After 30 years in America, she was about to be deported. Tiny Colorado church offered her sanctuary
Out in America, beyond the property line of a church that in effect had become her country, the decades-old debate over immigration reform was as loud and emotional as ever. President Trump was stepping up deportations and highlighting immigrants he described as rapists, murderers and gang members. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was giving an eight-hour speech calling young immigrants “courageous” and “patriotic” and speaking of their “divine spark.” Week after week brought more protests and accusations that both parties were using the issue for political gain while failing again to find a solution.
And all this time, Rosa was sealed off, watching the seasons change through the window — the end of spring, summer, fall, winter, and now almost spring again, a late snow falling as she got up to answer the door.
It was the pastor, his wife and a woman Rosa had never met before — a stranger arriving with a plate of cookies and pretzels. “There’s more!” the woman said, disappearing to her car, then calling out from the front door: “Okay! Close your eyes!”
Rosa closed them.
“No cheating!” said the pastor’s wife, who moved toward Rosa, reached her hands up and pressed her fingers over Rosa’s closed eyelids. Rosa wobbled. She held out her arms for balance, waiting to see what it could be.
She was not a “dreamer,” one of the 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children and now waiting for the courts to decide whether they can be deported. She was not one of the violent criminals often singled out by Trump, or one of the life-or-death cases that sometimes appear in the news. Rosa Sabido was one of the rest — roughly 10 million immigrants without proper legal documents living ordinary lives in America.
She was 53, unmarried and without children, and said she first came to the United States on a visitor visa in 1987 to see her mother and stepfather, both naturalized citizens who lived in Cortez, Colo. She said she traveled back and forth between Colorado and Mexico for a decade until immigration officials raised questions about her visa and told her to leave the country, at which point she crossed back into the United States illegally and settled into a quiet life in Cortez.
She lived in a small blue house next door to her parents at the edge of Mesa Verde National Park. She got a job as a secretary for the local Catholic parish. She made extra money selling homemade tamales out of her car, driving a route that took her to banks, pottery galleries, spas and offices around Cortez and the nearby town of Mancos, avoiding run-ins with immigration authorities until 2008, when she was arrested during a raid targeting relatives and released on the condition that she check in with the federal immigration office in Durango.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/after-30-years-in-america-she-was-about-to-be-deported-then-a-tiny-colorado-church-offered-her-sanctuary/ar-AAvjmkZ?li=BBnb7Kz
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