People leave the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Miramar, Florida. File/Associated Press

Kevin Baxter, Tribune News Service

One day. For Judith Ortiz, whose parents brought her to this country from Durango, Mexico, when she was 2, a mere 24 hours have made the difference between a life of freedom and opportunity and one constrained by limits and obstacles.

Ortiz and her twin sister, Janette, were raised in suburban Dallas, where Judith was her high school’s valedictorian, graduating with a 3.96 GPA. Both girls had remained in the country illegally as toddlers when their family overstayed a tourist visa. When they turned 18, they became eligible for benefits under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era programme designed to shield from deportation young people brought to this country illegally as children.

Because the girls have the same birth date, the same address and the same surname, their lawyer suggested Judith mail her application a day after her sister to avoid confusion. Janette’s paperwork was approved six months later, in June 2021. Shortly after, a federal judge in Texas blocked the government from approving additional DACA petitions. Judith’s application — and her future — have been on hold ever since. She can’t be sure that the mailing date, not some other arbitrary bureaucratic quirk, caused the fateful difference, but in her mind, that one-day delay in sending off the application is what has set their lives on different courses. “Having DACA would make my life 100 times easier,” said the 21-year-old, who attends classes at Texas A&M alongside her sister. “I was always scared of getting pulled over. There’s things that people don’t really think about sometimes.” Judith took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, hoping to enlist in the military, and scored well enough to enter West Point, only to be rejected because of her immigration status. Because of that status, she can’t legally get a job or a loan because she can’t get a Social Security number. Her twin, who entered the country on the same day and grew up in the same house, has a job, an apartment and a car loan.

Judith, who is slated to graduate in December, is eligible to be deported back to a country she never knew and can’t remember while her twin sister can legally remain, work and study.

“I grew up in America. I don’t know (Mexican) culture very well. It’s not the same,” she said. Few who work in immigration law are surprised by the story; the capriciousness of America’s broken immigration system seems to be the rule, not the exception. “It’s a bit of layer cake,” said Travis Murphy, a former US diplomat who is the founder and CEO of Jetr Global Partners, a Washington-based firm that works to solve visa and immigrant issues for athletes and sports franchises. “Policies have been enacted year over year that don’t necessarily work directly, in a coherent way, with previous policies. We don’t have consensus in what we want the outcome to be,” he added. “That’s the problem.” The sometimes arbitrary and frequently confusing nature of American immigration law enforcement constrains the lives of millions of immigrants — those who live in the country legally as well as those here without legal status.

More than 4 in 10 immigrants who participated in a wide-ranging survey conducted earlier this year by the Los Angeles Times and KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, said they don’t understand how the country’s immigration policies work, nor how those policies affect their families.

Yet they have no choice but to rely on those policies to be able to live, work, study and sometimes simply exist in this country. Roughly 1 in 4 immigrants said they worry that they or a family member could be deported. The number is highest among the undocumented, but the fear is shared by one-third of legal permanent residents and 1 in 8 naturalised citizens. Many immigrants who have legal status have family members who do not. Some 10.5 million people — precise estimates vary — lived in the US without authorisation in 2021. Roughly 1.8 million live in uncertainty, recipients of temporary protected status, student visas, DACA and other protocols that either have limited length or can be revoked, with little notice, at any time. Tens of thousands more are apprehended at the southern border each month trying to join them.

Meantime, the pathway to legally immigrate to the US has become so constrained that for many, it doesn’t truly exist. The Cato Institute, in a June report titled, “Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible,” estimated that fewer than 1% of the people who apply to move permanently to this country are now able to do so. “The government’s restrictive criteria render the legal paths available only in the most extreme cases,” wrote David J. Bier, Cato’s associate director for immigration studies. “Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: It happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.” The U.S. caps the number of permanent employment-based immigrants at 140,000 annually, with no more than 7% allowed from any one country. As a result, people in countries with large numbers of applicants could wait a lifetime. A US citizen who wants legal permission for their married adult child to immigrate to the US from Mexico would have to wait 160 years at the current rate of approval.

Those who do enter the US legally aren’t exempt from the law’s complexities. Six years ago, Agustina Vergara packed up her life and moved from Argentina to Southern California to finish a master’s programme at USC. With her employer’s help, she applied to exchange her student visa for one reserved for workers in fields requiring special knowledge. That’s when things went off the rails. As she waited, Vergara’s father was diagnosed with cancer. She couldn’t go back to Argentina without abandoning her visa application, which would have meant starting the process over again with less chance of success. When he died, she couldn’t attend the funeral.

Weeks later, her lawyer gave her more bad news: she wasn’t going to get the visa anyway. The government offered no explanation why. Vergara was crushed. “My thinking was perhaps a little too optimistic,” she said. “There is no way that a hardworking person that really loves America and wants to build a life here and contribute to make America the amazing country that it is, there is no way that they won’t have me.” Like Judith Ortiz, Vergara, 35, had filed every form, paid every fee, followed every rule. She was, by all accounts, an outstanding student and a model citizen. Her background check came back as clean as hospital linen.