Living a Red, White and Blue Reality
I met Leo through a volunteer gig a few years back. He’s a cybersecurity manager, a Marine veteran and a nature lover who posts beautiful photos on social media. I have a ton of respect for his thoughtful approach to the challenges we faced together while serving a local nonprofit. He’s the kind of guy you’d turn to in a pinch.
If you happened to meet Leo on the street, you would see his easy smile and never connect it with the somber Marine pictured above, let alone a 13-year-old desperately holding things together after a life-altering event.
Like so many of us, he stayed silent about what had happened. He joined the community of people who feel isolated by trauma, and he stayed there for a long time. But now he’s at a place in life where he’s ready to talk publicly about what happened to his family—and in doing so, he has discovered the power of helping others heal.
I’ve known Leo’s history for a long time, and I’m honored he is allowing me to share it with you here.
I would love if there were never another reality like Leo’s. Until that day arrives, I’ll be encouraging people not to stay silent.
Sorry for the length, but something I’ve been wanting to share …
I want to tell you a story. But as I share here before you, I want you to understand something: This isn’t just my story. This is my reality. And it’s the reality for thousands of families across the United States who live in the shadow of a broken immigration system.
I was 13 years old the morning my life changed forever. I was asleep, tucked away in the home I shared with my family—my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. A house full of love, full of laughter, just like countless other Hispanic families across our country and the world.
And then, there was a knock. No, not a knock—a POUNDING at the front door. It was so aggressive that it rattled the walls and woke me in the early morning hours. As the oldest of all the cousins, I was the first to sneak down the stairs where all the adults were gathered. ICE agents were there, loudly demanding for my family to hand somebody over.
I was confused. I was terrified. My grandmother saw me, and rushed me away back up the stairs, but I knew. I knew.
They were here for my mother.
I had always known she was undocumented, but I didn’t fully understand what that meant. I knew she was trying—going to lawyers, doing everything she could to make things right. And yet, that didn’t matter. The system doesn’t wait for paperwork. It doesn’t consider the family it tears apart. It just takes.
I wish I could tell you what happened after they pushed their way into our home… but no matter hard I try; I can’t recall any details or what exactly happened after the fear sat in. My therapist says that’s normal for trauma.
What I do remember is still getting on the bus and going to school like nothing had happened. I remember sitting in band class, gripping my trombone with shaking hands, and finally breaking down in tears. My band director, pulled me aside and gave me space to process. But how do you process something like that? How do you move forward when the world around you keeps turning, indifferent to the fact that your family is no longer whole?
My two younger siblings, both U.S. citizens, were taken to Mexico with my mother. I stayed behind. My father and I moved into a house—just the two of us. And suddenly, I wasn’t just a teenager. I was a young adult with responsibilities I didn’t know how to carry.
The family unit I had always known was gone, and I had to find a way to survive without them.
I coped the only way I knew how: I threw myself into school, into band. I became the best trombone player I could be, because in music, I found an escape. I found a place where I wasn’t the boy whose mother had been taken away. I was just a musician. And Mr. Parish— my band director—he became more than a teacher. He became a guide, a mentor, someone who helped me navigate the things that most teenagers rely on their parents for.
But the weight of it all never really left me.
I felt the financial strain immediately. I knew high school came with costs—band fees, school trips, little things that added up. I got a job as soon as I was old enough, determined to pay my own way. My parents never took a cent from me, but I carried that responsibility in my heart. I carried it in my silence.
Because I didn’t talk about it. Not to my Hispanic friends, not to ANY of my friends. It felt like a scarlet letter, a mark of something I had no control over but that defined so much of who I was becoming. It was easier to bury myself in achievements than to acknowledge the loneliness, the isolation.
I wasn’t alone—but I was lonely.
And that’s the part people don’t see.
The world hears “deportation” and thinks about policies, statistics, legal jargon. They don’t see the 13-year-old boy trying to hold it together in band class.
They don’t see the families forced to choose between separation or uprooting their entire lives. They don’t see the scars left on those of us who stay behind.
So how did I cope as I entered adulthood? It never really went away. What happened to me and my family still impacts me every day of my life.
Chasing this idea—this myth—of the “American Dream” became my coping mechanism. If I could just achieve enough, if I could just prove my value, I would finally be worthy enough to be untouchable. I would be “American” enough, so completely American that the policies and laws that had once ripped apart my life would no longer be able to touch me. American enough that the weight of my past, that the shame of my silence, wouldn’t crush me.
Maybe I could rewrite the narrative of my life.
As a confirmed band geek, I wanted to do the one thing that would turn my entire story around. What’s more American than the military? I threw myself into the military, enlisting not just in any branch, but the one that held the most respect, the most reverence of any of them: the United States Marine Corps.
It would give me everything I wanted: money, validity, and a way out. The Marine Corps was tough, and I wanted to BE tough. It was American, and I WAS American. It would prove something to people, it would allow me to take visceral control of my own life, and it would prove to the country that had taken so much from me that I DID in fact, BELONG HERE.
And in a lot of ways, the Marine Corps did change my life. Some good ways … a lot of bad ones. But it did launch my entire professional career. After leaving active duty, I worked my way up the ladder of military contracting, finding a place in corporate America—which is its own can of worms in my narrative of belonging.
Strangely, it always seems to shock people when they realize I don’t have an advanced degree. Somewhere in the middle of classes, I realized I was only doing it as another way to try and check a box on some list of “American qualities.” And I realized I was done with all of that.
If there’s one thing I’m proud of as an adult trying to straddle the line of two cultures, it’s that I carved out space for myself by turning the status quo on its head. The only way I was able to do that is by facing a harsh reality: that the American dream I had been chasing since middle school does not actually exist.
Once I admitted that to myself, it was the first step towards standing proudly in my own authenticity. I no longer had to contort myself into the shape of the “ideal American man”.
If anyone is looking to claim me as their poster child for the American Dream—and trust me, they’ve tried—I am the first person that will call them out on it.
Because let’s be clear: The American Dream is a carrot that people in power dangle over our heads to distract us from the fact that they’re stealing the things that truly matter.
Because the fact is, my life as it exists today has come at a cost. I am the only member of my family to have lived most of my life thousands of miles away from the rest of the family unit. Anyone familiar with Hispanic culture knows that is … strange.
Given my history, given what I had to face when my mother was deported and how I coped, it makes sense. Objectively, I’ve come to understand that. But now, not only am I othered by society, but I’m also othered by my own family.
I exist under two flags and am comfortable under neither.
When I go home, I regularly face jokes about my broken Spanish and not being “Mexican” enough. I’m the coconut—brown on the outside, white on the inside. I know it’s their way of explaining my distance from them, but it doesn’t make the cuts any less deep. It doesn’t make the feeling of isolation go away.
I am both a part of my family, and separate.
In a lot of ways, this separation is my own doing. It was intentional. I left my family so that I could prove its validity to exist in a country that told us we had no claim to. But that was a seed that was sown long before I knew how to identify it. It took root when I was just a kid. And I’m still trying to figure out how to work alongside its lasting implications. Those roots have worked their way into every aspect of my adult life.
But what I want to drive home for you is that this isn’t just my story—it’s MY REALITY.
I am not an exception to the rules of deportation, I am the reality of its execution.
And this is the reality of so many others who live in constant fear of those knocks at the door. Other mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and siblings who have to choose between silence and stigma.
Who carry the weight of something they never asked for.
So, if you take anything away from my words, let it be this: Immigration isn’t just a political issue.
It’s a human issue.
It’s about families.
It’s about children forced to grow up too fast.
It’s about resilience, about survival, about love that stretches across borders but is never quite whole again.
I am here today, not just as someone who survived, but as someone who refuses to stay silent any longer.
Because I want to be the voice for that boy who endured. I am in a position now where I can make the choice to stand up for him and speak. The way I am speaking about it, right now.
Because if my story can make even one person understand the weight of what so many families endure, then sharing it is worth it.