This is the third story in a four-part series that examines how President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign is unfolding in the Green Mountain State. Read the first and second stories here.
The sounds of explosions rock the living room of a small Burlington apartment as Alex and his wife and their 10-year-old son watch their television.
The video, taken a couple days prior, captures scenes of violence erupting in the family’s hometown of Otavalo, Ecuador.
“This is a neighbor who was shot, and he ended up dying,” Alex said through an interpreter. “You can see the bullet wound.”
Indigenous Ecuadorians are in the midst of a nationwide protest against rising fuel prices and government persecution. Ecuador’s president has in turn deployed the military to towns such as Otavalo, where international humanitarian groups have condemned the use of excessive force on peaceful demonstrators.
Alex’s arms are clasped around his son and wife, tears streaming down their faces. They know the people running for cover in these streets. Alex shows a photograph of his sister, a nurse, treating injured protestors.
“The government is actively attacking indigenous people, is actively mistreating people,” Alex said. “There’s huge discrimination.”
Some immigrants come to the United States in search of economic opportunity. For others, the decision to move here is a matter of life or death.
More than 800,000 people applied for asylum in the United States last year. But recent changes to federal immigration policy have made the path to permanent legal status more tenuous for people like Alex and his family.
Faith in a better future
Fear of their own government isn’t the only reason they came to the U.S. Alex was also targeted by members of a local organized crime syndicate. A scar on the right side of his neck is a permanent reminder of the experience.
“I was threatened, I was beaten, I was tortured,” he told Vermont Public, which isn’t using his last name because his immigration status puts him at risk of deportation. “The gang made demands and made clear that if I didn’t do what they wanted, they would kill me. That they would kill my family, the one thing I love the most.”
As a result, in 2023, Alex and his family decided to make the 2,400-mile journey to the U.S.-Mexico border. They left with little more than the clothes they were wearing and traveled large stretches mostly by foot. It took them 30 days.
“We felt such relief when we saw the American agents because we knew we had made it,” he said. “We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know what city we were going to go to, where we were going to work, what we were going to do. We just arrived here with faith and a dream that we were going to be able to find a better future.”
They spent several days in an immigrant detention facility in Texas before finding out that their request to begin the asylum process had been approved. They would be able to live and work in the United States legally, so long as they adhered to regular check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The family started their new life in Brooklyn, where Alex quickly found work as a cook. Then, shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term in office, they began hearing about other asylum seekers, including members of their own indigenous community, getting arrested, detained and later deported after arriving for their scheduled ICE check-ins.
Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the path to asylum became more difficult under President Joe Biden. She said federal policy changes over the last nine months have made it even tougher.
“When the Trump administration got into office it revoked everything that said ICE officers should exercise discretion, they should base their activities on people who are most likely to be a public safety threat, or people who are most likely to be a national security threat.” Lind said. “They got rid of all of that, and said, ‘No, what’s important is getting the numbers up.’”
There’s a massive backlog of asylum cases pending in immigration courts across the country. Instead of bolstering the resources needed to resolve them, Lind said the Trump administration has tried to get those cases dismissed, to bypass legal protections against deportation.
“The Trump administration, if it really wants to deport a million people a year, needs to reckon with the fact that a lot of these people are currently in these lines, and these lines aren’t moving very quickly,” Lind said. “And their response to that has been to say, ‘How many of them can we get out of line.’”
Living in uncertainty
Alex and his wife decided they needed to leave New York, to find somewhere safer. He’d seen pictures of Vermont in tourism ads on the subway.
“And I just thought it was such a beautiful place and that kind of sparked a desire in me to come here,” he said.
In June, they left home again and moved to Burlington.
Alex said he does feel safer here. He’s found work as a cook in dining services for a local institution, and in the kitchen at a large chain restaurant. His son attends a local public school. His family was also surprised to find that other members of the indigenous Ecuadorian community also lived in Vermont — they live in the apartment with four of them.
But uncertainty hangs over their lives here, perhaps now more than ever. Trump in late November announced a pause on all asylum claims after the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers by an Afghan immigrant.
“I’m stuck in the middle of a game I have no control over,” Alex said. “I don’t get to decide if I stay here or not. That’s something that the government decides.”
After watching what’s happening to immigrants like him across the United States over the past nine months, Alex said his faith has been wavering.
“We left a country where we were being persecuted. Even going into the streets, leaving the house, you are risking your life,” he said. The United States, he said, has been a refuge for his family. But, he’s learned, “persecution does exist here as well.”
Alex says his indigenous ancestors — the Kichwa Otavalo — have been fighting to regain their freedom since Spanish conquistadors arrived in Ecuador more than 500 years ago.
He said his quest to secure safety and prosperity for his family in Vermont has become his form of resistance.
“It’s been 500 years and more that our communities have been looked down on,” he said. “The only thing we want is to be able to live a better life.” ■
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