Life in Mexico doesn't exist anymore
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Her friends away at college, Brissa must stay home watching cartoons with her little sisters, while her mom takes on the United States immigration system.
BY CINDY LANGE-KUBICK | Lincoln Journal Star
She is clutching a small tin cup.
In Part One:
The clock starts to tick when Brissa Placek turns 18. The girl from Acapulco, Mexico, adopted by a Wilber family has 180 days to get an immigrant visa or risk a three-year ban from the United States. Her adoptive mom, Jessica, puts her life on hold to make it happen.
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Her mother is leaving and the girl does not want her to go. She is 2. She doesn’t understand that her mother will come back, that she will take her and her big sisters home to the pink house with the papaya trees in Acapulco when summer is over.
She runs down the street, crying, holding her cup.
Mami! Mami!
Now that mother is gone.
That world is gone.
Her new home
Brissa Placek fixes lunch wearing flip-flops and a Wilber Wolverines sweatshirt on a mild January day.
She graduated last year, but her boyfriend, Anthony Bates, is a senior. State wrestling is coming up and she’ll be in the stands.
Brissa was a cheerleader her senior year at Wilber-Clatonia. Her new mom let her try out after she raised her grades. She starred in the class play and sang in the chorus.
Life was so different when she came to Wilber her sophomore year. She stood out with her dark skin. When they took a covered wagon to the park for history day, a boy told her to pull the wagon. Like she was a slave.
That changed when the kids got to know her. Now it seems the whole town is rooting for her.
She changed, too. The girl who wore short skirts and lived in the tiny apartment with her mom, cooking and taking care of her little brother, Tony, is gone.
Tony is gone. He was deported with her mother three months after Brissa was adopted by Jessica and Jason in December 2003.
Her older sisters are still in Mexico. They stayed behind when Brissa came to America in 1998.
One day she picks up the phone. She dials their old neighbors in Acapulco.
The words form in her head. This is Brissa. Do you remember me? Have you seen my sisters?
The call won’t go through.
Here illegally
It’s noon and she has already fed the horses and dogs. Now her 4-year-old sister squirms on a stool at the counter.
“Kayla? Are you still hungry?”
Five years ago, her parents bought this farmhouse, the place where her father grew up, built by his immigrant ancestors nearly a century ago. Jason Placek dug a new foundation and tore out old walls. Now he’s building it back up again.
It drives his wife, Jessica, crazy waiting for the house to be finished.
Brissa waits, too.
While her friends are at college, she scoops hamburger into taco shells, playing Sorry! and watching cartoons with her little sisters, Makayla, 4, Zoe, 7, and Brittany, 11.
After her adoption, everyone figured the hard part was over.
They discovered they were wrong that day in Beatrice.
After they left the Social Security office Jessica dialed the number for Homeland Security.
It didn’t matter that Brissa had been legally adopted, a voice told her. She’d been smuggled into the country, she was here illegally.
If she wanted to keep her daughter here, she had work to do.
The mother grabbed a pen and started to write.
Fighting for a green card
Jessica’s mother bought a book when her daughter was a little girl, “The Strong-Willed Child.”
Her parents taught their only child to love her neighbor. Do what’s right. Help the weak.
Now Jessica is grown, a 32-year-old mother with a mighty foe: United States Citizenship Immigration Services.
That system punished people like her who did the right thing.Taking in an abused teen. Adopting her instead of taking money from the state for foster care.
My daughter hasn’t done anything wrong, she tells the politicians she writes.
You make the laws, she tells them. And this one isn’t fair. I’m an American. Why can’t Brissa be, too?
It took phone calls to a dozen lawyers and hours on hold with government agencies, people steering her one direction and then the next, before Jessica found Max Graves to help them untie the immigration knot.
The soft-spoken director of a nonprofit that helps people with immigration problems assured her he could help.
Last summer, he filed a form called the I-130. Petition for Alien Relative. The form would have to go to two visa service centers in the U.S. — one in California, one in New Hampshire — and then to the U.S. consulate in Juarez, Mexico.
If all went well, Brissa would receive a permanent immigrant visa. A green card.
Then she could get a Social Security card. A driver’s license. A job. Loans for college.
But first she needed that slip of paper that said she was approved.
Jessica paid $190 and they mailed the petition to California.
But there was a problem.
Anyone in the U.S. illegally who wanted a green card had to return to their home country.
Everyone. Even the adopted girl from Acapulco.
Brissa would have to wait in line for an appointment in Juarez.
Tens of thousands of people waited in front of her. Some had been waiting for years.
And there was another problem. Last month, when Brissa turned 18, a clock started to tick. A timebomb called the Unlawful Presence Act.
The act said any person unlawfully in the United States for more than 180 days past their 18th birthday risks a three-year ban from this country.
Brissa turned 18 on Dec. 19. On June 16 her ban would go into effect.
And now Jessica raced to defuse the bomb.
Happy in America
Her papi died when she was 3. She can’t remember him. She only knows what people told her. He loved the Los Bukis, the romantic songs they sang.
She had his dark skin. If she had been a boy she would have looked just like him.
Her world changed after he died. Her mom was angry now, all the time.
She lost her job waiting tables at the Days Inn by the beach. One day, Brissa broke the trunk off a glass elephant. Her mother kicked her as she knelt searching for the broken piece. Brissa fell, blood spilling from her lip, a piece of her broken tooth on the hard ground.
She was 9.
When her mother said they were coming to America, Brissa was relieved.
It would be an adventure. They would be happy there.
Time running out
Jessica types Brissa’s case number into the immigration service Web site.
Nothing. The headaches come every day now. She imagines their petition sitting on a desk somewhere, lost in a sea of paperwork. She knows they received it because they asked for more information.
Finally, six months after they first filed, she gets an answer.
The visa center in California had begun processing their petition.
That was the good news. The bad news: Cases like theirs were taking as long as 990 days to be approved and sent to New Hampshire.
They will never make the 180-day deadline.
Jessica has two choices. Keep Brissa here and break the law — or hide her in Mexico, afraid her birth mother will find her.
She won’t break the law. She talks to her pastor about finding a place in Mexico for Brissa to live when time runs out.
She dials Max’s number. She repeats the question she’s been asking for months. Why won’t someone help us?
She has called Tom Osborne. Chuck Hagel. Ben Nelson. She has written George Bush. Dick Cheney. The State Department. Oprah. Dr. Phil.
Please help my daughter.
When a caseworker came to check out the Placek family before the adoption, they asked Jessica to name her proudest moments.
She ticked them off. Marrying Jason. Giving birth to three girls.
The first time Brissa told her she loved her.
Application denied
Jessica is at work when the call comes.
It’s Max. Bad news, he says.
The official letter will arrive a week later.
It is ordered by the director of the CSC that the form I-130, petition for alien relative, filed for Brissa C. Placek, be denied.
They need to start over.
113 days.
Coming Tuesday in Part 3
Jessica refuses to give up
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