From Chicago, it's this American Life, I'm IRA Glass. All right, you're turning a laptop, starting a laptop so we can both watch this.

That's my co-worker, Emmanuel Barry, setting up to show me a clip from an old film on her computer.

This is something that she's shown lots of people since she first saw it. It's an old Soviet movie from 1936.

OK, so this is a film called The Circus. It's kind of like the Russian version of It's a Wonderful Life.

It's like that classic black and white movie that comes on TV all the time. It's like heartwarming that everybody knows.

But when I saw what was happening, I was like, what is happening?

Um, yeah. I'm going to play like. So there's this beautiful blonde woman, she's singing like in the center of the circus tent. She's an American who has come to Russia to perform and then this man just start screaming, stop the show, stop the show study.

So let me explain who he is. He's German, to be honest.

He looks a little like Hitler, the mustache or whatever. Oh, and it's 1936. So Hitler is on the rise. Yes. And he's in love with this American circus star, but she's rejected him.

And so to get revenge, he is going to reveal her secret to the world, the secret that she's been keeping throughout the entire film. And then he brings out this black baby.

Then the baby is like a toddler size, yeah, maybe maybe two, and then the German, he runs up the stairs and he like holds the baby up almost like Simba, and he starts shaking the baby and screaming.

She said, with a Negro child, she gave birth to a black child. You're reading the subtitles now. He's shaking this child over and over again. He's like a black child, a black child. And then this guy comes up to him, this Russian guy in the audience, and he's like, what's the problem? And the this is a black child. A white woman gave birth to a black child.

Well, the Russian guy just literally shrugged his shoulders. Yeah, he shrugged his shoulders.

And he says, so what this does and the German guy goes off on this speech and puts the baby down and and the toddler, he just sort of walks off and people in the audience, they sweep the baby up in their arms to protect the baby from this guy. Yeah. And so they're passing this black kid around all of these white Russian folks and they're laughing at the guy. Yeah. He's like, why are you laughing? Why is this funny?

Remember, it's 1936 in the US where more than 30 years before interracial marriage is legal everywhere. I mean, it's Jim Crow. Black people are still being lynched. Yeah, I'd like to see this scene where this guy is being told by all these white people, mind you, like you're crazy. This is no big deal like what is happening here.

And as I started to do more research, I learned that this was part of Soviet propaganda for decades. This message, America is racist. We are not.

In the 1920s and 1930s, African-Americans, they actually moved to the Soviet Union because it was promising a better life.

Like the boy in the film, that black baby is actually the son of an African-American who moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Wow. And I haven't gotten to the last bit of scene, which is actually my favorite part of the whole thing.

So this like Russian woman is like cradling the baby, rocking it back and forth, and then she starts singing to him.

Mr. Dream's stepping soft.

Make a piano noise.

Yes, so she's totally putting this baby. Yeah, they're putting the baby to sleep. Yeah. And then she passes the baby to like this next person and it just becomes this thing where they're embracing this child, one from the next, like rocking it back and forth and singing to it. The other thing that's happening in this scene is that they're all singing in different languages like the Soviet Union at this time. There are all these different ethnic groups and then there they are embracing this black baby.

Oh, yeah. So it's more. What I'm watching this black baby being embraced, like, I wonder, like, was it true, like what black people really embraced like that and for like the in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union and for the African-Americans who went over there and left to, like, escape racism, like, did they somehow actually escape racism?

Because, like, that's a question that I think about a lot like can I go somewhere in the world and escape racism?

Yeah, I had a year or two where I really thought about this a lot. I was working as a journalist in Ferguson covering months of protest and a community really like I was covering a community that was in crisis after the shooting death of Michael Brown.

And I had just had this experience where I felt like I'd just seen some of the worst parts of American racism from watching people threaten other people because of the color of their skin, just looking day after day at like the social inequalities that exist in St. Louis and the structural things like redlining. And it was kind of hopeless.

I felt kind of hopeless about it, at least at the time.

And I was a little bit like I think I just have to leave here. Like, I I used to mostly play this game as like a coping mechanism where I would think about, like, where in the world can I go? Like, I would talk to my friends about Ghana or like Central America or places in the Caribbean. I'm like, do you think it's better? They like could it be like would it be better there to be a black person there?

And they're seeing this film made you wonder about Russia and did it work out for the black Americans who move there?

I don't necessarily think that Russia is a better place to live as a black person. But for those people who did move there in the 1930s and their kids and their grandkids, like, what role did race end up playing in their lives? Like, how did it work out for them?

That's actually the thing that we're going to be talking about in general. In today's program, we have stories of people who decide, I'm going to go somewhere, I'm going to move there, I'm going to try to fit in and we see what happens. And for one and we are calling back in the USSR. Oh, that's too easy. You came up with that.

They know what? I was joking, but it's good anyway for that activity. Will you vote for descendants of those African-American expats in Russia and just explain who you found?

OK, so the woman that I found, her name is Yelena Hunger, and she wrote this book called Soul to Soul.

She's a black Russian born and raised there. And I don't know, I sort of felt like a connection to her the more I read about her because she's a college athlete like I was.

She's a journalist like I am. Her grandfather is from the same county in Mississippi that my grandmother is from. Wow. And I don't know, I sort of just felt connected in a way.

How did you find me?

Like, originally? Yeah. Uh, your book. Oh, you read the book.

I read the book, yeah. Because I'm so like I said, Jolina, as a journalist, she had a successful talk show in Moscow.

They call her the Russian Oprah, which is almost definitely because she's black and had a talk show. It was her grandparents who moved to Russia back in the 1930s. They had a leftist New York version of a rom com meet cute. Her grandmother, Bertha, was a Polish Jew who'd been arrested at a women's rights demonstration. Her grandfather, Oliver Golden, was black and had been arrested down the street at a human rights demonstration.

And they met at the jail.

And in the morning, the rabbi came to bail my grandmother out and my grandmother said, Oh, wonderful, could you please build me out together with my new friend, all the gold and the rabbi, her father saw that Oliver was black and her father looked at her.

I said, well, you're sitting in jail with your friend and left them there. And that's how their love story began.

That's so weird.

A weird matchmaker situation, but it worked. The couple didn't see a future for themselves in America, so they decided to go to the Soviet Union. Oliver had visited before and they wanted to help build Lenin's great new society, one that promised no racism. Oliver and Bertha settled in Uzbekistan.

My grandfather thought there would be some kind of kinship between African-Americans and dark skinned black people. That's why he chose to go there. And he worked as an expert in cotton.

Yes, her grandfather left the American South and traveled halfway around the world to work in cotton. He developed a new breed of cotton that would work for Uzbekistan. Short growing season and life was good.

They made good money, had a nice apartment, a nanny for when their daughter Lily was born in 1934. Oliver wanted her to have everything he thought white kids got in the United States. So Lily had language, tutors, music and tennis lessons. But their lives got harder after they became full Soviet citizens and lost their foreigner status. And after Stalin began to solidify his power, they started to live like everybody else.

Oliver died in 1940. Lily grew up and went to college in Moscow. She married a politician from Zanzibar, Jelena's dad. He died shortly after Yelena's birth.

So the only consistent black presence in her life was her mom, the neighborhood she grew up in, all white from a very young age.

Being black meant constantly explaining herself to the world.

My best friend was Sachem. He was a neighbor. And since my childhood I thought he was my brother because we were together all the time.

So in the street when somebody would ask me, Why are you black? He would say, No. One, She's my sister. Number two, she's black because her father was from Africa. And guess what? Everybody is black in Africa. And they would say, Yeah, but she was born in Moscow. She's supposed to be white. And she says, OK, Yelena, if somebody else ask you the question about Carla, we're just beating them right away.

So we were known in the neighborhood as the most cruel fighter who taught me how to fight.

He told me, you take a bottle, you break the bottle. And with this, whatever is left, you just put in this case. So we were, you know, bad kids in the neighborhood.

This was when she was only seven years old. So Russia wasn't some racism free utopia. People like you, Lena, obviously came up against what I would call racism.

But when I asked Lena about it, that was not racism. That was curiosity. That was ignorance, but not racism. This happened a lot. In our conversation, Ulyana would tell a story about some experience that sounded honestly horrible to me, but she'd always insist that it wasn't racism or discrimination. It was ignorance.

I think that ignorance can be and often is racism. But I didn't want to debate that fact so much as I understand how she thought about it. Other people commented on it, yeelanna.

Didn't think too much about the color of our skin when she was a child. She didn't feel different because she was black, but because her family came from America. It wasn't until she started thinking about boys and love that she thought more and more about the way she looked, how much she stood out from everyone else.

And I would ask my mother, Mom, why am I so ugly? Why is my nose so big? Why are my lips so huge?

And she was say, no, you're beautiful. And then she would ask her American friends to bring American magazines black and lovely. I think it was called black and lovely.

And my mom would show me those magazines, say, look, those beautiful women, you look just like them.

And I was take this. I was so proud. I would take this magazine, bring it to Sasha and other friends in the street and say, look, I'm just like them. And they would say, Yeelanna, this is a very strange magazine. Why is everybody black in it? Don't bring those magazines any anymore.

And I felt so lonely because I didn't have anybody just like me.

I had assumed that there would be a little community of all the black Russians that they'd stick together and hang out all the time. But it sounds like you didn't have that wasn't around people that looked like her, not even her mom. Really.

Lilly, it was much lighter and gorgeous, according to Lena. Just for the record, when I met Ulyana, I thought she was gorgeous, there's something regal about her. It's hard to imagine her as a self-conscious teenager, but she was my mother would always remind me, let's say she would tell me, be careful with boys.

They would not date you because they love you, but because they would want to try dating a black girl. And that's why my self-esteem was damaged, probably because I didn't trust any Russian guy that would approach me. And I didn't believe that somebody would fall in love with me at all.

Sincerely, I wanted to know the ways in which being black shaped Yelena's life in Russia. And to hear her tell it, her family was never denied an apartment because of their race.

She was never put into an inferior school because of her race. She was never singled out by law enforcement because of her race. There wasn't that kind of institutional racism, but she was lonely. She felt undesirable. Being black made it hard for her to imagine a future with a partner. So much of my conversation with her was about wanting to find her person, her strong desire to find someone and her fear that she wouldn't.

Despite her insecurities, Elaina was popular and accomplished, she took music lessons, spoke perfect English and was an excellent tennis player, just as her grandfather would have wanted.

Her mother constantly reminded her that she had to be better than everyone else. Apparently, you still have to be twice as good in the Soviet Union. She was recruited to play tennis at one of the country's top universities and accepted into their prestigious journalism program. She had so much going for her, but she still felt like no boy would ever want to date her until she met Vasya.

He was a chess champion. I'm go. Well, I started in Moscow State University, so I was a tennis player.

He was a chess player and we were a beautiful couple. And he had a very rough time dating me.

Mm hmm.

Then the coach, physical training coach of the university, called his parents and said, do you know that he's dating a black girl?

And they said, well, yes, why? What's wrong?

And this because she will get pregnant and she will marry him.

Then his parents called my mother and said, If you think that your daughter will make our son marry your daughter, you are wrong.

And then my mom said, if you think that my daughter will marry your son, you're damn wrong. There's no way. My gorgeous daughter every year. And it was just going back and forth, back and forth.

So he felt that he had to demonstrate that no matter what, he will be with me. Mm hmm.

So he started missing his glasses and he would come to my classes and sit there. So the teachers from his classes would write him, you'll have to attend, you have to attend.

Boom, boom, boom. So the end of the story was very sad.

He was kicked out of university classes and he was taken to the army where he had to go to the army.

Yeah, yeah. If you are kicked out of university, you have to go to the army. Wow.

So that was my first experience dating a Russian boy.

Yeah. A pretty dramatic end to a first relationship, but the drama didn't stop there for yeelanna. A few years later, she dated a Russian guy from Verona, a small town about a day's drive away from Moscow.

They went to visit his parents and stayed for the weekend. One morning she came back from the shower and her boyfriend's mother examining the bed sheets.

And later I asked my boyfriend, what was she looking? And he said, well, she never saw people of color. So she thought that the sheets be dirty and she was very surprised that they were clean. But again, it was not racism. It was pure ignorance, pure ignorance. And this woman adored me later. So but I felt that enough is enough.

And it's time for me to to be with people that knows who I am. Don't look at cheats. Don't ask stupid questions.

Something was missing for Lena in Russia, and like me and her grandparents, she decided to look elsewhere for answers. She thought she'd find them in the very country that her grandparents had fled America. Yelena had heard about American racism, but she still thought she would be better off in the USA.

When we saw Eddie Murphy, when we heard about Arthur Ashe, where we heard about those brilliant musicians and jazz musicians and all of them were black and very, very, very successful. So when my grandmother would start telling me about racism, I would say, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And think about all those very famous African-American athletes that would be laughing all the way to the bank. So I felt that I would be understood much better by people like me.

And in fact, yes, I was thinking I was dreaming about going to the United States and marrying an African-American when you pictured and dreamed of going to America.

What did that life look like? How would this guy look like in my dream, I said life, but I guess that's a good description of the guy.

Yeah, see, I was not really dreaming about skyscrapers and, you know, capitalism and all that.

I didn't understand about that, but I just felt that what's this song one day that he'll be tall and black.

And what song was that? I went to Your Prince will come the CBS.

Actually, it's the man I love. It's Gershwin, not Disney. But what do I know? My parents almost exclusively listen to Stevie Wonder's Inner Visions.

For most of my childhood, I was expecting to meet a prince that would look like me and he would look at me and say, Oh my God, you're so gorgeous.

Because even the guy that really, really loved me was in the university. He used to call me monkey. He called me monkey would love me.

He didn't realize that that was insulting. And I never told him that in America that would be insulting.

But, you know, in Russia, guys would call the girls a rabbit. I don't know my cat well, he called me my monkey. And I could explain to him that that was racist because I knew he was not a racist. That's just how he called me. And I felt, what if I looked like a monkey? And so what?

Wait, so this guy called you monkey and you didn't say like, hey, wait, that's not you can't do that. But he didn't insult me. He didn't mean to insult me. He loved me. And as I told you, he was punished for this. I don't know. I would have trouble with that one. I know.

I know. I know. It sounds terrible to. I know. Ulyana moved to America in 1989. She was 27 years old and she built a life for herself there. She worked as a journalist. She made friends, black friends. She loved to go to black churches and listen to gospel music live. She went to salons, actually knew how to style black hair, and she found her black Prince Charming. He was perfect.

He was perfect. He was playing tennis. He loved jazz. He liked classical music. He was just perfect for me.

They dated for a few years. Ulyana was sure he was going to propose. And then one night he invited her out to a fancy restaurant. So I got dressed and prepared.

I knew what how I will answer him.

So we go to this restaurant, very fancy restaurant and the reception, they tell us that we are sorry it is packed, but there's just one place near the bathroom and he says, no, no, no, we're not taking it. And I said, no, why not? He says, well, I want to sit near the window. I said, well, it doesn't really matter. Window, bathroom. I mean, it's clean. The food is the same because I want to hear the proposal.

Okay. I didn't care where we were sitting there. Yeah.

So he said no and he said, yeelanna, you don't understand. Our grandparents were fighting. They were dying for the right to sit at the window, not at the bathroom.

And I said, you know, in Russia, unless you bribe and you won't get a table regardless of your color, as long as you're green, you will get it. So please stop thinking, stop feeling so insecure. And he said, you know what? We would never understand each other. You're black outside, but you are white inside. You don't understand what we went through. And that was the end of our book.

Because at the end of your.

Yes, yes. Yes. Because it showed that we were so different and he said that we would never understand each other.

She agreed they had different pain points in Russia. She had an experience, a kind of institutional racism he had.

And she said her boyfriend couldn't possibly feel the things that upset her as a Russian the way she felt them.

Do you feel like you fully understand African-American, like the sort of like pain points are?

No, I understand them, but I don't feel them. That's the difference. The things that upsets, let's say, African-Americans.

I can see why that upsets, but it doesn't hurt anything to you, like your black on the outside, but you're white on the inside. What was your reaction to that?

I thought he was stupid.

I said, how could I be black and white inside? I am. I mean, I'm I am. And the things that I went through, you don't understand.

Did you guys ever talk about race before the argument that you had in the restaurant? Was that like a conversation you guys had are not at all.

No, he no, we didn't talk about that. No, what did it surprise you when it came up in the restaurant? Yes, it did. Because I still don't believe that if they didn't offer us a place near the window, it meant that it was racism, I still don't believe so.

So for you, it feels easier just to sort of give a little bit of the benefit of the doubt or be like, I can't I can't know for sure whether what the what the intention was.

So I said, sure. And I don't want to I don't want to think about it. I don't want to damage my nerve system by thinking about that. I will never know the truth, number one. Number two, it can be both. Number two, it can be both. And number three, what difference does it make?

So interesting that you say that just because I feel like it's a thing we do all the time in America is that we we replay out these moments of discomfort for each other in the black community over and over and over again. For what?

For what I know. Meaning what if you told me that I did that and as a result, as a result, this restaurant was closed, for example, or as a result, this waiter was kicked out? That makes sense. But why going through that again and again and again without any results? Why scratching the place? Still the first blood on your body.

But but I think part of the reason we do it is to recognize that like this this is still this is happening. Like we must acknowledge that this is happening. We can't pretend it's not happening.

Yes, I acknowledge it. But again, if I was, I would sit down at home and start. Oh, they did it because I'm Jewish. No, they did it because I'm black. No, they did it because my grandparents are American. No, they did it because of that. And that and that, you know, there's no end to that.

I think for many black Americans, there's a curiosity, a need to understand and explore that constant unease we experience because I'm black as my doctor, giving me proper care because I'm black. Am I here to fill a diversity quota because I'm black? Am I being pulled over part of what it means to be black here? Part of what draws us together is investigation of that discomfort. There's communal reassurance in that. I know that black people are not a monolith yet.

The fact that Ilina didn't have this curiosity surprised me, but it also made sense.

Yeelanna didn't have an echo chamber of injustices growing up. I can talk to my hairstylist, my trainer, my family, and say, hey, this thing happened.

Ulyana had no community to share with nobody to cosign her. Problems were not those of black people, but her own.

I want to be clear, being black is not some joyless exercise for me. I wouldn't trade it for the world. I'm not moping about, but your is right about one thing. Thinking about race all the time is exhausting, but I can't let it go. And I try to explain to her why I feel like part of it is like it.

All the small things that I feel like in some ways add up to one really big problem that just still hasn't been solved, that it's like it's small things that add up to feeling like you don't belong here, that like the country that you've always that you've always existed in like doesn't want you. And I, I don't know.

I had this I had this dream that, yes, somewhere there was another world where I belong to. And this is America now with you.

I don't understand where your dream house I don't know where I was.

I don't know. I don't know exactly.

Back to Africa. Right. Are you talking about going to Africa?

I don't even think it's necessarily back to Africa. I think I don't know if this place exist. I think it's just this this place in some ways still doesn't accept me after all of this this time and that maybe this is as good as it gets and maybe there isn't another place are a better option.

Do you do you think it's silly that I think about these things so much? Yes, I think that's silly that you think about it so much, there are more important things in your life that you you don't have to waste your time on things that you cannot change.

And you don't have to change those people if that's how they are that you don't.

I don't think you have to waste your life on changing them. You just drop them and go on with your your life. Don't worry about the things you cannot change. Sometimes I think Julian is right, that I'm silly for obsessing over this stuff and I wonder if maybe she's better off for not having spent her entire life puzzling and picking over every interaction with white people that maybe her grandparents moving to the USSR helped her bypass parts of America's particular brand of racism.

But maybe I never really had a choice. Race, specifically, black and white, is such an integral part of living in this country. Elaine insists I have bigger things to worry about, but honestly, I can't think of anything that affects me more. Being a black American is what keeps me from feeling like I truly belong in this country.

Have you ever felt like you belong somewhere like have you ever found that place? You know what, for me, it's not where it's more with whom, hmm, that's what was important for me.

When I lived in the United States, it was important that I was surrounded by people I really loved. It doesn't matter where I am. As long as I was surrounded by love, that's all that matters. I wish that surrounding myself with people I love solved my problem. I am surrounded by people I love. A lot of those people are black, and as long as I feel threatened on behalf of all of them, I can't stop wishing there was a better place for us.

Yelena's better place turned out to be right where she started, she lived in the USA for 12 years and might have stayed, but then she met her husband, a white Russian man, and they moved to Moscow, where he did treat her like a princess. It was hard to find a black salon in Moscow back then, so he would fly to Paris just to get her hair done.

Amanda Berry is the executive editor of our show, thanks to you. Senator McCaskill is making a documentary about black Russians that includes Yelena Hanga.

Coming up, a guy gets kicked out of a thing he had no idea he could get kicked out of. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

This American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today's program, get back to where you once belonged, stories of people who do not feel quite at home, where they are searching for their place.

And there are people Today Show is a rerun that first aired a year ago. We've arrived at Act two of our program Act to Nowhere Man.

So the story is about somebody who felt like he really had found his place in the world a job he was good at, good people that he liked and admired, and then he got kicked out and kicked out in this way. He didn't even know it was a possibility. Reporter Jeremy Raef explains. Raul Rodriguez is like a lot of the dads I grew up with in Texas, but somehow, even more so, he fixes his own truck, kills his own goats.

When you walk into his living room, there's two buck heads on the wall, a big TV.

And in the middle of it all, the thing he's most proud of on a little shelf encased in Plexiglas.

Uh, this is my Department of Justice badge or the immigration inspector badge.

That was it's kind of surprising that Raul ended up working for immigration, given how he first met those guys. He grew up in Mission, Texas, right by the border. He'd go back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. all the time.

And when he crossed the border, agents would always stop and bust his chops. Asked for his papers, he'd always show them, here's my birth certificate, born in Brownsville, Texas. But they were jerks about it by the time I was a teenager, he says it was like a ritual.

The officer usually kind of looks at you and starts saying, OK, what's your name? He says, you know, we're bringing you in here. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. He wanted to know if I'm a citizen or not, and this is what I am and said, well, we know you're not. And this is OK. Show me all you know we can show you. And and I thought, oh, come on, man.

I've been here many times and and it's not right for you to harass me like this. I don't know why I do. Because I look God, look, I don't look the part. I don't look as good as U.S. citizen enough as you want me to be. My features are very Hispanic, very Mexican.

Eventually, after a bit, they let him go every time.

He was going back and forth across the border so much because his parents were in Mexico and he lived with his aunt and uncle in Texas. It wasn't a great situation. His cousins never really accepted him. They'd beat him up at family functions.

His aunt and uncle would introduce their own kids first, then him. He says he was an afterthought at best.

I got a call from Bastad to go to a Negro because I was different from their color. That was very dark compared to them. They were very light skinned and I don't know what's what the translation would be in every model in, you know, what I'm talking about are in my little laboratory model. It's a relative that just stays there like a leech.

When Raul would visit his parents during the summers, he'd beg to stay. He hated living in Texas, but they always send him back. Your mom gave birth to you on the other side so you could be a citizen. They'd say it's going to be better for you there. Trust us. Eventually, Raul says it did get better after high school when he joined the Navy. The structure, the order, the authority, he liked it, which led him to law enforcement after the Navy, he became an immigration officer, just like the officers who harassed him when he was a teenager, even got assigned to the same bridge he used to cross.

Back then, some of the very same officers who doubted his citizenship were now his co-workers.

I had this one, inspector, that that there's a female. And when I showed up for work for the first day, I told her, remember me? And I don't remember you. You take me inside and you wanted to break me. And he says was I mean, oh, yes, you were very mean. Try to intimidate me a lot. And I'm sorry.

From the beginning, Raul was a very thorough officer. For example, one day this guy comes through who Raul knows really well, used to work with him at a furniture factory. I was like an uncle to him. He's coming from Mexico into the United States. Raul checks his papers and it turns out the guy had a tourist visa, which doesn't let you work. Raul revoked the visa, took it away, didn't let the guy in for a while.

At one point they called me whether gottschall kind of like pain in the ass because I won't let anything through. I had to do it. I didn't let anybody slack. Raul wasn't just throw his wife told me there are a lot of slugs in federal government, Raul wasn't one of them. He's an above and beyond guy, a stand out, and he stood out more and more because it's pretty well documented. Customs and Border Protection or CBP, had some ugly instances of corruption, bribery, drug smugglers infiltrating.

By contrast, Raul was a total Boy Scout, even won an award. In 2006, a woman approached him while he was buying cigarettes at the gas station. She asked him if he would look the other way while she smuggled in a kid and pushed a little piece of paper in his hand with her number on it. Rawles set up a sting and the next time they met, he wore a wire.

She was later arrested. CVP gave Rawat's Integrity Award one of their highest honors. His bosses flew him to Washington for a big ceremony. Raul got to wear his finest uniform. His kids were there. I got to see him walk across the stage and shake the commissioner's hand. And they gave him a plaque, which these days sits in a place of honor near the deer heads in his living room and in his personal life, too. He was totally by the book.

He was taught not to fraternize with anyone breaking immigration laws. It could cost you your job.

So you have to cut ties with anybody that's had that kind of a history while everybody has people who are illegally in the U.S. So you have to cut those out. Anyone who is close to who was undocumented, he cut out of his life friends, family members. Raul didn't make exceptions. Rawle found his home customs, it's actually remarkable how much Rowel refers to the people he worked with his family as a brotherhood.

I finally belonged to somebody to belong to something. And it feels good to to to be wanted to be accepted when you never did, when you were not cast or when you were just there. They did all the things families do, a combination of responsibilities, but also fun. They threw barbecues. They went to baptisms, birthday parties. They hung out all the time. Then one day in April, twenty eighteen, Raul goes in to work, he's starting his shift and I see the two managers come in and said, Oh man, there comes the two chiefs, because everybody be careful.

Make sure you're not on the phones and stuff like that. They go into the office. They set up, I guess, and I'm doing my work and stuff. And one of them comes out and says a little and come to the office.

Raul had no clue what this was about, but it looks serious.

They never called you just for nothing. And they don't come in twos just enough. They have to have a witness. They open up an envelope, and that's where it says it says it says we're going to have to pick up your gun, your weapon and your credentials. This is the paper says you're no longer as of the state law enforcement officer until four pending further further investigation in the investigation. What for? No, I'm not. I've never done anything wrong.

We don't know nothing about that. And this is we're just giving you the notice and here to pick up your weapon and your badge. And so I take off my belt and my belt and I take off my badge and I take out my credentials and I give it to Rawles.

Head was spinning. It worked there for 18 years. He was close to retirement. Had he done something illegal and not known about it, something small he'd forgotten about. He scanned his memory and he couldn't think of a single thing. I walked back out in the main office. Everyone was looking at him kind of sideways. I was embarrassed because I had to do that walk of shame, walk amongst my my fellow officers and without a badge and a gun.

And people were just looking at me saying, hey, what's wrong? What's wrong? I said, I don't know, man. I don't know.

He sat at his desk for a minute and then he called his wife. She works at another branch of Homeland Security. He was quietly freaking out.

So he went home. He and his wife went around and around trying to think of what it might be for the life of them. They had no clue.

About a week later, they, the OIG, the Office of Inspector General, wanted to meet with me at the courthouse building. They take us into a room, one of those typical cop rooms that has the small table and it has a dark window where they there they you know that they're watching you from the other side. So two agents come in and they read me my rights, so I thought, OK, this is criminal and so it is.

Are you familiar with this piece of piece of paper?

And they slide it over to me from his 18 years as a customs officer. He could tell right away what it was, a Mexican birth certificate.

I just didn't know whose it was until I actually read it. So I start reading. I see my name Raul Rodriguez, and I see my parents names, Francisca, Margarito and my grandparents names. And they are who? And they recognize anyone. I've never seen it, but I know that is mine because it's got my name, my parents names and my grandparents names. But I don't recognize the date of birth. It's a different one from the one I have now on this birth certificate.

Not only was this birthday different, but more importantly, so is this place of birth, a village outside of Matamoros, Mexico. If this thing was real, then Raul was not American.

Paul was confused. He had his birth certificate from Brownsville, Texas. He'd been using it his whole life, didn't make sense. The agents explained Raul had applied for a green card for his brother as part of the application process. They'd looked into Raul's own citizenship documents and in their research, they'd stumbled onto this this Mexican birth certificate. And here they were. Raul was like, look, this is not the first time someone scrutinized my citizenship.

We'll get to the bottom of it and clear it up, he told the agents. You know what? Let me get my dad in here right then and there.

He called his nephew, got him to drive his dad over the border. They all met just a few hours later at a Starbucks. Raul sat with his father and the two investigators at a table inside.

No one ordered coffee rolls.

Dad. Margarito told the investigators the story that Raul had always heard the Raul's mom crossed the border so he'd be born in Brownsville. Then the investigators showed him the Mexican birth certificate. Marguerita looked down at the table. He admitted that, yes, Raul was born in Mexico at home. Yes, his birth date was in nineteen sixty eight, not nineteen sixty nine. Yes, Raul was a Mexican citizen.

He had been texting me during the day.

That's throw his wife Anita, because Anita also works in immigration. She knew how serious this all was.

He texted me back a message that indicated that it was regarding his birth. So I said, well, where are you? And he told me where he was and I said, OK, I'm on my way.

She rushed over to the Starbucks and when I got to the location, him and his dad were walking out. They were both crying.

And I heard my father in law, Masago, telling him. Him to. Law is supposed to be in. I'm sorry, son, I did it for your benefit, and I just my heart sank. And I feel bad. Now, because I literally unloaded on my father in law, I told him off. And of course, that just says we just did we did it because we thought it was best for you to give you a better opportunity and he has had a great opportunity.

If it wasn't for what they did, I wouldn't have them and I wouldn't have my kids. I'm thankful for that.

But at any point, they could have said, wait, I need to tell you this. And they never did.

Raul's sister saw it differently. They don't blame their dad, Margarito. They tried to convince Firewheel that what their father did was forgivable, even understandable. Back then, unauthorised border crossings were an unremarkable fact of life. The border fence, the agents, surveillance blimps, that all came later, especially after 9/11. Marguerita told me he regrets getting the fraudulent birth certificate. Now he prides himself on being honest and he said he's ashamed to face Raul. But it didn't seem like such a serious offense at the time.

It's hard to get exact numbers, but one investigation in the 1990s found nine hundred fraudulent birth certificates registered by midwives in South Texas, same as Rawles. The undoing of Raul citizenship set off a chain reaction in his family. Raul's son, who he'd had from a previous marriage, had gotten his citizenship through Raul. Here's Anita again. What happens to him?

What happens to my daughter in law and my grandkids if he gets deported? People are thinking about that, you know, just that ripple effect.

Raul broke the news to his son, Raul Jr. that afternoon after he left the Starbucks. He explained the whole thing. Raul, citizenship is no longer valid. So neither was Raul Jr.'s. Now, they were both undocumented.

Incredibly, Raul Jr. had just applied to become a CBP officer himself. His interview is coming up in a couple of weeks. Now, of course, that wasn't going to happen.

Raul's lawyer told me that when someone like Raul signs up to serve in the government, like by joining the military or working for CBP, the government doesn't look too hard for reasons why they can't. It's when the person asks for something in return, like a green card for a brother. But the government takes a closer look. After that day at Starbucks, Roland Anita immediately made a plan for how to fix all of this could just apply for a green card because his wife is a citizen.

It would be a hassle, but they would get through it.

So they filled out the application and Raul and his Rauchway was super upfront about everything. He knew what he was up against. He'd made a false claim to U.S. citizenship, said he was an American when he really wasn't. But there's a clause in the US immigration code that says if you didn't do it knowingly, the government can exercise discretion. He and Anita were hoping that USCIS, the agency that issues green cards, would see this all as a big mix up, granting the exception and they would be done.

They thought it would happen quickly, actually, which wasn't the case for a long time. They didn't hear anything so long. They started to get nervous. They started to look for help from public officials. After all, Raul is a veteran law enforcement. They reached out to their congressman, then Ted Cruz, the senator. That's not the full list. Why?

I told them the other day, I said, you know why? I said we both voted for Trump. Why don't we call him and say, hey, help me out, Pres, I voted for you. I said, I know better not you might come down and deport you. And then where would we be?

Even as the AOC, the supporters. I sent her a message before we contacted you. She never responded.

Everywhere they looked, people were turning their backs. That thing about our customs officers aren't supposed to hang out with undocumented people. That was Raul now. So all his friends, the co-workers, he referred to his family, they almost all abandoned him. In theory, his wife, Anita, shouldn't even be hanging out with him. One person who did reach out to him, that lady who used to bust his chops in the bridge when he was a kid.

Raul explained to my producer, Nadia Reman, she thought I was having financial troubles.

And so she called me up and she offered to give me money.

But she didn't say anything to you about, like, your, you know, your citizenship or anything like that?

No, I told her. I told her. I guess you were right. Would she say she just started laughing?

She says, Cesira, well, don't say that.

Another friend who stood by Raul and still season is Johnny Garcia, the JAG. It's his initials. They met for breakfast at a Mexican place across the street from an immigration detention center for kids.

The JAG is allowed to see Raul because he's retired. U.S. Customs last year said it was too stressful. He wanted something more relaxed. So he became a drill sergeant at a boot camp for kids who get in trouble. They gossip about work, who got a promotion. But that guy with the dog breath about his hygiene.

OK, and the Jags encounter with that woman in the cargo lane, removal of al Qaeda.

And Lavinia's lawyer, Gloria, she slapped me. Oh, she did?

No. Yeah. Oh, she just lit up the freaking dynamite man.

I was coming back. So much drama.

Eventually, after about forty minutes, they finally started talking about Raul situation, about how he's afraid to even leave the house. Like right now, I don't have any status at all. If I can get stopped right now and I can get deported, pretty much all set up for deportation. I was it's it's on my side. It's a little bit more difficult to to to deal with because if I get stopped by one patrol, I know I'm a goner.

They will. I have no status. So right now, can I really go out? I go out but I, I'm looking over my shoulder.

I was like all these other businesses back in the same boat. Exactly.

Raul tells the JAG he's been waiting way too long for an answer on his green card. I'm starting to get really frustrated. He feels like the government singling him out because he was a customs officer.

He thinks they're trying to cover up that they employed an undocumented immigrant by mistake for so long.

He says this over and over, said to me lots of times, but the Jags, not sure he's right.

He says maybe the government wants to show they don't give anyone preferential treatment, unfortunately. And if it ever comes out, they're probably going to have to show that, you know, we just we gave him what he deserved, make everybody else, you know, why are we breaking the law? If we're going to give him an exception? Everybody is going to say, wait a minute, you can't do that.

Why the JAG does try to make Raul feel better. Tell them he's sure he'll get his citizenship eventually. Yes, I will. If he's talking to his dad, he isn't. The JAG says he should. But ultimately, what leaves an impression on me is that he talks about Raul's case like any other like an unfortunate undocumented person, I will sit there taking it all in, but looking like he doesn't really agree. Roland Annita had been waiting for nine months when they finally got called in for the green card interview, Anita said it was a jarring experience.

These were officers, like the guys they both worked with were the first ones to jump in when things got tough. They'd had each other's backs for years. If anyone would get that Raul had done nothing wrong, it would be them. But that's not what happened. We were treated like criminals.

They took a sworn statement from each of us. They took two from him like they were trying to trip him up or trip me up or something. And and I don't blame the specific officers that did the interview.

You do what you're told. If I didn't need my federal job. I would have told them all to go to hell. It's about as dramatic a reversal as you could imagine, Raul was a hard ass rule following law enforcement officer who learned he'd been violating the very rules he'd been enforcing for almost 20 years. Did it change him? Did he see things differently? Did the rules seem fair now that he's on the receiving end of them? We talked about this a lot.

Raul says the cases he's thinking about now are the ones where he stuck to the rules and didn't give people a break. And as a result, they suffered badly. Like there's this one case, a brother and a sister. They were both really young.

They were being smuggled. We had to, like, call the consulate and arrange transportation back to their home countries.

It turns out that this little boy was he was coming to donate an organ to a sister who was dying in Houston. He was going to donate his one of his kidneys and we couldn't even let him through. To save this little girl's life. And the little boy was like, man, I got to go, I have to go. And they said, no, we can't. And we had to turn back. He starts crying and crying and crying and.

And what's wrong? Hey, what's going on? Why are you crying? So I left my Bible over there. And we'll just give you another one. A no no, that's my Bible. Oh. At this point in the interview, Raul got out of his chair, got some water from the kitchen. I'm sorry, take your time with them. I mean, this stuff and I haven't cried in a long time to hear your good.

And we just had to turn them over and that was it, I felt like he was doing it for a good reason. It was doing something he felt he was doing something good and then he was being treated like a. Like that now. This is a story he's always felt bad about, but it feels worse now, I think in part because he can relate to the kid a little more to someone trying to do the right thing, caught on the wrong side of the rules.

It's also a story we're following. The rules makes you do a thing that also feels very wrong. You place a lot of faith in the rules. Yeah, because when you did these difficult things that you had to do, deport a teen or turn back this organ donor child, it was sort of like essentially the rules are the rules. I can't do anything about it. And now that you're on the receiving end of that, do the rules seem more arbitrary to you or meaningless than they used to?

No. They don't I still believe that the rules are the rules, they still apply and I have to abide by them. I still have to follow the rules, regardless of what the outcome is or what what happens. And that's the frustrating part, is that they they've gone overboard on my my case and my my my my situation. They're they're doing things differently with me because who I am, USCIS won't comment on ongoing cases, but I ran this by four immigration lawyers and they said everyone is being treated badly.

They didn't think Raul was being treated worse than anyone else. One in Texas who has a lot of experience in this exact kind of case said, sure, years ago Raul would have gotten a green card. But since President Trump, basically everyone with fraudulent birth certificates is denied. In fact, if anything, she said he's lucky they didn't lock him up or put him into deportation proceedings.

There's lots of ways this is hard for his wife, Anita. She told me she thinks a lot about how Raul never wanted to grow up in Texas with his and uncle and cousins, how if he'd had his way, he would have stayed in Mexico with his mom and dad working on the farm.

In the end, somehow the choices his dad made deprive drawl of a home on either side of the border.

All those years that my husband was here growing up with his aunt and uncle, suffering without his mom and dad, when he'd miss his mom, he'd always tell me I wish I had been born in Mexico because then I could have stayed with my mom and dad. And now at the age of 50, he finds out that he could have had that and they lied to him his entire time, it's like, no, what was it?

Because they didn't want me? Raul hasn't talked to his dad in months since that day at the Starbucks, it totally changes how I see him now to where I thought he was my hero. He was even though I didn't grow up with them, I took them to heart. I strongly believed in what he told me, what he said. And one of the things was that that bear be as honest as you can. I don't know I don't know if.

I don't know if I'll ever see my dad again after this. Has he reached out? No, not at all. I don't I don't think I want to see him ever again. Months tick by than a year, but no decision by the government about Rawles Green card application. Then on October twenty ninth of last year, Raul got a letter from the government, his green card application was denied. They said Raul had made a false claim to U.S. citizenship, said he was an American when he really wasn't.

It also pointed out that he'd committed voter fraud by voting as an undocumented immigrant. Of course, Rawl thought he was a citizen at the time. He thought voting was the right thing to do.

Raul's world has shrunk down to a few acres that he and Annita own, he keeps goats, cattle, bunch of chickens. He watches the news in the morning while he walks on the treadmill.

His badge, an integrity award, are still above the TV. He and Anita had dreamed of retiring in their 50s and driving around the country in an RV, maybe visiting their kids at college or on a base if they decided to join the military. Now they can't leave town. There are border patrol checkpoints on all the major roads heading out of the valley. After a career of working double shifts and overnights, he finally has time to himself to think maybe too much.

The stress of being undocumented is getting to him. He only sleeps for two or three hours at a time.

He and Anita started fighting Rawal worried for a while they were headed for divorce. His lawyer told me that Raul could be in this limbo for three or four more years before exhausting his appeals.

Raul told me he's thought of just giving up and leaving. It would be drastic, but it would bring this to an end. If the courts ultimately deny him a green card and he's ordered to leave the country, he told me he would go, he'd obey the law. He said, I'm going to practice what I preach. He'd moved to Mexico as a former border officer who'd arrested smugglers, confiscated loads of drugs. He's worried the cartels might come after him.

They would still see him as a US Customs and Border Protection guy, the way he wishes everyone else would. Jeremy Raef, yes, he did a print version of the story and a short video documentary where you can see where we're going to need to to the Atlantic website, to this story first aired last year.

Rural's situation hasn't changed because of the pandemic, his appearance before an immigration judge was pushed back from October last year to April this year.

Where should I go if I don't belong? Where should I go if I don't?

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