Natalie Zarate, a 28-year-old Overland Park, Kansas, resident, usually spends the one day she has off work each week playing with her 2-year-old son.
Unlike his mother, the boy was born in the United States, automatically making him an American citizen. It’s a status she gained only a few months before his birth.
Zarate, who lived in the United States for several years without legal status, believes her journey through the U.S. immigration system represents the intricate complexity of a system she feels often works more like a lottery than an accessible path to a life in the U.S.
“I feel like I got lucky,” said Zarate. “It took me a long time, but I went through the process. But for others that don’t get lucky, which is the majority of people, I don’t feel like it goes the way it should.”
Zarate’s experience is full of lucky breaks, costly legal work and years-long setbacks. Now, with the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to toughen immigration policy, she worries many people stuck somewhere in the middle of the unpredictable path to citizenship might never reach the end.
‘They just let us through’
Zarate’s luck came in the form of the unfortunate circumstances she experienced as a child.
In the late 1990s Zarate’s parents lost their business due to an economic crisis in Mexico. Zarate said they lost most of their money, and in desperation, made the decision to sneak into the U.S.
“People don’t think about the cost it takes to go in the legal way,” Zarate explained. “It can take years. To them, they didn’t have years. They either had to cross illegally or watch their family starve.”
In 2000, when she was four years old, Zarate’s mother paid a stranger to sneak her and her sister across the U.S.-Mexico border. Her mother had come to the U.S. six months earlier.
The stranger traveled with the two young girls from the southern Mexican state of Veracruz to a U.S. border checkpoint and used other children's passports to get them across. To this day, Zarate’s shocked at how easy it was.
“On the passport it had the other kids’ picture,” Zarate said. “But since we spoke English and my sister was in the front, she's a blonde headed, light-skinned girl … They just let us through.”
From the border, the sisters were picked up by their mother and together they travelled to the Kansas City area.
For the next six years, she lived in small apartments and duplexes with eight to 10 family members at a time. She suffered abuse at the hands of family members and developed behavioral problems.
The issues eventually became so prevalent that her school reported them to Child Protective Services.
“I was in foster care from the ages of 11 to 18,” Zarate said. “I got placed into a group home, and then from there I bounced around a little bit from foster home to foster home.”
Despite some resulting trauma, Zarate believes foster care enabled her to pursue citizenship as early as she did.
Her caseworkers were able to obtain a form of legal status for Zarate at the age of 12. While she can’t remember the specifics of the status, it was likely the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a classification most often given to minors who were neglected, abused or abandoned by their parents.
According to the Congressional Research Service, less than 1,000 children received this status in 2008, the year Zarate turned 12.
This new status allowed caseworkers to start the process to get Zarate permanent legal status, commonly referred to as a Green Card, in the U.S. Three years later at the age of 15, she got it. She recalls it as one of the most exciting moments of her life.
“As a kid I always looked at my future like, ‘Oh, I get to just be a McDonald's worker cause they don’t do E-Verify.’” said Zarate. “It opened a lot of doors for me that I didn’t have before, like to go to college and actually get a career.”
‘Case by case’
Even as a teenager, Zarate was eager to take the next step to become a U.S. citizen. But as she aged out of foster care, she lost access to the caseworkers and attorneys who had assisted her in the past. It was now up to her to determine what she needed to do.
After waiting the mandatory five years required by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office for permanent residents to apply for citizenship, Zarate contacted some local immigration attorneys to get the process started. She confronted another barrier.
“I ended up getting a couple tickets and getting into a little bit of trouble,” explained Zarate. “The attorneys recommended that I wait longer. So it was more like ten years.”
There are several things that can lead to the denial of a citizenship application. A common one is on the grounds of what the USCIS calls “Good Moral Character.”
According to the USCIS website, GMC is a subjective factor, analyzed on a case-by-case basis. It looks at the applicant’s behavior during the five year waiting period, but can also look beyond it. Reasons for denial using GMC can range from having an affair to participating in terrorism.
Zarate’s attorneys told her past legal trouble could result in a denial under GMC, the first of many setbacks as Zarate confronted the convoluted laws governing immigration. Anne Parelker, the attorney who eventually helped Zarate gain citizenship, explained that there is no one, cookie-cutter path to citizenship.
“I would say everything in immigration law is case by case,” says Parelker, a former Johnson County- based immigration attorney. “There is never a one and done deal, and there are so many nuances. It’s just so much to know.”
Finances were also a barrier for Zarate. The filing fee alone for the citizenship application has ranged anywhere from $640 to more than $1000 in the last five years according to the USCIS.
After hearing her story, Parelker worked with Zarate at a heavily discounted rate, and even helped obtain a partial fee waiver. Parelker, who is married to an immigrant, understands just how much money can slow the application process.
“Most of the time you’re going to have to pay a pretty good fee for (the application),” Parelker said. “You can sometimes get a fee waiver but not for everything. Now if you’re going to hire an attorney, that’s going to be several thousand dollars. It’s really expensive.”
'This is where they want to be'
With Parelker’s help, Zarate’s application was approved without issue, and in 2023 she gained her citizenship. It’s another moment she remembers as filled with excitement and deep relief.
“It wasn’t an easy process,” said Zarate. “Like I said, I just got lucky. It’s not like when you go get a driver's license, you just bring these (documents) and boom, you got a license type of deal … it’s a long process.”
It's a process she hopes her son won’t ever have to experience.
But as the Trump administration takes aim at birthright citizenship and tries to enact extreme changes to immigration law, Zarate worries that he may face the same — or even worse struggles than she did.
For now, she said all she can do is pray and ask others to give people like her and her family a real chance to contribute and earn their place in America.
“There’s some people who have been here a whole lifetime that actually just work and are just here for a better life,” explained Zarate. “You should lend out your hand and give them those opportunities because this is where they want to be.”
