The Day I Got Deported From El Salvador

Christmas 2015 was the day I will always remember as the day I got deported from El Salvador.  I had lived there all my life, but because I had a US passport they decided to deport me back to the United States.

Back up… this sounds twisted, right? Surely this can’t be real.

Well, it was.
Before I even landed it was a trip from hell. I had to get up super early in the morning in Boston and they didn’t bother to tell me my flight got canceled.  I hadn’t slept the day before and had spent an inordinate amount of time embroiled in family drama. I had just gotten over a really really bad breakup and had really bad back pain.

All this to say, I was 10 hours late arriving in El Salvador and hadn’t slept for 48 hrs. When I arrived at the immigration officer I was kind of snippy and the girl was asking me a LOT of questions.  She could tell from my passport that I often traveled there, and pretty sure she could tell that I had gone to high school there. For whatever reason, I never got Salvadoran citizenship and opted to stay with my British and American passports.

She was so over the top Umbridge question after question after question. My back hurt, my legs hurt and I was tired. So I told her ” Look lady can I just pay the immigration fee and get my bags?” . She looked at me her nose rising up a millimeter and sneered. ” Sabes que tengo el poder de deportarle verdad?” She told me with a high pitched satisfaction. I guffawed. ” Oh Cmon! You cannot deport me for being in a bad mood!”

She smirked gave a little ” hmmph” turned her heel and disappeared.

I never spoke to her again and this followed six hours of waiting outside the immigration room. At that point I was in tears , exhausted and the doctor was checking up on me. They emerged with a revised ticket.

I was to go home in the next available flight.

I told them ” Look can I speak to the embassy of the US or Great Britain?” . They looked at me and said : ” We are in El Salvador your country’s laws don’t apply here! ” . I was led to a waiting room with bright flourescent lights and had to sleep on the bare floor with no food.

The next morning at 4 am I was woken up by a police officer. He kindly picked me up and told me he was shocked that this had happened to me. He felt so bad and said it was all dumb bureacracy and he was going to do his best to help me.

This kind man led me to the police station and fed me. He then tried to talk the immigration officers out of deporting me. ” She can come back any time just not today” They said.

It was approaching 48 hrs of travel. I felt like a fish scattered on a deserted island. I belonged nowhere. I felt bereft and lost.  I saw various families being deported back to El Salvador,  on opposite lane to me. Me, trying to get in and them trying to get back out.He beamed and told me ” I have a great idea wait here!”.

Somehow, Carlos found me a plane ticket to Guatemala for 100 dollars that left in two hours. I was to go there, and then come back to El Salvador by bus. Which I did! I boarded the plane and thanked Carlos teary eyed and grateful. Over my shoulder i saw the people who were still weren’t lucky enough to come back in : The family exiled from Cuba who were roaming around lost in the airport.  I went to Guatemala slept for three days in a hotel and then took a bus to El Salvador and had 0 issues.

In my mind, I knew I was privileged and lucky. What I went through, while tiring and annoying was nothing compared to a refugee in Syria or Salvadorans trying to ask for asylum. I did not have to walk thousands of miles to get to the United States. I did not have to hide for hours underneath hot and sweaty seats, or risk being raped or hated.
The cop treated me with kindness, and everyone else received me with open arms. Because I had a blue american passport and I was white.  I would never know what it was like to be put in a concentration camp with barely any food and no blankets and made to drink toilet water. I would not know what it was like to find out my child died because of the flu.  My dilemma lasted four days. It was over. No tarnish, no stain, i can still go anywhere I want.

But the women who are me, but browner, and with a different passport haunt me. We are just two sides of the coin, and somehow the injustice of it makes me cry.

Where would we be without technology?

I was about to publish my discussion on my social media paper when poof the electricity went out.

As I write this I am writing this in pitch dark and have no way of knowing when the internet will go back on.

it seems odd that in the civil war when I was a kid in El Salvador we went without electricity for four days on end. We would play monopoly and games and read books.  In this very blog I wrote about going without a phone for a year now the concept seems inconceivable.

now I feel like a part of me is missing when there is no electricity. In fact so much so that I sit in darkness and use my dying battery to write about it. Time goes slower, you feel disconnected from the world.
As the heat starts to deplete in the house and the winter settled in my bones a small grain of fear nestled in my heart .

This in of itself is a privilege as many go without electricity for their whole lives