His wife was spiraling into insomnia, and his children were afraid to go to school, so Jaime Cachua sought out the person he trusted most in a crisis. He sat at his kitchen table in rural Georgia across from his father-in-law, Sky Atkins, the family patriarch. Jaime, 33, hadn’t seen his own father since he was 10 months old, when he left Mexico in a car seat bound for the United States.“We have to prepare for the worst-case scenario,” Jaime told him. “There’s a chance we could lose everything.”Jaime muted the football game on TV and began to explain his new reality as an undocumented immigrant after the election of Donald Trump, who had won the presidency in part by promising to deport more than 11 million people living in the country illegally.“I’m going to be straight with you,” Sky told Jaime. “I voted for Trump. I believe in a lot of what he says.”“I figured as much,” Jaime said. “You and just about everyone else around here.”“It’s about protecting our rights as a sovereign country,” Sky said. “We need to shut down the infiltration on the border. It’s not about you.”“It is about me,” Jaime said. “That’s the thing I don’t understand.” Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
Hi, my name is Eli Saslow, and I'm a writer at large for The New York Times. I write in-depth pieces about how the big issues in the country, the big tension points, impact people's lives.
For today's Sunday read, I'll be sharing an article that I wrote about an undocumented immigrant who is now scrambling to stay in the United States, in part because many of his friends and even close family members voted to support President Trump and his plans for mass deportation.
In the weeks since President Trump was elected back to office, he has begun making plans, as he's said repeatedly, to begin mass deportations on day one in office. At the same time, more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States have begun scrambling to try to figure out how they might be able to stay in the country.
Many of these people have been in the United States for decades, since they were children. And they live in communities, in many cases, that voted heavily for a president who has promised to deport them. And these immigrants are struggling not only with a sense of fear about what's going to come next, but also with a sense of betrayal and confusion.
about the people around them in the communities that they love. It was their former teachers who voted in this way. It was their bosses at work. It was their friends. And in many cases, it was even their family members. And so I began having conversations with some of those immigrants about what that felt like and how they were making sense of this country that they've lived in for so long.
In the kind of reporting that I do, I might in the end write about one person or one family's experience. But I begin that process by talking to a lot of people to try to understand a situation better and to try to begin figuring out who it is that I'm going to go spend time with.
And that means I'm searching through people's Facebook pages, through Twitter, through GoFundMe sites, through people's comments in the local media to try to understand who might be in this situation where they live in a community and love a community that now has voted in a way that may result in their deportation.
One of the dozen or so people that I found and began talking to was a guy named Jaime Cachua, who is 33 years old and has lived in Rome, Georgia, a relatively small town in North Georgia, ever since he was 10 months old.
Jaime loves Rome, went to high school there, got his first job there, met his wife there, is raising four children there, loves his church, and is in so many ways seen as like a pillar of this community. He works at a car dealership, and his job at the dealership is essentially to be like a mascot.
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