Two Years and Six Months in Border Purgatory

The Perlas did everything to play by the United States’ rules. Was that a huge mistake?

- By Fernanda Echavarri

WEEK 124

Their story—the one I was writing, and the one I had no power to write—had to have a happy ending. There was no other way. Juan Carlos Perla, a man of faith and a man of rules, insisted. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. His story, after all, is something of a parable about the crushing machinery of the Trump era’s immigration system. What’s more, we weren’t even at the ending.

It was early March, two days before he and his wife, Aracely, and their three young boys would finally be allowed to enter the United States. From the small room in a Tijuana church where the Salvadoran family had been living for the past nine months, Juan Carlos, 38 years old, was asking me what it feels like to fly.

“Now that I’m really nervous about. We’ve never been on an airplane before. Is it kind of like those rides at the county fair?” he asked. “You know, like the big ship one that rocks side to side? Because I can handle that.” His kids—Jeremías, 9; Carlos, 6; and Mateo, 3—were excited to get on a plane. His wife hadn’t said much about it. But as Juan Carlos admitted to me, he tends “to be a bit more of a nervous person than my wife, and right now I’m pretty nervous about all of this...I hope it all goes well. I know it will go well.”