bad news: Her latest attempt at advance parole was denied.
“You feel so hopeless that there’s a person you love, but you can’t be there to hug her or say goodbye, to help her when she needs you,” Garibo said. “If there’s anything humane about it, that’s the most humane thing about advance parole that provides us. Being able to say goodbye to our loved ones – but more importantly – when they’re still alive.”
