Girl with No Country: Domestic Adoption of Illegal Mexican Immigrant’s Daughter UPDATED

“”It’s like I am stuck here in school and you know,” she said, her smile not reaching her eyes.

The only place Kaiti Tidwell feels like she exists is in her senior classroom at Centerpoint High School.

“My whole world is stopped right now, it’s just stopped,” she said.

While adulthood offers most teens freedom, for Kaiti it has been the exact opposite. She’s a girl without a country at a crossroads of a journey that began when she floated across the Rio Grande from Mexico, in an inner-tube, as an infant.

“There’s no telling how many kids have the same story. We’re kids. You can’t blame a kid for coming over here at three months old and not having a country,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes and frustration turning her voice raspy from its typical tenor.

Kaiti’s mother worked in chicken houses in the south. But Kaiti spent much of her time with the Tidwell family.

“I went back and forth a lot. Sometimes, with my biological mother other times with the Tidwells,” she said. “But finally, they adopted me to help me, especially to be able to go to school.”

“It’s a terrifying thing,” Joann Tidwell admits. “Having charge over someone else’s child, not knowing what’s going to happen. We met Kaiti when she was four. After three years, we started the adoption process.”

Joann flips through a scrapbook, filled with report cards and pictures of the petite Kaiti in even more miniature a form. It was the only documentation she had.

“I wondered, to myself, how am I going to prove she ever existed,” Joann said. “If she goes missing, gets hurt, how am I going to prove she is even a person? So I made this scrapbook. It was our lifeline.”

“But that didn’t change Kaiti’s status because you have to go through the process,” Joann said. “She still wasn’t an American citizen. She wasn’t a citizen of anywhere.”

While Kaiti is legally her daughter, Joann has been unable to gain citizenship for her. It’s been an 11-year battle. The Tidwells have applied for Kaiti’s citizenship on six separate occasions, six different applications. Thousands of dollars in legal fees, hours of heartache, a decade of tears, all to no avail.

“By Mexico not recognizing Kaiti our government won’t recognize her,” Joann said. “That’s just the way it is. It’s completely frustrating. We’re tired. We’re just sick of it.”

“My mom took me to a lawyer and he said I didn’t exist. Of course, I was four and told my mom to pinch me, I’m here!” she sighs. “That stuff, I had to learn how to live with that.”

The girl without a country has lived an all-American childhood, because children don’t need photo IDs or Social Security cards. She’s flown in an airplane, had an after school job, and dreamed of a diploma.

“I’m just a kid like everybody else you know with dreams and ambitions and goals,” she said. “But I’m also like that one fish that gets popped out of the water. There’s no one really there to help.”

But that dream of walking across the stage as the first high school graduate in her family is out of reach. She won’t toss her cap into the air, because she’ll be below the border.

“Who wants to spend their senior year knowing you don’t have papers you’re struggling,” she laughs at herself. “It’s just not fair. I’m having to go back to a country I don’t know, that I can’t even remember. I belong here, I belong on that stage. I should be able to graduate and turn to my mom and say, ‘I did it’.”

Kaiti turned 18 in November. On May 5th, she will be considered an illegal immigrant despite this being the only country she’s ever known.

“After turning 18, you have 180 days to go through the process,” she said. “We’re waiting on a date in Mexico right now. But we don’t know when that date will come. I’ve never been to Mexico. My mom has never been to Mexico. I’m nervous about that.”

It will require missing graduation, a milestone for most American teens, so she’ll have a chance to live as a free adult in the place she’s called home for her entire life.

“I came here as an infant, and I didn’t have a choice. Now, at 18 I have to do what I have to do. I’m going to fight for it. I believe, I have faith, that it’s going to happen,” she said.

She’s received a temporary Mexican passport and birth certificate. But there are no guarantees Mexico will grant her citizenship, which means there are no guarantees she or her mother will ever be able to return.

Joann plans to travel to Mexico with her daughter. She knows she will probably end up selling her home, her car, and the way of life as she knows it will end. But she believes any other mother would do the same.

“As a parent, you would do anything for your children,” Joann said. “If they told me, Kaiti is sick and she has to go to Mexico or she will die, I wouldn’t hesitate. This is as much about her life as that is.”

According to Joann, this is the final chance for Kaiti. If this doesn’t work, she will never call herself an American citizen.

“This is the last strike. You can only be in the system so long, you can only make so many applications, and then our government is through. They’re done,” she said. “But we’re applying for dual citizenship with Mexico. If they grant it, she’ll already be on the way to citizenship with that.”

That’s not to say they both aren’t terrified.

“Scary, I’m very scared,” Tidwell said. “Because you’re taking Kaiti out of her element, you know? I’ll be okay, but I don’t know about her.”

When I ask Kaiti about the future, her face turns glum, but then brightens.

“I’m going to do this. Not just for me though. It’s a goal of mine, but I’m also doing it for all of those other illegal students, illegal immigrants like me. I want them to know they don’t have to be scared. I have done this six times, and I’m still going at it. We can never give up.”

Kaiti Jasmine Posadas-Tidwell might as well be a modern day Moses. She floated across a river as an infant, to find herself in a foreign land. Taken under the wing of another family, fighting for freedom, and searching for years. The comparison, however, isn’t something that bothers her.

“He never gave up. He kept looking,” she smiled. “I’ve had that story told to me twice but I’ve never looked at it like that.”

A Girl With No Country: Born in Mexico but Raised in America, Now What?
[KARK 4 News 4/6/12 by Marci Manley]

“”I’m overwhelmed, I’m too overwhelmed,” she said, with a quick intake of breath. ‘I’m ready for all this to be over. It’s too much.”

The day Kaiti Tidwell, 18, couldn’t imagine happening has arrived.

“I think as soon as I get on the airplane it’s going to hit me like a train,” she said.

Surrounded by family and friends, she and her mother Joann Tidwell prepare to board a plane bound for Veracruz, Mexico.

“It wasn’t until I saw the airport that it hit me. They’re going away. Even a few hours ago, it didn’t seem real,” her boyfriend Roverto Hernandez said. “All of these emotions are just hitting me out of nowhere.”

They can’t be sure of when they’ll return, if ever.

“It’s bittersweet, because what if I don’t get to come back,” Kaiti said. “I see my friends crying, and I keep telling them not to because it’s not goodbye, it’s see you later. But I don’t have a return date.”

“It’s see you soon, it’s not goodbye. I can’t think of it as that,” her best friend Stephanie Buendia tells us, shaking her head as if it’s all a bad dream. “I can’t imagine not spending every second with her this summer like we have before. I just can’t think about that.”

Kaiti’s biological mother, a migrant farmer who worked in chicken houses across the south, floated Kaiti across the Rio Grande in an inner-tube when she was six months old. Because Kaiti was never recognized as a Mexican citizen, she can’t become an American.

“It’s not your choice, it wasn’t your choice to come in the first place. It wasn’t your choice to do something wrong. Nevertheless, you have to face the consequences,” Hernandez said. “It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right.”

After Kaiti’s mother left her with them indefinitely, the Tidwell family chose to adopt her at the age of seven. They fought for 11 years to win her citizenship without success.

“There’s a reason this is happening. Even though it’s bad, maybe it’s something I have to go through for something good to happen,” Kaiti said. “I have to stay strong. I can’t break, not even for a second.”

“I have to think about all the other kids in my situation. I have to be strong for them,” she said. “I’m lucky that my case is out in the open. I can say to them, I know what you’re going through. I’ve been there. I’m taking one for the team. But I’ll be back.”

Kaiti turned 18 in November. As of May 5, 2012, she will be considered an illegal alien. Instead of risking deportation, she’s departing for a land beyond the border where she was born but can’t recall.

“She’s going somewhere she’s never been to see people she’s never seen to live a life she doesn’t know how to live,” Buendia said. “My parents immigrated here. I was born here. But we both grew up here together. I just don’t see how you can say I’m more American than Kaiti. That I deserve to be here more than she does. This is her home. This is where she belongs.”

“It just feels like there’s going to be a big something missing in my life,” Hernandez said. “It’s hard to know I can’t be with them. There isn’t much I could do if I were with them, but I would at least know where they were, how they’re doing, that they’re safe.”

While many of us have bid goodbye at these very barricades, most of us have an arrival date already on the calendar when loved ones will return. We’re never forced to think, like the group of teens in tears, that it could be the final farewell.

“I know it’s not the end if it’s bad, there’s got to be something more,” Kaiti said, a sad smile creeping up as the tears streamed down her face. “It’s going to be like another chapter in my life that I”m adding to.”

Because Kaiti doesn’t already have a date set with the Mexican consulate, it could take a year to attain that meeting, according to lawyers. That’s aside from the time it will take to file the adoption papers to have Mexico recognize Kaiti as Joann Tidwell’s daughter.

So, Kaiti Tidwell remains, indefinitely, a girl with no country to call home. ”
Girl With No Country Departs for Mexico to Become an American
[KARK 4 News 4/27/12 by Marci Manley]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

We still can’t figure out how she was legally adopted in the US with no papers.