Las Vegas girl, 15, asks pope’s help to prevent mom’s deportation

But if her mother’s temporary protected status (TPS) isn’t extended by the Trump administration, the Coronado High School sophomore would either have to shoulder such adult responsibilities or move with her mother to El Salvador, a country she has never even visited.

“A 15-year-old paying the rent, that doesn’t sound right. A 15-year-old taking care of two underaged minors doesn’t sound right,” she said. “It just doesn’t sound right, I would have to go with my parent and I’m basically leaving my culture, my nationality, my homeland. So me saying the Pledge of Allegiance every day (at school), it basically has no meaning no more. Because ‘and justice for all,’ they’re taking away my family.”

With that eventuality hanging over her, Alessandra recently joined a group of 11 children of parents with TPS status to appeal to a higher moral power — Pope Francis — in an attempt to enlist the pontiff in their cause.

Alessandra and the other kids traveled to Rome on Oct. 7 on a trip organized by the National TPS Alliance, an advocacy group for immigrants in the program. After working with the El Salvador Embassy, they were granted a brief audience with Pope Francis.

“It was a pretty unforgettable experience,” Alessandra said last week of the opportunity to make their plea for compassion to the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

The group hoped to persuade the pope to raise awareness about their plight and possibly encourage activism to prevent their families from being torn apart.

She said the pontiff responded warmly, telling the group that an immigrant right is a human right.

But he didn’t say much else on the topic, and Alessandra said she came away uncertain whether he would champion their cause.

“It showed me he wasn’t for or against,” she said, sitting on a couch in her home in the east valley beneath a portrait taken at her quinceañera in April.

Fleeing civil war

Alessandra and her 13- and 12-year-old sisters are U.S. citizens and have lived in the Las Vegas Valley their whole lives. But their 46-year-old mother, Sandra, isn’t a citizen.

Sandra Granados fled El Salvador 17 years ago, after a turbulent childhood in the war-torn Central American nation. She remembers seeing bloated bodies on the streets during the civil war that raged from 1980 until 1992 and recalls being trapped with her family in their house for a week when she was a teenager while a battle raged in the streets.

She remained in the country after the war ended, finishing her education and getting a job that she held until a powerful earthquake struck on Jan. 13, 2001.

That was the last straw. Shortly afterward, Granados came to the United States with a friend on a travel visa and began her new life. When President George W. Bush established TPS status for those who had fled El Salvador in March 2001, she enrolled in the program.

Today, the single mother owns a home off of Boulder Highway, where she attempts to grow corn in the harsh desert heat. She also has worked at Wynn Las Vegas since it opened in 2005, delivering room service orders.

When Donald Trump was elected president, Granados grew worried about her status and the fate of her three children. She always knew her status was temporary — it’s in the program name, after all — but she had always hoped that the U.S. would eventually provide a pathway to permanent residency or even citizenship.

Though it was intended as a temporary reprieve for those fleeing a war or a natural disaster in their homelands, the TPS program was routinely extended by previous administrations of both parties, requiring recipients only to fill out some new paperwork for renewal. Those who were already in the U.S. without documentation could earn TPS status, as well, if a conflict occurred in their home country.

Move to revoke

But the Trump administration announced in January its intent to cancel TPS status for citizens of Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador and Nicaragua at various points, saying conditions in those countries have stabilized enough that people can return. The end dates differ for each country, but TPS holders from El Salvador were given until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the U.S.

Taking the program away now is not fair to these people, many of whom have now lived in the U.S. for decades and built new lives here, advocates say.

Critics respond that TPS was never meant to be permanent and is not intended to provide a path to citizenship.

“I’m sympathetic to the idea that long-term TPS people have basically been led on and that we should properly amnesty them, but that can only happen in the context of changes to the TPS law itself,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for low immigration levels, told the Review-Journal this month.

In March, a class-action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California challenging the revocation of TPS status for residents of the four countries. Earlier this month, a judge issued an injunction that will allow TPS recipients from the four countries to stay while the lawsuit moves through the courts.

Sandra Granados says the threat of deportation and being separated from her children has stirred her to activism.

Before last year, she said, she wasn’t political at all. She did her work, raised her children, renewed her TPS, paid her fees and kept her head down. She said she’s always “daydreamed” of a more permanent status in the United States.

But now, it’s different.

“I’m going to fight to the end, and we’re not going back,” she said.

Contact Meghin Delaney at 702-383-0281 or mdelaney@reviewjournal.com. Follow @MeghinDelaney on Twitter.