Yet another phone call. She sighs before picking it up. 

“Alo?”

“Alo Ada? Do you think it’s okay for me to pick my kids up from school? I heard ICE is waiting outside.” Of course, this is all in Spanish. Ada pinches her nose.

“Yes Maria,” she replies, “That rumor has been going around but it’s not true, they can’t do that anyway.” 

“Okay, thank you! Bye.”

“Bye”. She puts down the phone and runs her fingers through her hair. That had had to 

been at least the fourth call like that from her clients. Ada works as a bilingual consultant and Parents as teachers worker at Family Services. Essentially a social worker. 

She’s at a home visit now, near the end of it as she and her client are just finishing up some paperwork. The kids, a girl in 5th grade and a boy, who just started to walk by himself are playing out in the small gated backyard that they’re lucky to have. 

“Ada?” The women ask as Ada begins to but all the paperwork in her bag, “If I and their father get deported back to Ecuador, will you take care of my kids? They were born here, they have nobody here, can you promise me that? That you’ll make sure they’re okay?” She sits there in shock, not knowing what to say, knowing that legally she can’t do that. Then she looks into the other women’s eyes. She sees herself in those eyes as a mother herself and a sad smile runs through her face. 

“Yeah,” Ada says, pulling her into a hug, “I promise.”

Ada plops down her bags down on the floor, and all but falls into her lazy boy, the day finally has caught up to her. Her two daughters, Xochi, the eldest, and Isa, the youngest, greet her and ask how her day was. She thinks. Thinks about the abuse shes seen, the stories of teachers all but berating bilingual children for not being as proficient in English, the fear in all the mother’s eyes, not for themselves, but for their children. She thinks about her own family who had immigrated from Mexico, and it hurts, hurts her to know that if anything it has only gotten harder to look for a better life in another country. 

“Hard,” she finally says, “But it always is.”