With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man's attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. He tells of his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives, of his father's deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and his mother's decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor. This book distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines, and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.