I’m in a waiting room in a large courthouse in San Francisco. Immigration court. Sitting next to me is Magdalena Martinez. She’s here for her mom: Bertha Mejia, from El Salvador. Bertha’s undocumented. In 2011, immigration officers came to Mejia’s home in Oakland. There was raid in the neighborhood. Martinez remembers that morning. “I got a phone call from my sister, Vanessa, saying that immigration had come and picked my mom up. So I rushed to my mom’s home and, yeah, she wasn’t here,” says Martinez. Here’s her sister, Vanessa Madrigal, was there when officers approached her mother’s home. “They came and knocked on the door, so they asked for identification and as my mom gave them the identification she stepped out, and as soon as she stepped out, they grabbed here and arrested her and said, ‘Call immigration.’”
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