What worries me most, if they deport my undocumented parents and two brothers, is that I’m not old enough to work. I couldn’t stay in Chicago with my three siblings who are U.S. citizens because no one would give me work. Our family would be destroyed.

Who would take care of my brothers and sisters? Who would take them to school? Who would cook for them and wash their clothes if my mom isn’t here?

Who would buy our school supplies and pay the rent if my dad isn’t here?

If they deport my parents and my two older brothers, who were born in Mexico and came here when they were babies, it’s as if they were deporting all of us. Then the eight of us would have to go to Michoacán, México. It would be terrible because we don’t have a house there. My dad wouldn’t have work and we don’t know anybody.

We wouldn’t know how to communicate with the teacher in school because our Spanish isn’t very good. My little brothers and sisters don’t speak it at all.

If we go, we would be behind in school because the subjects aren’t the same. I think we would be all right only in math, but in social studies, history and other subjects we would be really bad off.

But the worst of all would be that in Mexico we wouldn’t have health insurance, and my older brother has to be checked by a doctor regularly to make sure his kidney transplant is working properly.

My brother’s health would be at risk because here he has all the medical care he needs, even though he wasn’t born here. There he wouldn’t. Even though he’s Mexican, he wouldn’t have health insurance.

My parents are also worried. They always tell us the truth. They tell us, the older kids, that there is a possibility that they will deport the four of them.

Besides our normal concerns, like school and home responsibilities, that fear is always present in our lives – the possibility of being left alone in Chicago or going to a place that, as they say, doesn’t offer as many possibilities for getting ahead as in the United States.

My family has mixed status, since four of us were born here and four were born over there.

But we are not the only ones. There are a lot of families like mine. And they aren’t just Mexican or Latino. Other nationalities, like Asians and European, also face immigration problems.

My family hopes that an amnesty is approved, although we don’t know how we would do it since we don’t have money to pay the fine. There are four of us, and we would need more than $10,000 to take care of it.

Meanwhile, we can’t live in anguish. We can’t plan the future. My parents can’t travel to Mexico because if they go, they won’t be able to come back.

I don’t think it’s fair. In the end, four of us are American citizens and all we’re asking for is to live with our parents and siblings in the same country.