Amid celebration, clock ticks
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It's Brissa Placek's 18th birthday. It should be a happy day, but happiness is overshadowed by worry. Her adoptive mother has 180 days to keep her in the country.
By CINDY LANGE-KUBICK | Lincoln Journal Star
All day, Brissa shuts out the number.
Editor's note: Reporter Cindy Lange-Kubick and photographer Jill Peitzmeier followed Brissa's story for six months as her adoptive mother raced time to keep her in the country.
She won’t go there. She just wants to be a normal teen, fixing lunch for her little sister, working on a scrapbook for her boyfriend and feeding the bulldogs at the farm outside of Wilber, cocooned by corn stubble and gravel roads in the middle of America.
180 days.
Six months.
She won’t worry. Not today. If she starts, the tears will, too.
She lets her mom do the worrying for her.
All day, Jessica drinks hot tea, trying to drown the fear.
At work, she opens her desk calendar and writes the number 1 on today’s date: Dec.19, 2005.
Brissa’s 18th birthday.
180 days to go.
Not nearly enough time.
When Jessica and Jason Placek adopted the girl from Acapulco two years ago, they thought the hard part was over.
It’s almost funny now. What they didn’t know.
Jessica punches in a number. Sometimes she can hear her boss in the office next door, clearing his throat when she makes another call.
She keeps her voice low, trying to juggle her paying job and her mission to save Brissa. Max Graves, please.
She called a dozen attorneys before she found the soft-spoken immigration specialist last summer. Now her daughter’s life spills out of a folder in his Lincoln United Methodist Ministries office, three inches thick, littered with scribbled sticky notes.
He’s never seen a case like this one.
Today, Jessica’s trying to track down Brissa’s I-130, the form Max helped them file last summer. It must make its way through an overwhelmed immigration system by June 16.
180 days from now.
If that doesn’t happen, the Placeks will have to make a heartbreaking decision.
In the weeks to come, as winter turns to spring, a single issue — illegal immigration — will command headlines across the nation. Politicians will stump on its importance, ordinary citizens will take sides, a few will take up arms.
And at a farm in Nebraska, one family will look the issue in the eye, and the face of a frightened girl will stare back.
On this December afternoon, Jessica leaves the office early to run home and get her girls.
Smile, she tells herself. Pretend you’re happy, just for tonight.
In the morning she’ll be back.
She’ll drink more hot tea. She’ll make more calls.
And mark one more day off the calendar.
She had seen the girl before. A chatty 14-year-old who wore her hair long and skirts shorter than Jessica would ever let her own daughters.
The girl lived with her mom and little brother in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Crete. Jessica was working at B&H Apartments then, collecting rent, doing the books, scheduling maintenance.
She saw the girl’s mother when she dropped off her rent check. She didn’t speak much English.
The girl did. Brissa came in once or twice. She looked at the pictures on Jessica’s desk. Those three little blonde girls looked so happy.
Jessica offered to help when she learned Brissa’s family was moving to a new apartment across town.
On moving day, her mother screamed at the girl in Spanish. Hurry up! Be careful!
Brissa turned to Jessica. Can I come live with you? They both laughed.
Could she come live with them? In Jessica’s world, people didn’t ask those kinds of questions.
Jessica and her husband Jason were still in their 20s. It seemed like they had just been teens themselves.
But Jessica couldn’t say no, and Brissa came for the weekend.
It would be months before she teased out the girl’s secrets. How all of her mother’s despair rained down on her after her dad died. The chipped tooth. The bruises. The blame.
How she came to America when she was 10 with her mom and little brother, Tony, both of them dropped over the top of a tall fence in the desert, like fruit plucked from a tree.
How they would never be hungry here and nothing bad would ever happen again.
Brissa was a smart girl, Jessica thought. She needed someone to guide her. And the three blonde Placek girls loved the idea of a teenage sister.
Jason didn’t say much. He knew Jessica too well. And Jessica, an only child, raised by believers, stubborn and strict, had her mind nearly made up.
After that first weekend, Jessica dropped Brissa off at school Monday morning.
The next night the phone rang at the Placek farm.
My mom doesn’t want me anymore.
Most of the light has leaked from the December sky by the time Brissa opens the door to her grandparents’ house in Dewitt.
Hey, Grandpa.
Hey, birthday kid.
The farmer pats his adopted granddaughter’s head.
The older you get the less exciting it is, he warns her.
It’s warm inside. The smell of ham and Grandma Jean’s cranberry spice candles fill the modest house.
Brissa’s three sisters trail in behind her. Brittany. Zoe. Makayla.
My China Dolls, Brissa calls them.
Czech Mix is the nickname her new mom gave her. A girl from Mexico living in the Czech capital of Nebraska eating prune kolaches and potato dumplings? How crazy was that?
Jessica figured if anyone gave them a hard time for adopting a Hispanic kid, she’d tell them blood didn’t matter, that she was German and Swedish and Dutch but really they were all Americans.
Jessica runs the office at Crete Cold Storage now, where they ship frozen pork stomachs to Mexico from Farmland Foods, across the street.
She’s taking two college classes this semester, proving to herself and her girls the importance of education.
Work hard. Be honest. Do things the right way. That’s what Jessica tells her daughters.
Jason works six days a week as a second-shift electrician in Seward. He stops at Wal-Mart on the way home to pick up school supplies and dog food and hair gel, trying to wedge in time to drywall the living room and build a new garage.
They had custody of Brissa for more than a year before the adoption was final in December 2003. The government deported Brissa’s birth mom and Tony a few weeks later.
And Jessica and Jason gave their new daughter a second middle name.
Brissa Coral Hidalgo Banos became Brissa Coral Rose Placek.
A symbol of her new life, Jessica thought.
Coral to rose. Rock to flower.
Hard times to good times.
But the good times haven’t arrived.
She is a girl caught between two worlds. One won’t let her go.
One won’t let her stay.
Brissa opens the card Grandpa Roland picked out, with the bulldog on the front, just like her dog Bubbles.
She opens a silver package: a matching bracelet and earrings.
Then a Keith Urban CD from her parents.
“I’m so in love with him.”
Brissa keeps a poster of the Australian country star over the bed she shares with Brittany. Above it is a map of the world.
She wants to be a translator. She wants to live in Germany or maybe Spain. She wants to visit Russia and France. Her boyfriend, Anthony Bates, is going to be an archeologist.
They have this plan, to travel together and see the world.
He called her this morning at 5:35, the minute she was born.
Happy birthday, he whispered. I love you.
She smiles and shows her dimples. She didn’t tell anyone because she thought they might think it was cheesy, she says, but she didn’t.
Last night, Anthony and Brissa’s friends from Wilber showed up at Laser Quest in Lincoln for a surprise party. Mom made her favorite three-milk cake, pastel de tres leches, the kind Brissa remembers from parties in Mexico.
Tonight, they all crowd around a Dairy Queen ice cream cake decorated with a smiling Spongebob.
When her parents surprised her with a car the spring after her 16th birthday, she hung Spongebob air-fresheners from the rearview mirror and dressed it up with Spongebob seat covers.
The Cavalier sits in the driveway at the farm.
Brissa still doesn’t have her driver’s license.
After the adoption, it took four months for Brissa’s new birth certificate to arrive. When it did, Jessica piled the girls in the pickup and drove to the Social Security office in Beatrice.
The last step.
Once she had her Social Security card, Brissa could get a license.
She could get a job. She could apply for financial aid, go to college.
Jessica filled out the form and gave it to the woman behind the counter.
Does she have a residency card?
Jessica frowned. No. But we have her birth certificate.
The woman disappeared.
Ten minutes passed, 15, 20.
When the woman returned, she handed Jessica a business card.
Call this number.
The mother looked down. She herded the girls out to the truck, trying not to cry.
Homeland Security?
Coming Monday in Part 2: Brissa watches cartoons while her classmates go to college and her mother takes on the immigration bureaucracy.
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