Valeria Serna, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient from Texas, wants you to remember that family separation isn’t just something “happening at the border,” because it’s also “happening in our cities.” She knows this first-hand, because she was just a child when her big brother, Rafael, was deported to Mexico in 2008. While Valeria is now a 21-year-old student and activist, she described the pain of her family’s separation like it was just yesterday, remembering him as being her “protector.”
”Every morning he would drop me off and pick me up from school,” she said. “During the cold months, he would always make sure to go warm up the car and defrost the windshield. He would only call me if it was already warm, because he didn’t want me to be cold. So, he was always watching out for me and making sure that he was safe.”
But her family’s world was turned upside down during the summer of 2008, when he was arrested on his way to school. “Everything happened so quickly. I was so young,” she said. “My mom was trying to explain what happened, and I couldn’t really understand. I kept asking, ‘Why? Why would someone do that to me? Why would someone do that to our family?’”
She said it really didn’t hit her until the start of the school year, when Rafael wasn’t there to drop her off or pick her up from school like before. “I dreaded the bus rides home,” she tearfully said, “because I knew that when I went home, he wasn’t going to be there.”
The pain stuck with her for a long time, saying she never really discussed her own immigration status afterward. That changed following last year’s DACA rescission, when she contacted immigrant youth-led organization United We Dream and went to Washington, DC, to push for permanent protections. She was ready to fight.
“That was really the first time in my entire life that I said, ‘I’m undocumented.’ It was really empowering to see a lot of people recognize me as a human … I was liberated,” the resilient organizer said.
Today, Valeria says that technology allows her to stay in contact with her brother and his new child, but it doesn’t change the fact that family separation “robbed me of that relationship I would’ve had” if they’d been able to stay together. Rafael and Valeria’s story shouldn’t just be a call to action to protect families at the border, it should also be a call to action to protect immigrant families everywhere.
“Today when you go home,” she said, “love your family, love your friends, your neighbors. Be with each other, if you’re still here, give them a hug, a kiss, just really appreciate them, because there’s nothing like that feeling.”