This is the painful calculus of American immigration policy — a patchwork of executive actions that bring relief to a chosen few, while millions more are subject to increasingly cruel forms of immigration enforcement. Broadly speaking, enforcement comes in two forms: an explosion of border patrol that creates border detention camps, and makes crossing ever more dangerous for migrants, and deportations in the interior that rip families like mine apart. While the political debate over immigration moves in an ever more ethnonationalist direction, few understand the brutal reality of our current immigration system — and what deportation actually means for my family and thousands of families like mine who are currently fighting to stay together.

But as one administration after another failed to pass comprehensive legislation that would allow immigrants to apply for legal permanent residency, the immigration enforcement system grew ever crueller. Republicans, now calling for mass deportations, have become increasingly extremist, while Democrats have tracked them to the right. The Clinton administration expanded temporary protections for immigrants from certain countries, while criminalizing immigration and making it more difficult for most undocumented immigrants to adjust their status. The Obama administration enacted the DACA program, which allowed 800,000 undocumented youth to apply for temporary status, while deporting a record 3 million immigrants. As politics on immigration move further to the right, smaller and smaller segments of the community are granted fragile, temporary status, while the majority are criminalized and threatened with imprisonment and deportation.

The only way to break this vicious cycle is to demand the obvious: a path to legal status and permanent protection from deportation for the millions of us who have built families and a life in the United States. Anything less rips children away from their parents and destroys communities.