Jessica Mejía and her family had a good life in Colombia. They owned an electronics business and traveled to Houston every year, where they stayed with Mejía’s older sister Nataly, who had moved to Texas to study English at Houston Community College.
Mejía, her parents and her younger brother would stay for a month, eating out and shopping at Ross or Marshalls before flying back home to Medellín.
Everything changed in 2012, when a criminal group in Medellín approached Santiago, Mejía’s younger brother, demanding that he pay them for “protection.” Santiago, who earned a living by purchasing electronics in the U.S. and reselling them, refused to pay.
The gang shot him to death.
The men who killed Santiago then called Mejía’s mother, Carmen Ramírez, demanding that the family pay protection money or they were next. When Ramírez reported the extortion to police, a prosecutor advised her to leave the country, Ramírez and Mejía said.
But Mejía discovered that her brother’s murder and the death threats weren’t enough to claim asylum in the U.S. — they needed to prove a fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.
Fearing for their lives, Mejía and her mother used their tourist visas to flee to Houston. Her father decided to stay behind, Mejía said. When their tourist visas expired, they remained in Houston as undocumented immigrants.
That’s when they began a long and expensive path to getting legal status in the U.S. More than a decade later, Mejía and Ramírez are legal permanent residents — both have what’s commonly known as a green card — and are on a path to obtaining U.S. citizenship after navigating what most U.S. elected officials acknowledge is a broken system.
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