U.S. Department of Homeland Security

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security enters the Kingsley family’s story as the federal authority attached to the discovery and enforcement of their undocumented status. Its most concrete appearance is a Notice to Appear sent after Samuel Kingsley’s arrest; the family’s subsequent removal proceedings culminate in an order to leave the United States. The department’s presence is consequential but not omnipotent in the account: Natasha Kingsley seeks help at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, while an immigration judge, rather than Homeland Security itself, decides whether the family’s case can proceed and later refuses to overturn the voluntary departure order.

Appearance in the Kingsley Case

The family’s vulnerability begins with a move from South Korea to the United States. Min Soo Bae and Dae Hyun Bae immigrate believing that a cousin in New York City will help them establish a life there; they adapt and prosper, but the family’s later security remains contingent on its undocumented status. By the time Natasha is a teenager, she understands that the family is to be deported that night. The department becomes part of her immediate crisis not as an abstract government name but as the power behind the possibility of losing the only home she knows.

The triggering disclosure follows Samuel’s night of acting success. He drinks with his new actor friends, crashes his car into a parked police car, and tells the responding officer the family’s immigration history. The officer arrests him and calls U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A few weeks later, the family receives a Notice to Appear from Homeland Security. The sequence links a single drunk-driving incident to the exposure of the whole household’s status: Samuel’s criminal mistake is his own, Natasha insists, yet its consequences extend to his wife and children.

Administrative Process and Legal Limits

The family’s case proceeds through immigration hearings rather than through a direct decision by the department. At a Master Calendar Hearing, the judge gives the family the choice of voluntary departure or pursuing Cancellation of Removal. Samuel initially rejects voluntary departure. The family then researches the relief option and hires the cheapest lawyer it can find, hoping that Peter Kingsley’s United States citizenship can help demonstrate extreme hardship. The application fails: the judge does not accept that returning to Jamaica would put Peter’s life in danger, and the family’s argument about the psychological harm of uprooting him does not secure relief.

After the judge denies the case at the Merits Hearing, Samuel accepts voluntary departure. Natasha argues for an appeal, but the family’s lawyer says there is no viable case and recommends leaving voluntarily rather than acquiring a deportation on their records, preserving some hope of returning one day. The distinction matters to the story: Homeland Security initiates the notice that brings the family into proceedings, but the judge rules on the requested relief, and the family’s lawyer advises them about the consequences of their remaining choices.

Natasha’s attempt to find another route underscores the limits of what she knows about the system. On the day she is due to leave, she goes to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services building in downtown Manhattan, hoping someone there can help. At Jeremy Fitzgerald’s law office, she learns that USCIS is not the proper jurisdiction for the problem. The attorney later tells Daniel Jae Ho Bae that the judge would not overturn the voluntary departure order. In the novel’s account, the institutions are not interchangeable: Natasha’s desperate appeal to USCIS cannot undo the decision made in her removal case.

Consequences for Natasha and Her Family

The immigration process shapes Natasha’s practical future well before the final departure. She is in her senior year, wants to attend prom and graduation with her friends, and has begun preparing an application to Brooklyn College. Her mother has spent two years saving for a trip to Florida to obtain a Social Security card bearing stolen numbers, which Natasha needs to apply for financial aid. The card is not a secure solution; it is a costly workaround that might let her pursue college, contingent on receiving aid and a scholarship. The removal case threatens not only a place to live but a future she has only just begun to plan.

The legal forms make this pressure visible in smaller, procedural details. At Fitzgerald’s office, Natasha spends at least fifteen minutes completing paperwork, including questions about whether she is a communist, criminal, or terrorist and whether she would take up arms to defend the United States. She checks yes to the last question despite saying she would not. A client questionnaire asks her to account for her time in the country; the paralegal says that material explaining what America means to her, why she wants to stay, and how she might contribute could help Fitzgerald humanize her. The request turns her attachment to the country into something she must formulate for a legal case.

The family’s immigration history also complicates the meaning of home and return. Natasha has lived in the United States since she was eight and says she does not know anyone in Jamaica or know her relatives there in the way she believes family should be known. The country to which the family is expected to go is therefore not, for her, a familiar home waiting to receive her. Her family’s case ends through voluntary departure, but the word voluntary sits uneasily beside the narrow options described: accept departure, pursue a difficult form of relief, or appeal a loss that their lawyer says cannot be won.

Narrative Significance

The novel makes Homeland Security’s role legible through a chain of ordinary-seeming documents and decisions: an officer’s call to immigration enforcement, a Notice to Appear, hearings, and a final departure order. That chain brings federal authority into the private consequences of Samuel’s crash, reaching a daughter who did not cause it and whose school plans, friendships, and attachment to home are nonetheless at stake. The process is not presented as a single, all-purpose agency decision; its effects are distributed across enforcement, the court, legal advice, and Natasha’s unsuccessful attempt to seek help elsewhere.

The department’s authority also shapes the novel’s contrast between legal outcome and imagined rescue. Daniel once jokes in his thoughts about a headline in which a teenager defeats an Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through a last-minute loophole and lives happily ever after with his true love. The narrative immediately rejects that fantasy: no loophole stops Natasha’s departure. The contrast gives the agency’s presence a precise narrative weight. It is the institutional force against which the characters’ hopes are measured, while the story refuses to turn the removal process into a last-minute romantic escape.