Diane Guerrero, a Colombian American currently appearing in the hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black, described in a Los Angeles Times op-ed published at the weekend how her parents were abruptly removed from her home and deported by immigration agents when she was 14 years old.
In a dramatic first-person account, Guerrero, now 28, recounted returning home in Boston from school to find an empty house with the lights still on and dinner half-cooked. Neighbors told her that her parents had been detained by immigration officials.
Guerrero, who was born in the United States, was the only member of her family to legally reside in the country. Her elder brother was also deported. After deporting her family, Guerrero wrote, the US government did not contact her or offer support.
“Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me,” wrote Guerrero. “No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.”
Guerrero, who told a version of the story on TV in June, was able to see her family at a detention facility during deportation proceedings. Eventually she moved in with friends’ families and attended a performing arts school in Boston. She said she worried often about being a nuisance to the families she lived with.
“I consider myself lucky because things turned out better for me than for most, including some of my own family members,” she wrote.
Guerrero has gone public with her story as President Barack Obama is said to be considering new immigration rules that would do more to prevent families from being separated in deportation cases. The president is expected to take executive action, possibly as early as this week, to defer deportation for parents in the country illegally whose children are US citizens, if the parents have lived in the United States for at least five years and meet other requirements. The proposed changes could affect as many as 5 million immigrants.
“I realize the issues are complicated,” Guerrero wrote in the LA Times. “But it’s not just in the interest of immigrants to fix the system: It’s in the interest of all Americans. Children who grow up separated from their families often end up in foster care, or worse, in the juvenile justice system despite having parents who love them and would like to be able to care for them.”
Orange is the New Black, which follows a group of eccentric inmates at a women’s prison, garnered five major primetime Emmy nominations in 2014. The star of the series, Taylor Schilling, told late-night host Seth Meyers last week that she had heard that the president himself watches the show. At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama referenced the series in a joke about his and speaker of the House John Boehner’s skin color.
