Gaby Fernandez Sanchez

When I was 15, our car got hijacked at gunpoint.

It was my parents, my brother and I, we were on our way to a birthday party that my mom had baked and decorated the cake for.

We stopped to put gas and two men with guns came at us on either side and took everything including the car itself.

Once the shock wore off, we realized that we were all standing at a gas station and my mom was still holding the cake.

That was the tipping point for my family and my parents decided it was time to leave Venezuela to escape the dictatorship and the violence under the Chavez regime.

So in 2001, we packed our bags and we came to America.

The immigration process is a complicated process and they don't give papers to just anybody.

I know, shocker.

Luckily, my mom is an amazing teacher and she was able to get her work visa sponsored by a school in Florida.

Now because my brother and I were minors, we were also protected under her visa.

This means the only member of our family that was not protected under this visa umbrella was my father.

My father is a photographer and he is originally from Spain.

Because Spain and the US are allies, Spaniards can come into the country for three months without a visa.

So during that move, we figured we have three months to sort this out.

We started to figure out his green card process, and we were very, very, very fortunate to be able to hire an immigration lawyer, a luxury that very few immigrants in this country can afford.

The lawyer said to us that my dad would have to leave the country and come back in to get another stamp on his passport.

No big deal.

He left for a couple of weeks to Spain.

The day that he was supposed to arrive, I came home from school and the phone was ringing, so I ran to pick it up.

They asked for my father.