Courtesy of Elizabeth Villanueva
Audio By Carbonatix
Maria Del Rocio Casillas wanted to become a U.S. citizen the right way, by taking the proper legal steps.
Her adult daughter, Elizabeth Villanueva, thinks that was a terrible mistake, since Maria is now stuck in Mexico, waiting to find out if she will ever be able to return to her home in Denver.
“It was the wrong decision, just because we’ve been separated for a year,” Villanueva tells Westword. “The effect that it has – my son is a second-generation American, and this is affecting my children. It goes deeper than what people think.”
Casillas and her husband, Francisco Villanueva, left their hometowns in the state of Aguascalientes in central Mexico and arrived in the U.S. on July 4, 1993. “That was a big deal,” Elizabeth Villanueva says. “On July 4, we celebrate them coming here.”
Casillas’s brother, Juan, was already living in Colorado; knowing that his sister was six months pregnant with her first child, Juan recommended that they join him in the Centennial State.
“We left [Mexico] because my husband was making very little,” Casillas says. “We wanted to have our own house, I was pregnant, and we wanted our children to have a better life.”
At the time, the couple “didn’t know anything about any processes” to get residency, Villanueva says of her parents. “It didn’t cross their mind” to apply because “they are from a small town,” she tells Westword. They just wanted to come to the U.S. any way they could.”
Things turned out to be tougher than the couple expected: Francisco – a landscaper – worked all the time, and Casillas felt homesick and began wanting to return to her mother in Aguascalientes. In 1994, almost two years after arriving in the U.S., they returned to Mexico with Elizabeth.
Casillas wasn’t able to leave her doubts behind in Denver, though.
After she found out she was pregnant with her second daughter, Sindy, she began wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to raise her in the U.S.
Casillas and Francisco eventually decided they would make their way back to Colorado in 1995, hoping Sindy would be born an American citizen like her older sister. But the baby wound up coming two weeks early, while the family was still in Zacatecas, a state several hundred miles from the border.
After arriving in the U.S. again in 1996, Casillas and Francisco did their best to live like good American citizens, even if they weren’t – and had actually broken the law to come here. Their hope was that over time, their mistakes would eventually be forgiven.
Francisco continued working as a landscaper, and in 2003, they had a third child, Ximena, who was hearing-impaired and ultimately able to make it into New York University to study engineering.
“They built a full life here,” Villanueva says of her parents. “They work, and my mom was very active in her church community. She was taking English-language courses, trying to be a good citizen. She had never even got a parking ticket before. She wanted to follow the law.”
For as long as Casillas can remember, she and Francisco told their oldest daughter how they couldn’t wait until she turned 21 to start filling out forms to petition for her mom to become a lawful permanent resident and attain a green card. Five years after attaining residency, Casillas would be able to apply for citizenship on her own.
Villanueva turned 21 in late November 2014, while she was studying to become a special education teacher at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Because of this, she wasn’t able to start her mom’s application until November 2015, after she finished her degree.
She attempted to apply for her mom’s papers first in 2015, hoping it would make it easier to attain her dad’s card once that was done. But Casillas’s decision to cross the border illegally twice – and once with a child who was born in Mexico – would come back to haunt her.
Villanueva remembers being “hopeful” at first. “When I first started the whole process, I was very hopeful,” she says. ” It’s always been a dream for our parents to get their papers. That’s always been something since I was a little girl that we’d talked about.”
After almost a year spent working on the application, Villanueva was able to submit the first one in 2016.
Another year would pass before she and her parents found out that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had never received it. USCIS “does not comment on individual immigration cases,” and so was unable to “confirm or deny” that this happened, according to a spokesperson.
It was the start of a series of frustrations and waiting.
Villanueva re-submitted the form in 2017, but this time found out her mom would need to fill out another application for a waiver to forgive her mom for crossing illegally.
The form, an I-601, was needed before Casillas could pass on to the most crucial step of immigration – her interview with immigration officials.
Casillas submitted the I-601 in the middle of 2019 and had to wait two years. until 2021, only to hear they had to wait yet another year for their appointment in November 2022.
In the time it took to start the application process in 2016 and finally get an appointment six years later, Villanueva started her job as a special education teacher, met her husband in 2019, and had two children – her daughter, Yaretzi, in 2019 and her son, Carlos Javier, or CJ, in 2020.
For her November 2022 interview, Casillas had to meet with officials in Juárez, a border city in Mexico, due to her not being a U.S. citizen. She, her husband and her daughters knew this meant that she wouldn’t be able to return until she had her green card.
Francisco wound up staying in Colorado, hoping to continue working and sending money to Casillas.
On October 31, 2022, Casillas and Villanueva rode south with CJ on I-25 toward Juárez. They found a hotel and waited until their appointment a few days later. Casillas went into her interview on November 2, and Villanueva knew she would come out with a paper in one of three colors: green, to say her application is finally approved; blue, to say that she was still missing information; or white, to say she was denied.
“I remember they were taking a really long time,” Villanueva says. “I was getting worried.”
When her mom finally emerged, she was holding a paper that was blue – still in need of updated proof that she has no criminal record. She was also denied admissibility because she brought her daughter over illegally in 1996; the government had labeled her a smuggler for bringing Sindy when she was a baby.
“I felt really guilty because I was helping them through this whole process, and I didn’t know what different paths could have happened,” Villanueva says. “It’s just really hard.”
Since Villanueva and her husband worked, this meant they had no one to take care of CJ until he was old enough to start preschool. Casillas and Villanueva knew they might have to leave one-year-old CJ in Mexico.
Villanueva’s husband and father worked, so as Villanueva saw it, CJ had no caretakers in the U.S., so she decided to leave her son with Casillas and wait – either until her mom became a citizen or until CJ was old enough to start preschool.
“Mom and I sat down that night and talked about what we needed to do,” Villanueva says. “I told her, ‘I can’t leave my son, I can’t.’ but she told me, ‘You have to be realistic. Daycare is expensive. What are you going to do?'”
Casillas is currently back in Aguascalientes, waiting to hear back about her 601 and whether the U.S. government has forgiven her for crossing illegally in the 1990s.
CJ will be away from his mother for one full year come November 17. He still sees his mom through video chats on WhatsApp and will be back in the U.S. living with Villanueva once he starts preschool next August.
“We came in the ’90s. It affected us first by leaving our parents and siblings without knowing the consequences of entering illegally,” Casillas says. “Even now, we’re suffering the consequences.”
