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Jan 15, 2025 - 01:22 PM |
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An explanation I've been waiting over half my life to finally find. |
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Quick timeline
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9/30/81 my birth in Guatemala
2/21/84 I am taken to the States.
An explanation I've been waiting over half my life to finally find.
As many of you that have been aware of my story for over 20 years now know, I got deported with the greatest of ease. It's honestly harder to flip a pancake than it was to get rid of me. And even though the felony conviction was a massive part of that, people then and now have always been confused as to how I could have been in the States since age two, full standard education received there, native English, a child with a citizen, etc. and still get deported so swiftly.
What I always knew was that my mother flew me out of Guatemala without my father's permission. What I always thought was true, simply because she told me so (how naive of me) was that she had someone falsify my father's signature in order get me on the plane. You know, like how you would get your parent's signature on some piece of paper so you can go on a God damn field trip with your class. Pretty simple and hard to believe in hindsight, but I think "3rd World in the 80's" was all the justification I needed to believe this crap.
And yet, ICE (then INS) insisted and insisted there was no proof of entry of me entering the United States legally. And this was a fucking VITAL point for their case against me. At the time I thought "the Government doesn't care, they see I can't even afford an attorney for this and will just not even make an effort to look me up."
And these were my beliefs for over 20 years.
Then, randomly, my partner's niece discovered familysearch.org, a free ancestry website she was building her family tree with. While telling us about it over lunch one day last year, she randomly asked me my mother's info to just give me an idea of how it works. So she looked her up and found my brother and I (the only kids my mother has had) but also, while searching under her name, discovered a different child. The odd thing is that this other child was born three months before I was, which of course is impossible. I didn't make much of it at the time because I thought the website was just faulty.
Eventually though, as a fatherless bastard that was separated from so much of his family because of the way I was removed from my birth country, I got curious and used the site to start building my own tree. And then I ran into this document again, under my mother's name. I took note of a few things:
1. birth three months before my own.
2. home birth, with help from a certified midwife.
3. No father listed, only my mother.
4. While this "child" was born July 4th 1981, the birth certificate was registered October 1983. Which was four months before I was taken to the United States. The comedy that is a July 4th birth date does not escape me.
5. And most damning of call, as clear as day, my mother's signature.
So yeah, a quick phone call was all I needed to confirm what you can probably guess by now. My mom paid a midwife to claim she assisted with this fake home birth.
So, going back to INS saying they had no proof of entry for me, it all makes sense now. My mother used this fake birth cert to get me on a the plane and never used it again. Once she registered me in the United States school system/hospital records/whatever she resumed using my actual identity. If she had kept using the fake identity she created for me, there's a decent chance things could've been different.
My father, once discovering my mother and I were gone, and gathering from her family here that she had left the country, placed a legal complaint through both the police here along with the U.S. Embassy. Sadly my mother was made aware of this, which if she had gone to try and renew the Visa we travelled with, she'd of been deported. But what this meant was that she was forced to do things illegally in the States as far as her citizenship was concerned. And I, of course, had a share in the consequences.
When I discovered this and brought it up to my mother last year for final confirmation, she didn't deny it. In fact, the first thing she said was "with that (the fake doc) I scored a massive goal on your father." It sounds better in Spanish, but basically it was her way of saying she fucked him over good. I let her know, in so many words, that she scored that goal on me too.
The fact that while I was in immigration proceedings, my mother didn't say a word to me about this, says a lot. Mainly, I am convinced, because it would've been her neck on the line too. It hurts, and it hurts that if not for this website she would've taken this info to the to grave.
But at least now I have my explanation.
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