Daughter of illegal immigrants struggles against the odds to graduate from Huron High School

Jasmine, who is an American citizen, chose to stay here alone to continue her education.

Going to Guatemala with her parents would have been the easy way in the short-term; in fact, there were many easy paths that Jasmine chose not to take.

Through months marked by clinical depression, near-eviction, hunger and loneliness, she stayed focused on her goal: to graduate so she can go to college, get a good job, and someday fight to bring her family back to the United States.

Jasmine’s situation isn’t unique; several thousand alien parents of U.S. citizen children are deported every year, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics.

What sets her story apart is the lengths she went to to get her high school diploma — and the community that rallied to help her.

A familiar immigrant story

Jasmine’s parents, Gloria Sanchez and Hector Franco, came to the United States 19 years ago from Zacapa, Guatemala, because they were struggling to feed their family.



They left their 1-year-old son -- Jasmine’s older brother, Albin -- with his grandmother, borrowed some money, and crossed the border into Texas from Mexico with the aid of a human trafficker. They initially settled in Chicago, where Jasmine was born, before moving to Ypsilanti a few years later.

They worked in a restaurant by day and cleaned office buildings at night. They also delivered newspapers on the weekends.



When Jasmine was 4, and again when she was 8, she and her mother and younger sister, Jennifer, went to Zacapa and stayed for two years at a time, while her father kept working here in Ypsilanti.

They returned, along with Albin, for the last time when Jasmine was ready to begin sixth-grade.



“I can see the difference between me and someone who went to school here all the time,” Jasmine said of her academic performance. She earned mostly B’s and C’s at Scarlett Middle School and her first two years at Huron.



Jasmine said her mom had her own business cleaning houses during the day, and worked as a supervisor at an office cleaning company in Plymouth at night. Her father worked in landscaping. They were active in their kids’ schools, attending parent-teacher conferences and school events.



That all ended one afternoon in November 2008, when immigration agents entered the family’s trailer and asked for Gloria Sanchez.



“She ran to get my papers and my sister’s papers,” Jasmine said. “She was crying and saying, ‘Please, please leave me here with my daughters.”



Jasmine said her mother was on a watch list because she had been caught the first time she tried to cross the border, in 1990. 

The agents took Gloria from the home, but not before jotting down Hector’s name.

Gloria was held at a detention facility in Battle Creek.



Jasmine, her sister and father stayed with friends for a couple of weeks, but Jasmine said they couldn’t impose for long because the family had their own money troubles. So she and her sister returned to the trailer.



Immigration agents came back repeatedly, looking for her father and her brother. Jasmine was now the woman of the house -- taking care of her sister, looking out for her father and brother, working at the same cleaning company her mother had worked for, and going to school. She was also being treated, via Medicaid, for a bout of clinical depression that had landed her in the hospital shortly before all of this happened.

On Jan. 20, 2009 - Jasmine’s 17th birthday - her mother was deported. Her father voluntarily left for Zacapa a couple of weeks later, taking Jennifer, who is an American citizen like Jasmine, with him.

Agents finally caught up with Albin, and he is currently at a detention facility in Monroe.



When asked for a comment on the family’s situation, U.S. Immigration & Customs spokesman Khaalid Walls sent the following statement via email: “ICE is sensitive to the fact that encountering those who violate our immigration laws may impact families. However, ICE is mandated by law to enforce orders issued by immigration judges. For parents who are ordered removed, it is their decision whether or not to relocate their children with them.”

Walls said privacy rules prohibit him from disclosing the reason Gloria came to the attention of authorities.
Before he left, Hector visited Jasmine’s high school counselor and her English as a Second Language teacher and asked them to look out for his daughter.



When they were gone, the enormity of what had happened set in.

“I had told my dad, ‘You know I’m smart and can support myself,’” Jasmine said. “But once they were gone, I thought, ‘What have I done? How am I going to do this?’”



A community of mothers



Jasmine took over her mother’s office cleaning job, working from 5-11 p.m. weekdays for minimum wage. She barely had enough money to pay the mortgage, electricity and other bills, much less groceries. She received free breakfast and lunch at school, but says she usually didn’t eat dinner, and on the weekends sometimes only drank water.

She did her homework during breaks at work, or after work if she could stay awake. Her grades slid into the D range.

Her counselor at Huron High School, Stephannie Ruzicka, contacted the Education Project for Homeless Youth at the Washtenaw County Intermediate School District. Program manager Peri Stone-Palmquist arranged for Jasmine to receive school supplies and bus tokens, and put her in contact with the Rev. Melanie Carey, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Ypsilanti, which is known for its outreach in the local Latino population.

Stone-Palmquist said Jasmine's living situation was highly unusual compared to other homeless students she works with, most of whom have parents or guardians nearby.

“Obviously a student living by themselves in a trailer is not a stable condition, so we were concerned,” Stone-Palmquist said.



Carey asked Jasmine what she needed most, and Jasmine told her about her weekends without food. In short order, a group of parents at the church set up a weekly rotation to provide groceries.



Jasmine began attending the church, and when she was laid off from her job at the cleaning company, a church member helped her land a summer clerical job at the Highland Cemetery.



One day, Jasmine told Carey she really missed being part of a family.

Carey talked with her husband, Jon, and children Nick, 14 and Grace, 12, about taking Jasmine in for her senior year. They had been considering hosting an exchange student.

“We talked about it, and prayed about it, and decided maybe Jasmine was the ‘exchange student’ we were meant to have,” Carey said.



Now living in a stable home, Jasmine was able to work just 10 hours a week, first teaching English as a second language at FUMC, then as a community organizer at the Washtenaw County Worker Center.



Ruzicka said Jasmine “blossomed” once she could focus on being at school, earning mostly A’s and B’s. She also earned a respectable C in the difficult Health Sciences program, in which students work side-by-side with doctors and nurses in a clinical setting.



“One of the doctors who works with the students told me, ‘Very seldom have I had a student come through the program who makes such a difference with the patients she works with,’” Ruzicka said. “She also helped the kids in our ESL program. She's a role model. She pretty much caught the hearts of everyone here at school.”

Of Ruzicka, Jasmine said, “She’s one of my many mothers.”



This summer Jasmine is working full-time at the Washtenaw County Worker Center, and in the fall she plans to move in with a local retired couple and start attending Washtenaw Community College. She says she wants to become a nurse practitioner.

She has received three scholarships, through the Tuition Incentive Program, the Barker Scholarship Fund, and the American Association of University Women, to pay for her first two years of school.

Stone-Palmquist called Jasmine a success story.



“We try to build a support network for the students we work with," Stone-Palmquist said. "It's really been amazing to watch what that church has done to help her."



Back in poverty



In December, FUMC gave Jasmine an airplane ticket to visit her parents in Guatemala for the holidays. Jasmine said her parents are impoverished again. They are living in her grandmother’s old house, and have used most of their savings to repair the home and buy a car. They started a small wholesale business selling medicine and food, but Jasmine still sends money to them because they can’t make ends meet.

“They were used to this kind of life, the stability. We were starting to get out of the hole here,” Jasmine said. “It was sad. I felt very bad leaving them behind. My little sister misses me, but I can’t support her here.”



She wants to bring her sister back as soon as possible.

“She’s having trouble in school because she doesn’t write or read Spanish,” Jasmine said.

And she hopes someday she’ll be in a position to bring her parents back, too. American children cannot petition for their parents to become legal U.S. residents until they are at least 21.



She said her parents are proud of her for graduating from high school. She is the first in all of her extended family to do so.



“It would have been so easy to just drop out of school and work. I could have supported myself better,” Jasmine said. “But I didn’t want to stay in poverty.”

Jen Eyer is on the community team at AnnArbor.com. You may reach her at jeneyer@annarbor.com.