HOUSE ARREST

HIDING OUT WITH AN IMMIGRANT FAMILY IN ICE-OCCUPIED MEMPHIS

- SAMANTHA MICHAELS

On a dark November evening, I find myself outside a unit at a garden-style apartment complex in Memphis, its parking lot alight in flashing blues and reds. The police are here—about a dozen cars—responding to reports of a violent crime. I'm accompanied by Mauricio Calvo, a 50-year-old local whose friend Diego lives here. Calvo knocks. “Soy yo,” he whispers—“It's me.”

“I told him not to open the door under any circumstance,” he informs me.

The door cracks open and Calvo nudges me through. I'm disoriented. It's pitch black inside, curtains drawn, lights off. Diego stands in the entryway, but I see only the outline of his body, not his face. “Buenas noches,” he whispers, and guides us to the living room. A little boy comes up beside me. “I wanna play!” he says in English, gesturing toward the TV and Xbox. Nobody turns it on.

This family has nothing to do with the situation outside, but still they are hiding. Diego (not his real name) explains that when the police pulled into the lot earlier that night, he instinctively hit the floor as though dodging bullets. “We were afraid, because what we are feeling these days is Immigration is everywhere,” he tells me in Spanish, voice shaking.

He and his wife—whose parents brought her to the United States as a child—and three of their four kids, all US citizens, had stayed that way about 10 minutes, flat on the floor in the dark. Then they called Calvo, who leads Latino Memphis, an organization that helps immigrants. “I got very scared they could start knocking on doors looking for the suspect and scared they would take him,” Diego's wife says, nodding at her undocumented husband.