Natasha goes to the Fitzgerald law office

Natasha goes to the Fitzgerald law office on the day her family is due to leave the United States, hoping to find a way to remain in the only home she knows. The visit turns that urgent hope into paperwork, explanation, and a delayed meeting: Jeremy Fitzgerald is in the hospital after a car accident, and the legal process Natasha hopes to interrupt has already narrowed her family’s choices. Her attempt makes visible both the personal stakes of deportation and the procedural chain that has brought her there.

Reasons for Seeking Help

Natasha leaves home for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services building in downtown Manhattan, though her family is undocumented and due to be deported that night. She does not believe in fate, but desperation makes her willing to seek help wherever it might be found. After failing to get a solution there, she goes to the Fitzgerald office for an appointment, carrying the prospect of departure into another institution with the hope that someone can still intervene.

The urgency is intensely personal. Natasha has lived in the United States since she was eight, and Jamaica is a country she does not know in the way she knows Brooklyn, her friends, and the ordinary milestones of her senior year. She has only recently begun preparing an application to Brooklyn College. Her mother saved for two years to travel to Florida and buy a stolen-number Social Security card that could pass background checks and college applications, giving Natasha a chance to apply for financial aid and possibly afford an in-state school. The threat of removal therefore interrupts not an abstract future but a set of plans already being assembled under difficult conditions.

Natasha also connects the family’s predicament to her father’s DUI. At the office, she resists the idea that his mistake should determine her future: she sees his offense as his responsibility, while the consequences reach the daughter who calls America home. In her account, the chain is stark: her father’s night of public attention led to the DUI, which exposed the family’s immigration status and put her home at risk.

The Delayed Appointment

At the office, a staff member recognizes Natasha and tells her that Jeremy Fitzgerald has been in a car accident an hour earlier. His wife has said he is fine, with only a few bruises, but he will not return until late afternoon. Natasha has arrived for an appointment and urgently needs help; the news that the lawyer is unavailable leaves her with no immediate answer. The office continues around her: workers drill and hammer while she moves closer to the desk to hear what is being said.

Instead of meeting with Jeremy at once, Natasha is handed forms. She spends at least fifteen minutes completing them. One asks variations on whether she is a communist, a criminal, or a terrorist, and whether she would take up arms to defend the United States. Although she says she would not, she checks yes. Another form asks what has happened in the deportation process. The final questionnaire calls for a full account of her time in the country, a demand that makes her confront how much such an account might include: the family’s arrival and concealment, the false Social Security number on school forms, and her mother’s journey to Florida to obtain a card with usable stolen numbers.

The staff member tells Natasha that the questionnaire needs more about what America means to her, why she wants to stay, and how she would contribute to the country. She explains that anything Jeremy can use to humanize Natasha may help. The request makes belonging something Natasha must argue for in writing, even though people born in the United States do not have to prove that they are worthy of living there. Natasha responds by describing herself as hardworking, optimistic, and patriotic, and by writing that America is already her home in her heart. Citizenship, she says in her account, would legalize what she already feels. The exercise requires her to translate a lived attachment into a case for a legal reader.

The Family’s Case

When Jeremy later discusses the file with Natasha, the paperwork opens onto the history of the family’s proceedings. After her father’s arrest, the family received a Notice to Appear from the Department of Homeland Security and attended a Master Calendar Hearing. The judge offered a choice between Voluntary Removal and filing for Cancellation of Removal. Natasha’s father did not accept voluntary departure at that hearing, so he and Natasha’s mother researched whether the family could qualify to stay.

Their strategy rested in part on Peter’s United States citizenship. He was born almost exactly nine months after the family moved to the country, when Natasha’s parents were still happy together. To obtain Cancellation of Removal, her father needed at least ten years of residence, good moral character, and proof that deportation would cause extreme hardship to a qualifying United States citizen spouse, parent, or child. The family hired the cheapest lawyer they could find and brought that argument to a Merits Hearing, but the judge denied their case. Peter’s citizenship did not establish the required hardship: returning to Jamaica was not judged to endanger his life, and the psychological harm of uprooting him from his home did not persuade the court.

Natasha had argued that the family should appeal. Their lawyer advised against it, saying they had no case and were out of options. Leaving voluntarily, the lawyer explained, would avoid a deportation on their records and preserve some hope of returning one day. Natasha’s father accepted Voluntary Removal after the denial. By the time Natasha seeks Jeremy’s help, therefore, the family’s situation is not simply an initial application awaiting review; it is the aftermath of a failed case and a choice made under legal pressure.

Hope and the Outcome

The staff member offers Natasha cautious reassurance, saying she has seen many cases like this and thinks Natasha will be okay. The reassurance is enough to produce a moment of hope, though Natasha remains skeptical and wants to know whether Jeremy can truly help. Her visit thus holds two competing realities at once: the forms invite her to make a fuller case for belonging, while the history she must disclose records how little the family’s previous arguments changed the legal result.

Jeremy’s eventual effort does not reverse that result. He is unable to persuade the judge to overturn the Voluntary Removal, and Natasha is still due to be deported that night. The failed intervention completes the movement begun at the office: an urgent appeal for help meets a process whose prior decisions have already constrained the available choices. The visit matters not because it secures Natasha’s stay, but because it brings her personal account into contact with the formal record and exposes the gap between feeling at home and having the legal standing to remain.