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My father was a journalist.

I wrote a techno song after I was deported. I was in America for a little bit, but then I was deported back to Germany. I was very sad.

You can't undo a deportation.

My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.

My father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, was preparing a fraudulent marriage to an American citizen as a route to this country when he was sponsored, making fraud unnecessary. My wife's grandfather bought papers from another Chinese villager to be able to come to the United States.

Deportation isn't something that is suddenly new.

I never, ever, had a person who could come up with the name of a person who could not get a job because an illegal immigrant had stepped in front of them, because it was either a job that person didn't want to do or didn't exist.

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.