CÉSAR MAGAÑA LINARES: You know, my feelings about small town Nebraska, in general —
I don't want people to ever take away that I absolutely hate
everything about it, because at the end of the day, I feel very
Nebraskan. I just wish that growing up, people also viewed me
as Nebraskan as I felt. And it's unfortunate to have to visit
a small town whose culture you like in so many ways, and the
main thing that comes to mind is all the instances growing up
where people told you how much they didn't like having you or
your family around.
So, Cameron, do you remember the first time we met, and if you do
tell me what that was like, what do you remember?
CAMERON LOGSDON: Yeah, I remember the first time we met because you were
coming in as a as a recruit for the speech team. You stood out
right away as somebody that was probably ahead of some of the
other students and maybe a little bit aware that you were ahead of
some of the other students. So you certainly came off like you
knew, you thought you knew what you were saying regardless.
CÉSAR: So I was very conceited.
*laughing*
Obviously, you've had students
coming into your speech team before me that have had to deal
with immigration in some way or another. What is your
general understanding of the immigrant experience here in the U.S.?
CAMERON: I had some familiarity with people that had, that had
immigrated to the U.S., but I probably didn't know much more
about the lived experience of an immigrant in the United States
until I was able to have kind of deeper conversations about the
logistical intricacies of how complicated and complex life can be.
CÉSAR: I do consider myself a dreamer, but I'm not somebody who
has Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, which is what
people normally think about when they talk about dreamers. I have
a different immigration status called Temporary Protected Status,
TPS. And I'm not going to get into the legal intricacies of
what are the differences between the two. But generally, TPS is a
humanitarian program where the US government has said your country
of origin cannot handle the return of every single one of the
citizens from that country, and in order to avoid creating more
instability in your country of origin — in my case, El Salvador —
I cannot be deported to El Salvador. And I've had that
immigration status for now over, I believe it's 20 years now.
I grew up in a very — I'll just say it, a very racist town.
I grew up in Fremont, Neb., which in the early 2010s made a bunch of news
because they had an ordinance saying that landlords cannot rent
property to undocumented immigrants. That created a big
stir up. And I remember growing up taking grocery trips, grocery
store trips with my parents. You get looks, you get people that
say things. As a child, you have to bear the weight of whatever it is
they're telling your parents. Sometimes you have to
intermediate a conversation that is basically just a bunch of
insults. My parents are not undocumented, but a lot of people
in a town like this, they see a person who speaks Spanish and
they think, oh, that person has to be undocumented. Whenever I
would have to translate things like that to them, my parents
would always be very flustered. My dad taught me to respond
to them and say, "we'll just tell them that we're here legally," you
know, "I have my ID." And I would have to look at my dad and
tell him, "Dad, he doesn't care."
Growing up with that kind of trauma,
and at the same time going to a school system where you
weren't taught anything about your history. Attending college at
the big city, right? Omaha's the big city, right? Taking a
intro to Latin America class while at the same time joining a
speech team, I thought, you know, this is an opportunity for me to
get to know myself better and maybe to talk about something
that I never got the chance to talk to people about. I viewed
that as kind of a breakthrough in my life. You know, finally, I'm
talking about this even though I spent 18 years of my life not
talking about it at all.
CAMERON: But then TPS came in to the conversation more,
and that did start to impact you more, right?
JUDY WOODRUFF: President Trump has made another
consequential decision regarding immigrants in this country.
BRET BAIER: More than 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants
could be forced to leave the US.
MAYA SAENZ: 20-year-old César Magañas Linares was 2 years old
when he and his parents were granted TPS under the Bush Administration.
CÉSAR: When I first read about the news, it was a bit
of a fight, flight, freeze response. In the moment I had to
freeze because I didn't even know what to think. I ended up being
late to work because I just sat in my car for like 15 or 20
minutes, not really knowing how to process the information,
because I had found out several months earlier that I actually
had an outstanding deportation order.
RECORDED VOICE: You have reached the EOIR automated case information system.
CÉSAR: I was working in a law office and I had a worker in a
different office neighboring ours, and he told me, well, you
know, there's a hotline that you can call, and it's an automated
toll-free number. And you just give them your alien registration
number and they tell you whether there's been anything happening
on your case. So he actually dialed in for me at that exact
moment and found out I've had an outstanding deportation order
against me since since 2000.
RECORDED VOICE: The immigration judge ordered removal
on your case on August 25th, 2000.
CÉSAR: So I had been living my whole life with an outstanding
deportation order, which the only reason the government can't enforce
it is because of my TPS. So now that TPS is gone and I'm sitting
in my car wondering, they can deport me now.
It's hard to, you know, come to terms with the fact that
you might have to defend your family from deportation.
It was more emotionally exhausting for me,
and it culminated into something that I hadn't
experienced before at the end of that week,
which you were present there for.
So we go to this national tournament. It's a two-day
tournament all day Saturday, all day Sunday. And at the very
end of that Sunday, I was hanging out with one of my teammates, and
I all of a sudden felt really lightheaded. And then all of a
sudden I felt like I needed to sit down, and that didn't work.
And then I realized I had to get away. So I physically got up and
just told my teammate who was next to me, "I can't do this, I'm
sorry. " And I just stormed off into a hallway where I knew
nobody was, and as I started walking, I felt myself just kind
of break down and I started crying. I cried a lot. At that
point, I realized that, you know, you can do as much as you can to
fight and be an advocate and become educated on these issues.
But you can't do anything about your vulnerabilities. And
I've never felt more vulnerable at any time. And in a setting
where I typically feel very strong in an academic setting, I
have never felt more vulnerable in a setting like that.
CAMERON: I've never seen you so vulnerable. And at that point I
have known you for a while. You were hiding. You literally hid
from everything. When I realized that you had cornered yourself in
that way is when I learned to, oh, this is a lot more than the
tournament. And I think it really made me take inventory of
all the things that you had going on and about how much the news of
TPS and what that means, not from a cold clinical political
standpoint, but for you as a person, what it really meant for
you as a person. And I haven't taken for granted what I learned
in seeing your vulnerabilities and seeing how even the funny kid
with his chicken nuggets and his, you know, political arguments can
put up walls that they're not still being affected by things
that we don't always see.
CÉSAR: I think at that time I thought it's better to collect myself
now, because there's nothing I could do in this moment that will
fix this long term. So all I could do is ground myself and
keep going, and having you there talking to me, helping me
understand what was affecting me personally in that moment, but
nevertheless reminding me to be resilient was exactly what I needed.
CAMERON: Do you feel safe in the U.S. right now?
CÉSAR: The short answer is, I feel fine personally. When I
think about all immigrants in this country, I'm uncertain. And
I think that's the story most immigrants will tell you, is that,
it's just so much uncertainty, and it has been that way for a long
time. That's not something that was unique to the Trump
administration. But the uncertainty is there, and I think
it's going to be there until somebody chooses to act
decisively. And despite all of the things that I just talked
about, where I told you how much life was tough in this
country, I still want to stay. And I hope that we can dismantle
the systems of power that make immigrants live
through all this trauma and still want to kick them out.