Fredi’s odyssey

Nobody was hurt in the car wreck. A police officer asked him for his driver’s license. Fredi didn’t have one, so the officer placed him under arrest. A secret he had been hiding for 11 years was about to be revealed: Fredi was in the country illegally. And he was about to be deported to Mexico, a country he hardly knew.

The next day, Fredi began an odyssey through the nation’s immigration system. He was 19 and had never seen the inside of a jail before. He was about to experience some of the darkest and most dangerous moments of his life.

In many ways, Fredi represents hundreds of thousands of people who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children. They are nicknamed Dreamers after the Dream Act, failed congressional legislation that would have granted them a path to legal status in the U.S.

Fredi has lived here most of his life and considers the U.S. his home. Every morning in school, Fredi pledged allegiance to the American flag. He grew up learning this nation’s history, listening to its music, reading its literature. Two of his younger brothers were born here. He got his first job  here, selling cellphones.

Mexico had nothing for him. No family. No friends. No work. No future. But that is where the government was sending him. And Fredi was terrified.

He had reasons to be frightened. The same immigration system had deported his father, which strained his parents’ marriage. It had forced his sister out of the country. It sapped the family’s finances. And it would attempt to deport his older brother.

But these ordeals would ultimately strengthen his family’s bonds. An “angel” would come to Fredi’s rescue. And he would be inspired to help others.

2

The first crossing

The coyote told Fredi to keep quiet. Move quickly, he said, the immigration authorities were coming. Fredi was just 8 years old. His stomach churned; he wet his pants.

It was 1998 and Fredi was traveling with his older brother, Aureliano, and sister, Ana. The smuggler was a distant relative. There were 20 others in the group, and they were illegally crossing the U.S. border into California, near the Mexican city of Tecate.

A single goal kept Fredi focused on the coyote’s instructions: His mother and father were waiting at the end of his journey. They had entered the U.S. a year before and settled in Georgia, fleeing poverty in Mexico. In their home state of Michoacán, the family had a dirt floor and only one bed. They survived mostly on beans and wore mismatched shoes.

At first, Fredi felt like he was on a big adventure. But the coyote’s warnings were ominous. He grew nervous as the group scrambled and hid. Would they catch him? And who were “they” anyway? He trained his thoughts on reuniting with his parents. They had missed his eighth birthday. They had missed Christmas.

Fredi and the other travelers approached a pile of rocks at the base of the border fence. Clearing away the rocks, the coyote revealed a tunnel. Fredi figured he would see civilization as soon as they crawled through. His heart sank when he reached the other side.

“When I crossed, there was just pure desert, mountains, hills,” he says. “I was in shock.”

Fredi tells his story as he sits in his family’s modest brick home in south Cobb County. Sixteen people live here, representing three generations. Inside, the brightly painted walls are adorned with pictures of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and the Last Supper. The sweet smell of incense permeates the house. Fredi’s mother, Delia, sits across from him. The family sometimes shuts the heat off to save money, so the room is cold. Fredi’s breath hangs in the air.

There is a mixture of sadness and resolve in Fredi’s eyes, though he is quick to smile. Just over his right eye stretches a thin scar from a childhood encounter with an angry ram in Mexico. On his back is a reminder of an impulsive act: a butterfly tattoo. He is a fan of Disney movies — “Ratatouille” and “Finding Nemo.” Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry are some of his favorite singers.

Fredi’s mother is his “everything.” He trusts her implicitly and can talk to her about anything. He loves her cooking and dreamily describes how she makes tacos with homemade flour tortillas stuffed with chorizo or beef tongue. He once got sick from eating too many of her meatballs, he recalls with a chuckle.

Delia says Fredi is her thoughtful, sensitive son. She would give her life for him.

Delia knew firsthand his journey to the U.S. would be perilous. When she and her husband crossed the border, they ran out of water as they spent several days evading U.S. authorities. She thought she would die. Delia says she didn’t know what kept her going, other than her Catholic faith.

“It was really ugly,” she recalls in Spanish as Fredi translates for her. “I would pray to God that we would make it.”

Fredi’s parents made their way to the Atlanta area, where they found work in a vegetable packing warehouse. Eventually, the couple raised enough money to pay a coyote to bring the rest of their children to the U.S.

Fredi resumes telling his side of the story. After they crawled under the fence, Fredi and the others walked for a day. They could hear a helicopter hovering nearby, so they hid under a tree.

A small car pulled up. Fredi and his siblings piled in. It was hot inside as they rode to an apartment. They hid there for a couple of hours. Another car picked them up and took them to Pasadena, where they stayed with Fredi’s uncle for a month. Then they flew to Atlanta. Fredi remembers tightly hugging his parents and siblings at the airport. They were finally together again. They were finally complete.

3

Becoming American

Skyscrapers, indoor plumbing, McDonald’s Happy Meals. Fredi fell in love with them. He had never seen such tall buildings. His family didn’t have running water in their home in Michoacán. And the Happy Meals — Fredi fondly remembers playing with the colorful plastic toys contained inside.

School wasn’t as fun. At least not at first. Fredi was the only Hispanic in his third-grade class at Margaret Fain Elementary School. He didn’t know much English, so simple things became frustrating problems. One day he needed to use the bathroom, but his teacher couldn’t understand his request. So he got up and went anyway. The teacher sent a stern note home to his parents.

“I couldn’t communicate with anyone, nobody,” he says. “I would complain to my mom that I didn’t want to go to school anymore because I couldn’t learn anything. I didn’t know what was going on.”

But he picked up the language quickly. Soon he became the go-to person for communication among his relatives. At fast food restaurants he ordered the burgers. In court he translated for them as they handled their traffic tickets.

Fredi knew he was living illegally in the U.S. after he crossed the border as a child. But he didn’t know what that meant until he was a teenager. That’s when he learned he wasn’t eligible for a Georgia driver’s license because he lacked legal status. He never told anyone about this situation. He acted just like any other American teenager, wearing trendy Nike Air Force 1 tennis shoes, hanging out at movie theaters, going bowling with friends.

Fredi never needed to come out as gay. His friends and family just knew. But his sexual identity eventually became a source of friction between him and his father. When they argued, Fredi said, his father blamed him for his family’s troubles, using a Spanish slur for homosexual. His father declined to be interviewed for this article.

“Deep inside I know it was because he just wasn’t comfortable with the way I was,” Fredi says.

Frustrated, Fredi moved into a friend’s house. His arrest for driving without a license came a few months later.

The police put him in a holding cell at the Cobb County jail with 30 others. It was cold. He was embarrassed, nervous, afraid. He pulled his arms into his T-shirt and wrapped them around himself.

When the authorities questioned him, he admitted his illegal status. The officers shackled his wrists and ankles. A van was coming to pick him up and take him to a holding cell in downtown Atlanta.

4

Desperate moments

That night, Fredi was put on a white bus with 50 others, mostly Hispanics, but there were some Africans and Jamaicans, too.

They traveled more than 100 miles south of Atlanta to the Stewart Detention Center, a sprawling, razor wire-rimmed building just outside of the small town of Lumpkin. It became Fredi’s hell.

Fredi shared a cell with dozens of others, but he kept to himself. Some of the detainees suspected he was gay and taunted him, whistling at him and calling him sexual slurs. His family didn’t have a way to get to the detention center or ID to get in. Fredi fell into a deep depression, sleeping a lot and skipping meals. He struggled with dark thoughts.

“I thought about killing myself whenever they gave us razors to shave,” he says.

Back in Cobb County, Delia was raising money from friends and family. She was going to pay a coyote to bring Fredi home. She had done the same thing for her husband and her daughter, who had been forced out of the country for the same offense.

“I was desperate about it,” she says. “I don’t know how I coped.”

Fredi eventually signed a document allowing his deportation. After he was in detention for about two months, Fredi and other detainees, some convicted felons, were flown to Texas with their wrists and ankles shackled. Then a bus picked them up and drove south. Hunger hammered Fredi with a headache. The loud music on the bus made it worse. The driver played narcocorridos, ballads about drug dealing and human smuggling along the border. Some of the detainees were singing along with the late Mexican artist Beto Quintanilla. To this day, Fredi can’t stand Beto Quintanilla.

They arrived at the Mexican border in the late afternoon. The officers removed the shackles and gestured to a bridge spanning the glistening Rio Grande.

Walk across the bridge and you are in Mexico and you are free, an officer told them.

Fredi thought about running away. But then he saw the officers’ guns. He walked toward the bridge, fearing what was on the other side.

5

In a foreign land

Fredi hung close to a group of four other deportees as they entered the bustling border city of Matamoros. Homeless people and drunks roamed the streets. Stray dogs loped by. Men hollered at the deportees, offering to take them back across the border for a price. Strangers harassed Fredi, calling him “mamacita.” Scared, he walked faster.

The other detainees were older and seemed nice. But he didn’t completely trust them. One had served years in prison. Fredi wasn’t sure of the others. He figured there was safety in numbers. He had heard the stories of Mexican drug cartels robbing, kidnapping and killing deportees like him. Yet, he didn’t have much to steal.

The authorities gave back the outfit he wore the day he was arrested in Georgia: a green Aéropostale T-shirt, khaki shorts and black Converse tennis shoes. He had just $86 in his wallet, money his family had wired him while he was behind bars. He had no identification — his Mexican consular ID was missing.

The deportees found a hotel nearby and let Fredi stay with them that night. The next day, the other men headed home, deeper into Mexico. Fredi remained at the hotel and called his mom. She told him she had paid $3,100 for a coyote  to bring him home. The coyote would knock on his door in the morning, she said. The same coyote had helped his father and older sister Ana return to the U.S.

Five days later, someone knocked at Fredi’s hotel door. He looked through the peephole at a short, dark-skinned man.

I’m the guy who is going to pick you up, the man said.

Suspicious, Fredi refused to open the door. He called his mom. She told him the coyote was tall and bald.

Less than an hour later, the tall, bald man knocked at Fredi’s door. He looked more menacing then the first one, Fredi thought. But he had no other options, so he opened the door.

6

Risking it all

Vibrations coursed through Fredi’s body as he headed north on an interstate through Texas, riding atop the cab of a white 18-wheeler. The engine roared. It rained and he got soaked. He rested on his side, then on his back. His bladder was full. He was hungry. He worried the driver would crash, sending him flying onto the interstate. The trip felt like an eternity.

The day before, he had floated on a raft across the Rio Grande. Some coyotes picked him up on the other side and took him to a gas station in Laredo. The truck pulled up there and the driver got out. The coyotes told Fredi to climb atop the truck cab and hide behind the extension of the roof designed to reduce wind drag. That way, the coyotes explained, the Border Patrol agents wouldn’t spot him at the checkpoints heading out of Texas. Soon, they said, the truck driver would stop and Fredi would be able to climb down and rejoin them.

Fredi did as he was told. The driver eventually climbed back into the truck and got back on the road, not knowing Fredi was lying on top. The coyotes followed in their SUV.

As he rode on top of the truck, Fredi daydreamed about being back in his warm bed in Georgia. He thought of his mother’s cooking, even craving her dishes that gave him heartburn, like beef in chili sauce.

Hours passed. Why wasn’t the driver stopping? he wondered. Something wasn’t right. He considered banging his fists on top of the truck to alert the driver.

Fredi pulled out a cellphone the coyotes had loaned him.

“When are we getting off?” he texted. “I’m tired. I can’t take it anymore.”

Be patient, was the response.

Finally, the truck driver stopped for gas in New Orleans. They had traveled for hundreds of miles. Fredi cut his arm as he scrambled off the truck and rejoined the coyotes in their SUV, blood streaming down his arm.

7

Angel to the rescue

On a raft, on a truck and on a prayer, Fredi journeyed more than a thousand miles to return to his bliss. He and his mother hugged and cried when he finally made it home. Exhausted, he crawled into her bed and fell asleep beside her. He missed her smell. He slept the whole day, and when he woke up he feasted on her homemade pork and chicken tamales.

Fredi soon found work assembling dog beds and started saving his money for college. He got his GED diploma. But he still wasn’t eligible for a Georgia driver’s license. At first, he didn’t get behind the wheel. But his fear of being arrested and deported faded over time. He made short trips to the bank and drove his siblings to the doctor.

Then it happened again.

In December 2012, Fredi dropped off his younger brother at the doctor’s office and headed home. An Austell police officer pulled him over for speeding. She arrested him for driving without a license.

At the police station, officers discovered a warrant had been issued for his arrest for failure to appear in court on his first charge for driving without a license.

Fredi was stunned. How could he appear in court when he was being held in the immigration detention center?  He started to cry, believing he was going to be deported again after he had risked so much to return. He doubted he had it in him to do it  again. And then he thought of a way out.

Fredi called his sister and urged her to get in touch with Dulce Guerrero. They didn’t know each other well, but she was a freshman at Pebblebrook High School when he was a senior. Fredi knew of her reputation as an immigrant rights activist.

Like Fredi, Dulce grew up in Cobb County with the nerve-wracking fear that she or her parents could be deported. Brought here by a smuggler when she was 2, Dulce has vivid memories of tension filling her family’s car whenever a police officer pulled behind them in traffic. Her two uncles and an aunt were deported.

Fed up with the situation, Dulce decided to do something about it. She co-founded Dream Activist Georgia to help prevent the deportation of people like her and Fredi, and she participates in public demonstrations around the country to draw attention to the cause.

Dulce fought for Fredi because she found his case so compelling.

“It’s a double struggle for him,” she said, “having been rejected for his immigration status and having been rejected for his sexuality.”

Authorities transferred Fredi to the Cobb jail, where he remained for two weeks. Each day, he grew more convinced there was no way out. He was transferred to a federal cell in downtown Atlanta, a brief stop before he was supposed to get on a bus headed to Lumpkin, and from there, Mexico. He steeled himself for his deportation.

But then Fredi heard an officer’s radio squawking: “Do you still have Fredi Alcazar down there?”

“That’s me,” Fredi said.

The officers pulled him aside. Four days before Christmas Fredi was freed, though an electronic monitoring bracelet was strapped to his ankle. He credits Dulce for his freedom.

“If it wasn’t for her and her organizing,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here. She is an awesome person. She is an angel. She basically saved my life.”

8

Living in limbo

Dulce put Fredi in touch with attorney Julio Moreno, and together they successfully appealed to the government to stop trying to deport Fredi while he applies for a reprieve.

In June, Fredi and two of his brothers, Ricardo and Aureliano, applied for two-year deportation deferrals under a new Obama administration program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Their requests are pending. Even if they are approved, they still won’t have legal status and must reapply every two years.

Legislation that would give Dreamers like Fredi a pathway to citizenship has stalled in Congress.  Republican House Speaker John Boehner recently said it is unlikely Congress will pass any major immigration legislation this year.

Fredi and his siblings’ suffering has strengthened their family bond. Fredi gets along better with his father now, perhaps because they have come to sympathize with each other’s experiences. Fredi learned details of his family’s journeys in the telling of this story. He didn’t know his mother lost toenails and suffered bruises falling in the craggy terrain as she traveled to the U.S. with his father. He also learned his sister, Ana, had returned to the U.S. the same way he did — by riding on top of a truck. The family never talked about these things, he says, because the memories are so painful.

Fredi, now 24, is selling cellphones and helping his mother pay her bills. Superstitious, he is reluctant to move out on his own again, fearing trouble.

He no longer wants to be a chef. He wants to go to college and become a social worker. He is following Dulce’s example and helping others facing deportation. He signs petitions, seeking their release. He fills out paperwork for them and advises them on how to navigate the nation’s complex immigration laws. He doesn’t want anyone else to experience what he and his family have been through.

If his bid for a reprieve fails and he is deported again, Fredi knows what he will do. He will seek a way to legally come back to the United States. This is where his family is. This is his home.

HOW WE GOT THE STORY

Young Americans today face stiff headwinds: the high cost of financing a college education, a tough job market and finding meaningful work. Today’s Personal Journey about Fredi Alcazar Dominguez recounts the additional challenge confronted by Dreamers: young people who were brought to the United States illegally and now face deportation. Staff writer Jeremy Redmon has covered immigration for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for four years. He’s traveled to the Mexican border to write about efforts to stop illegal immigration, and he’s covered the debate over the issue in Washington. Redmon met Fredi while he was seeking a reprieve from deportation. “I knew I had to tell Fredi’s harrowing story when he told me how he risked his life to return to the U.S. after he was deported to Mexico in 2009,” Redmon said. The immigration issue ignites strong opinions on all ends of the political spectrum, and Congress has wrestled with what to do about Dreamers such as Fredi. Both sides of the political aisle now say Dreamers should not be held accountable for the actions of their parents. The best journalism brings nuance and context to complicated issues. Today’s Personal Journey about one young man’s story achieves that goal.

Ken Foskett

Assistant Managing Editor

personaljourneys@ajc.com

About the reporter

Jeremy Redmon has been reporting for newspapers for nearly two decades. He now covers immigration and politics for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He previously reported for newspapers in Richmond, Va.; Washington, D.C.; and Northern Virginia. Redmon has embedded with U.S. soldiers and Marines during three trips to Iraq and has covered state legislatures and gubernatorial elections in Virginia, Maryland and Georgia. Redmon also reported on the 2012 presidential race across five states. He graduated from George Mason University in 1994 and 1997 with undergraduate and graduate degrees in English.