"This 18-year-old is protecting his California farm community – and his own mother – from ICE" | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) | The Guardian
"The agent’s voice crackled from the car’s speaker, loud enough to carry through the open window: 'How’s your mother, Cesar? We’ll go visit her soon.'
Vasquez drove straight home and found his mother washing clothes.
'I took her car keys and told her to stop everything she’s doing. My hands were shaking,' Vasquez said. 'I then moved her to a secret location that I have precisely for this moment.'
Vasquez’s mother is one of the thousands of undocumented farm workers in Santa Maria whom he is trying to protect. She left her home in a tiny town in Mexico to cross the US-Mexico border at age 13 in search of a better life. Vasquez’s biological father was one of the first people she encountered – a Guatemalan American whose family was settled in California and who held US citizenship. He was also abusive and never legally married her, keeping her from accessing US citizenship, Vasquez said. When Vasquez was an infant, his mother ran away with her three children to Santa Maria, a town about 150 miles (240km) north of Los Angeles, where she found work in the strawberry fields. She has been trying to secure documentation for more than a dozen years now."
~ Jennifer Chowdhury with photographs by Zaydee Sanchez in Santa Maria, California
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