Woman helping Bay Area immigrants recalls harrowing border crossing as a child
SAN FRANCISCO – Andrea Orea sees America's confusing and sometimes chaotic immigration system from a front-row seat.
As Director of Immigrant Services for Catholic Charities of San Francisco, she's the one who helps clients navigate a broken system. At times, she has to give them bad news.
"If they've been ordered removed, that's pretty much the end of it," Orea told KPIX 5.
The empathy she has for new immigrants comes from inside, inspired by her own harrowing story crossing the border as a 5-year-old without her parents.
"So one day, they told me you're leaving with this lady," she recalled.
Orea was born into poverty in Puebla, Mexico. She grew up not knowing her father, who was already working in the U.S. because his father was a guest worker in the Bracero Program in the 1960s.
To reunite the family, Andrea flew with her mother to Tijuana, then arrangements were made to send her in a car over the busy border crossing with a smuggler.
Her mother hired a woman who posed as a nanny taking Orea to school on the other side. She could only travel with the clothes on her back to not raise suspicions.
Orea still has the white sweater she wore that day, which her mother hand knitted for the trip.
"I was with the lady for a couple of hours. I remember she gave me chips and she was to be my friend, but it was really scary because I didn't know her," she said.
Orea remembers the traumatic feelings of getting in a stranger's car and waving goodbye to her mom.
"She said, no matter what happens, pretend to be asleep. Don't talk to the officers. As a child I was told just close your eyes, close your eyes. What was scary was thinking what if we were caught? Not being able to see my dad, or my mom," Orea said.
"I was scared I was never going to see them again," she went on to say.
Orea made it across and met up with her father at a McDonalds, as she was promised. Her mother came later, on foot, hiking for a week through the treacherous Sonoran desert.
"I could never tell people I was born in Mexico," she said.
Orea excelled at school, was a top student at Hayward High, and was accepted at UC Berkeley where she majored in political science and legal studies.
She qualified for DACA, got her degree and recently, a Green Card which finally allowed her to emerge from the shadows and tell her story.
"I always felt like an 'other' person here in the U.S. because I was born in Mexico and all those things. But then I went back to Mexico and I felt like I didn't belong there either," Orea said.
She says her next goal — full citizenship — is now just a few years away.
Her three brothers are U.S.-born citizens, but their parents still do not have legal status.
So, like the people Orea works with every day, the parents who took a risk sending a child across the border to find a better life, face an uncertain future of their own.