LOS ANGELES _ The boy looked tentative as he took his seat at the sixth-grade graduation. Bone-thin with thick glasses, Jose turned to look for his parents in the auditorium.
Moments like this filled his father, Pascual, with a combination of pride and dread. Watching from a few rows back, he studied his son's body language.
"Hey, champion," he called out.
Jose, 11, smiled and relaxed.
The boy, who is autistic, still depended on his parents to get through social events in their Lincoln Heights neighborhood. That made his parents anxious, but the unease was compounded by a secret they guarded.
They were living in the U.S. illegally, and the boy they had raised since he was an infant was not, in the eyes of the law, their son. They had always been too scared to enter the court system to formally adopt him, but these days they regret not having done it before, during what felt like more lenient times.
Jose, born in Los Angeles, is a U.S. citizen _ and any day he could be taken from them.
