The day after Sol Vargas Carrillo’s dad disappeared in Mexico, she went back to Herriman High School as if nothing had happened.
She and her family were undocumented, and they couldn’t tell others why her father was deported and why she couldn’t go back to Mexico to see her family.
“It required me to go through my grief in silence without talking about it with anybody,” she said Tuesday, “because talking about it would mean letting people know that I was undocumented and throwing my family under the bus.”
Vargas Carrillo, who believes her father was abducted in Mexico, is now a U.S. resident but her immigration path was complex. Her family got separated, and she didn’t qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. So she lived under the uncertainty of being undocumented for seven years.
And she doesn’t want anyone else to go through that.
Vargas Carrillo is a senior organizer at Comunidades Unidas, a nonprofit urging Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, to support an expansion of DACA and a creation of a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented individuals in the U.S. Advocates want to see this happen during the current lame duck session — before a new Congress, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding onto the Senate, takes power.
“We are done waiting around for solutions. We want something now, and we want commitment.” Vargas Carrillo said. “We want to know that he has our back in the same way that Utah has had his back time and time again.”
The first-term senator is in favor of a merit-based immigration system, according to his website. He also opposes illegal immigration and believes the U.S. immigration system needs significant reforms.
“Senator Romney believes that we need to get serious about long-term solutions that put in place a coherent immigration policy that secures the border, stops the flow of illegal immigration and updates our legal immigration system,” Arielle Mueller, Romney’s spokesperson, said Wednesday. “These include completing the border barrier, instituting mandatory and permanent E-Verify to eliminate one of the key drivers of illegal immigration, and resolving the status of DACA recipients who were brought into the country by their parents.”
Romney supports giving DACA recipients legal status, but he opposes giving them a special pathway to citizenship, according to his website. He also backs ending chain migration and the visa lottery program.
While efforts like the Tillis-Sinema bill — a bipartisan measure that could provide a pathway to citizenship for 2 million DACA recipients (sometimes called “Dreamers”) while increasing border security — might give the group a little hope, it leaves out millions of immigrants.
When Vargas Carrillo thinks about DACA, she draws lessons from mistakes she hopes the immigrant community won’t make again.
“We want them to know that we are done taking bread crumbs. We want the real deal,” Vargas Carrillo said. “By accepting DACA, we also failed our parents, we failed all of those who did not qualify for the program. And then not only that, we failed to actually receive a pathway to citizenship. The only thing that we did receive was protection from deportation.”
The program often feels like an anxiety-inducing “ticking time bomb,” said Andrea Jimenez Flores, a DACA beneficiary who moved to Utah when she was 5 months old.
“There’s a huge focus on how much we can contribute and what we do for the economy and the career paths we take or education. But none of that matters,” Jimenez Flores said. “The only thing that actually matters is that we’re human beings and because we’re human beings, we’re deserving, and we should be allowed to be safe in our homes, and we should be allowed to not fear having our families be separated and not fear that our livelihoods will be taken away.”
In October, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a review of DACA, leaving the program in danger of folding under the next Congress.
Despite this, Vargas Carrillo hopes religion can offer common ground between her community and lawmakers.
Protection from deportation has been an important issue, for instance, for Utah’s predominant faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2018, the first major policy statement under President Russell M. Nelson’s administration urged lawmakers to “provide hope and opportunities” for Dreamers across the country.
“They have built lives, pursued educational opportunities and been employed for years based on the policies that were in place,” the Utah-based faith stated at the time. “These individuals have demonstrated a capacity to serve and contribute positively in our society, and we believe they should be granted the opportunity to continue to do so.”
Vargas Carrillo noted that she and Romney are Latter-day Saints.
“Something that always got to me is the fact that the church welcomes me. Yet it is so difficult to see the one senator who I thought would stick closer to [these] values not show that same support,” Vargas Carrillo said of Romney. “From one fellow LDS member to another, I want to say that it’s about time that we start treating each other like we’re actually God’s children.”
Clarification • Thursday, Dec. 15, 6:05 p.m. • This story has been updated to clarify what Sol Vargas Carrillo says happened to her father.
Alixel Cabrera is a Report for America corps member and writes about the status of communities on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.
