Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers pursue a man in Houston in July. The surge in deportations harkens back to the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, when an estimated 1.8 million people of Mexican descent were deported or left the country under threat of deportation.

When I bought my home in Seattle, I wanted privacy. A backyard that felt like an exhale, where I could step outside and feel like I was enclosed by green arms, wrapped in a hug of wildlife.

Mine came with a neglected yard fenced on three sides by solid cedar planks and a single weak point: the northern property line, where a chain-link fence offered little more than the illusion of separation from the family who lived on the other side. 

Sometimes I’d catch eyes with the parents and wave, but mostly they kept to themselves, displaying a kind of careful distance I recognized.

Article continues below this ad

Children, on the other hand, have a way of moving through boundaries as if they aren’t there.

It didn’t matter if I walked outside with earbuds or if I exaggerated the gesture of popping one of them out of my ear to say “huh?” whenever the daughter, Ani, who is 6, asked me what I was up to. I could never go long in the backyard before she or her brother, Neymar, who is 8, would venture outside and peer through the open diamond shapes of the fence’s woven metal wires.

One day I was........

© San Francisco Chronicle