This is the final 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 rest of the series here.
About a dozen foreign-born students at Vermont State University in Castleton took turns reading passages from an essay about the rise of online shopping.
Eighteen-year-old Heidi Perez focused intently on a printed copy she held with both hands, impressing her professor with her crisp elocution as she read aloud about statistical shifts in consumer behavior.
The first-year students were learning English as a second language as part of their college coursework. The daughter of migrant farmworkers from Chiapas, Mexico, Perez’s path to that classroom had been more circuitous than that of most of her peers.
On June 14, agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection smashed the window of a vehicle Perez was traveling in, arresting her and her stepfather. They were in Richford, delivering food to the homes of migrant farmworkers.
The young woman who’d graduated from Milton High School a few days prior would spend the next four weeks in a cell at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington.
Hundreds of Vermonters rallied for their release outside a federal court building in Burlington in July. A few days later, an immigration judge granted them bond, freeing Perez to become the first person in her family to attend college, even as the case against her is still pending.
She’s experienced the first-year jitters that most new college students contend with.
“I’m used to living with my family, and it’s all pretty new. When I got here I felt a little confused, a little out of place,” said Perez, who spoke to Vermont Public through an interpreter.
But she’s had to manage an additional stress that other students do not.
“Before the detention happened I felt really safe here. I hadn’t heard about many detentions,” Perez said. “After the detention, obviously things changed for the worse.”
For this series, Vermont Public's Peter Hirschfeld traveled up and down the state over the course of several months to speak with immigrant families, spending hours in their homes or at their school. This type of in-depth reporting is only possible thanks to the financial support of Vermont Public members. Become one by making your gift today.
'On a knife's edge'
Perez came to Vermont from Chiapas in 2022 when she was 15 years old to reunite with her mom, who had arrived five years earlier to work on a dairy farm. She’s part of a recent trend that’s seen more and more child immigrants travel to Vermont to join their parents.
No state or federal agency keeps reliable data on the number of undocumented children in Vermont. The advocacy organization Migrant Justice says the number of children of undocumented Latin American immigrants is probably somewhere in the high hundreds.
As federal immigration authorities arrest an unprecedented number of people in Vermont — more than 100 over the past 10 months — that has altered the daily reality not just for parents but for the children that followed them here.
Yesenia is a single mom from Tabasco, Mexico, who moved to Vermont in 2017 so she could better provide for her two kids back home. Vermont Public is using only her first name because her immigration status puts her at risk of deportation.
“There wasn’t a way to make ends meet, and they needed things,” she said through an interpreter. “So this was the way to make enough money that I would be able to send back so they would have the things they needed.”
About three years ago, her children, now 14 and 18, traveled to Vermont to be with her. The family lives in a small house near the dairy farm where Yesenia feeds calves, and they attend local public schools. Yesenia’s daughter has been accepted into an architecture program at Norwich University.
But the heightened threat of deportation has cast a shadow over their new lives here.
“We just sort of feel like we’re on a knife’s edge right now, and that anything could happen,” Yesenia said. “We talk about what it would be like to go back to Mexico, but it’s not like things are going so great there. And if they want an education, I mean, here’s the place to do it. Like, I don’t think that they would be able to have the same future in Mexico that they could have here.”
Pushing for change
The fact that such a future, however tenuous, exists in Vermont can be traced to the efforts of immigrant workers themselves, including Heidi Perez.
Last year she traveled to the Statehouse multiple times to urge lawmakers to make residents of Vermont eligible for in-state tuition rates, and need-based financial aid, regardless of their immigration status.
“I explained why education is so important, why I wanted to study, why that opportunity meant so much,” Perez said. “And we just kept coming back again and again and talking to the legislators and eventually we won.”
She’s acutely aware of the significance of what that achievement means for her community.
“Before, young people would come here only to work. Why? Because they didn’t know they could study here in Vermont,” Perez said over breakfast at the Castleton cafeteria. “But now, because as a community we organized and we won the right to education, now we know we can do that.”
But whether Perez herself will be able to take advantage of the education she fought for now hinges on the outcome of her pending immigration case. While a judge granted Perez bond, federal authorities are still pursuing their case against her.
She’s accused of a civil immigration offense. For that, the federal government wants her deported from the United States. ■
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