Two Years and Six Months in Border Purgatory
WEEK 124
Their story—the one I was writing, and the one I had no power to write—had to have a happy ending. There was no other way. Juan Carlos Perla, a man of faith and a man of rules, insisted
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. His story, after all, is something of a parable about the crushing machinery of the Trump era’s immigration system. What’s more, we weren’t even at the ending.
It was early March, two days before he and his wife, Aracely, and their three young boys would finally be allowed to enter the United States. From the small room in a Tijuana church where the Salvadoran family had been living for the past nine months, Juan Carlos, 38 years old, was asking me what it feels like to fly.
“Now that I’m really nervous about. We’ve never been on an airplane before. Is it kind of like those rides at the county fair?” he asked. “You know, like the big ship one that rocks side to side? Because I can handle that.” His kids—Jeremías, 9; Carlos, 6; and Mateo, 3—were excited to get on a plane. His wife hadn’t said much about it. But as Juan Carlos admitted to me, he tends “to be a bit more of a nervous person than my wife, and right now I’m pretty nervous about all of this…I hope it all goes well. I know it will go well.”
There were other things to worry about first: All five of them had to test negative for COVID-19. “Do they touch the back of your throat when they do the test? Does it hurt more when they put the stick up your nose?” Juan Carlos asked. They also had to isolate for a night in a Mexican government-run shelter, get processed by US Border Patrol, test negative again, and quarantine in a San Diego hotel. And then they could fly.
At that point, the Perlas, with just two suitcases in hand, would be allowed to stay, at least temporarily, in the United States and make their case for asylum. They’d spent the last two long, painful years trying to make that case remotely, to little effect, and moving from one limbo to the next. “It was two very heavy years,” Juan Carlos told me, “full of tears, persecution, pain, hunger, suffering, anguish, and racism against us from Mexico and the US.”
I had grown to expect this kind of openness from Juan Carlos when things were tough, and lighthearted jokes when he was feeling more optimistic. I met the Perlas in Tijuana in early 2019, the day before they first presented themselves for asylum at the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego. But instead of navigating the daunting and complicated US immigration system from inside the US, as the Perlas had expected when they left home, a Trump-era policy known as “Remain in Mexico” kept them south of the border
