Checkpoint
We arrived at the checkpoint on the road going north from the border. We were returning from spending Christmas in my hometown with my parents and all the siblings who, with their families, had scattered across South Texas. In the back seat, our two young kids were sleeping soundly, exhausted by days of play with their primos. Blissfully for us, they had fallen asleep almost as soon as we hit the road for the six-hour trek home. My wife and I took advantage of their silence and inattention to chat about family matters: which cousin was in trouble, which sibling was having a hard time at work, and how my parents were rapidly aging. Despite the serious topics, a ninety-minute break to just talk with each other was a rarity with a six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. As the thornscrub landscape of the King Ranch rushed past in a blur, we went over the past few days, alternately fretting about the troubles of family members and cherishing the moments we had together as family.
Over many years of traveling north along this highway, the stop at the Border Patrol checkpoint had become routine: roll down the window, turn down the tunes, adopt your most unaccented English, and answer an emphatic “Yes, sir” to the inevitable query of “American citizen?” Over time, I had noticed that now, more often than not, the agent asking the question was Mexican American, as we were. This fact was not at all reassuring. My slightly darker-skinned sister had been interrogated several times at these checkpoints, and, while that hadn’t been our experience, we had always been reminded that our word was only as good as the agent believed it to be.
My mother lived in fear of this truth. She had been born a U.S. citizen of Mexican parents, which did not stop the Border Patrol of her childhood from deporting them in the early 1950s. Three decades later, when another economic recession stroked the periodic calls for the removal of undocumented migrants, she had marched her children down to the border station in town so we could each receive a “U.S. Citizen Identification Card,” INS Form I-197. As I would later find out, these ID cards had no legal standing whatsoever and would not have prevented us from being deported, but my mom believed that the U.S. government would honor its own word and that the document would shield us. Another thirty-five years later, my wife and I didn’t particularly believe that fiction, but we did make it a habit of always carrying passport cards for ourselves and our kids.
We pulled up into the station bay, and the agent—a woman for a change—asked my wife and me the question: “U.S. citizen?” She then told me roll down the rear windows to see the passengers in back. This was so out of the ordinary that we knew instantly the potential danger. I complied, revealing the two kids in their car seats. The younger one slept soundly while the older one drowsily rubbed her eyes at the sudden flood of light. What the agent asked next froze our blood. Turning to our daughter, she asked, “Are these people in the front seat your parents?” The possibility that our kids could be taken from us suddenly became very real. We had heard too many stories of people taken off buses headed north, of Border Patrol agents checking citizenship documents for domestic flights originating in border towns, and roving ICE agents picking up anyone who looked suspiciously brown. We were all U.S. citizens, but my wife and I knew we would be powerless should there be any capricious interpretation of that status.
But how would a six-year-old answer the agent? Our daughter was verbally precocious and a real jokester, known to playfully answer serious questions. At any other time, we would have enjoyed her quick wit, an endless source of parental amusement and pride. But such a response now would be disastrous. She simply answered, “Yes, they’re my parents.” Out of the mouth of babes. We breathed a sigh of relief as the agent proceeded to wave us through. We gathered speed as we resumed our northward journey. Our daughter fell back asleep, blissfully unaware of the drama in which she had played a starring role. My wife and I exchanged glances and held hands tightly for the next hour as the miles passed by.
