On Christmas night, a Salt Lake City woman and her four children boarded an airplane on their way to Guatemala. It is the land of Maria Santiago Garcia’s birth. A land of violence and death that she fled 15 years ago. A place her four children — native-born American citizens — have never seen.
Because Santiago Garcia came to the United States without permission and without papers all those years ago, because she was convicted of using a false Social Security number to get a job at a fast-food joint, the government of the United States — the one that all the rest of us elect and pay for — was forcing her to go back.