content image

The New Yorker

Weekly magazine

Follow this author

Undocumented in a Red State and Asking, “What Now?”

05/01/2017 06:00am | 6232 views

By Sarah Stillman, the New Yorker

Last Wednesday morning, Fatima Linares, a twenty-two-year-old community-college student in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was in her bedroom getting ready for work, when her little brother burst in to her room with an urgent question. “Where are we going to go?” he asked. Her brother is ten years old and a U.S. citizen. But his parents and older sisters, including Fatima, are undocumented, and so, on election night, he’d stayed up late watching news clips on YouTube, trying to figure out his family’s fate if Donald Trump pulled off an upset. Waking up to find Trump the new President-elect, the boy believed that he’d see his family swiftly deported. “What’s going to happen to us?” he asked his sister.

read more

About the Author

author image

The New Yorker

Weekly magazine

The New Yorker is a weekly magazine offering a signature mix of reporting and commentary on politics, international affairs, popular culture and the arts, science and technology, and business, along with fiction, poetry, humor, and cartoons.