Help Kayla Bring Her Dad Home

Hello, my name is Kayla Alvarado.

On Wednesday, January 29th of 2025, my father Jose Alvarado was followed by ICE while dropping his grandkids off at school and detained immediately after. I have called my dad “papi” since I was a baby so I will refer to him as such from this point on. My papi has been our family’s sole provider for years as my mother is 62 years of age and is often too sick to work. My papi works as a carpenter, enduring immense heat and strenuous working conditions to ensure that he can feed his family. Although, I am his only biological child, my papi has stepped in as a father figure to raise his stepson’s 5 kids, as my half brother struggles with a drug addiction and is unfit to be their caretaker. My papi treats these children as his own and provides for them as such. My dad was brought to this country at the age of 10 and was far too young to understand what immigration truly was and didn’t know a word of English so his resources were scarce, but as soon as he was able to teach himself English and had a general understanding of what he needed to do to fix his papers, he made multiple attempts to get documented. He was unfortunately denied several times due to there being 1 singular year that he couldn’t provide proof of his presence in the United States. It’s only natural to feel discouraged and dehumanized after spending so much money and effort to do things “the legal way” as everyone always insists and for it all to be in vain. It’s ironic that the fact that he had gone in so recently to discuss his documentation is the exact reason they knew exactly where to find him when the ICE raids began. My papi has been in this country for 33 years and has raised me for 25 of those years and his grandchildren for about 18 years now. My papi has spent the majority of his life in this country and he has chosen to provide for his family rather than to seek a more glamorous livelihood, that is the kind of man my father is. He is my best friend, the first person I talk to every morning, the person who has always made sure that I can express myself, the person that reminds me that good people still exist in this world. I hope this helps you grasp just how disheartening it has been to come home and not see him or hear his laugh echoing throughout the house or the sound of him cooking up some chorizo and egg tacos for breakfast or to even be able to text him, I miss his silly emojis now more than ever. I feel his absence so heavily, my entire family is feeling it right now and it’s even harsher of a reality knowing that he isn’t absent from our lives willingly. It’s difficult to accept that he’s sitting in a facility with no one to treat him like a human being, but as some sort of dangerous criminal they’ve decided these people in our community should be perceived as. He was taken from us like he was nothing, but he is quite literally everything to our family. The reason we survive. He is our foundation and without him our home will certainly collapse. We are working tirelessly to bring him home and hoping this can lead to getting him documented so he can have a permanent citizenship rather than the temporary status he had beforehand. However, we are not immigration lawyers and we do not have the funds to afford these lawyers on our own, so I ask that if you can spare anything to contribute or share our story as much as you can, please know that this could very well potentially help us keep my father in our lives and that I would appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for listening, thank you for caring. I’m going to fight like hell to bring my papi home, please join me in this battle.