By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

In the living room of the Kennett Square home of Lucia Ramirez and Raymundo Ayllon, there are delicately placed reminders that give generous recognition to the life they have lived and the family they have raised.

In the corner of the room, four photographs of their children Lucy, Nancy and twin sons Juan Carlos and Jose Antonio display smiles beneath graduation mortar boards, and in every other corner there are moments of a family caught in forever frames and all of it – every child, every grandchild – is lightly complimented by the subtle trinkets that tell of their Mexican heritage. 

In many ways, the story of the Ayllon-Ramirez family is not unlike the one told in every other household in America, but the purpose of a reporter’s visit last week was to document the journey it took for the family to get there and succeed.

In the late 1980s, Raymundo and Lucia were raising their young children in the small town of Pachuquilla nestled in the mountains of the State of Mexico. Lucy was eight, Nancy was six and the twin boys, Jose and Juan, were four. The prospects they had were limited by the economic hardships of the country, heightened by the Mexican Peso Crisis of the 1990s that destabilized the country’s financial markets. The crisis cut deep into Mexico’s socio-economic fabric and led to shifts in monetary policy, currency devaluation and widespread public discontent. 

The oldest of ten children, Raymundo began working as a teenager in Mexico to help support his parents and his nine siblings. In 1979, when he was 17 years old, he left for Kennett Square and there, he met his hometown neighbors and cousins, each of whom had already secured jobs in the mushroom industry. He saw prospects there - a job that would help him take care of his family.

In 1993, Raymundo drove his young family across the U.S. Mexican border, first to see Raymundo’s aunt in California, and then the family boarded a plane for a cross-country trip to Pennsylvania. When they first arrived in Chester County, they lived at the mushroom farm Raymundo worked at in New Garden Township.

“Our dream was to be able to have our family someday have a better life than we were living at the time in Mexico,” Raymundo said. “It’s hard to think about what our lives would be like if we stayed in Mexico.”

Assimilation into a new culture

The Ayllon-Ramirez’s journey to Chester County was assisted by the Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed into law in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan. The Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1984, and saw nearly three million people apply for legalization. Ultimately, 2.7 million people were ultimately approved for permanent residence. 

Raymundo Ayllon and Lucia Ramirez and their children were among them.

“My father was able to obtain his permanent status through the act, and based on him obtaining his green card, he was able to petition for his family to become lawful permanent residents, and eventually U.S. citizens,” Nancy said.   

The Ayllon-Ramirez’s assimilation into American life was challenged by not knowing the English language, nor many of the everyday customs that were so familiar to those who were born here. The Mexican population in the Kennett Square vicinity at the time was a mere fraction of what it is today. The children received a crash course in English by a neighbor at the mushroom farm the summer before they began school.

“Everything was different,” Lucy said. “It was a complete shock, coming to a new country and not knowing the language, but we learned English fast. We assimilated to change far more quickly than if we were adults.” 

“My first memory in the United States was when my father opened up the car door and we were there,” Juan Carlos recalled. “It was easier for us because kids are like sponges. It became even easier to assimilate when we began going to school.” 

While Raymundo continued work in the mushroom industry - where he remained for 27 years -  Lucia worked for 30 years in a variety of jobs, often two at a time – at a hotel, in the mushroom industry, and at a local textile company and cleaning homes and offices. While moving through the Kennett Consolidated School District, each of the Ayllon-Ramirez children began to learn life lessons passed down to them from their parents.

“When we first arrived in the U.S., there were not many other families who had immigrated from Mexico, but when they began arriving and if they were from our small town in Mexico, my father was one of the first people they would call if they needed something,” Juan Carlos said. “I’ve always admired that of him. Even on the worst of weather days, my father worked seven days at a time, and my mother worked to take care of us, and I admire that in both of my parents.”

“As I got older, I began to realize that I could not imagine myself moving with my family to another country and not knowing the language, not knowing the culture, and having to figure out everything from scratch,” Lucy said. “Sometimes I put myself in my mother’s shoes, and I don’t know how she did that. It is amazing to me to know that she made a decision to grab her children, move and leave all she knew behind. The older we get, the more we appreciate what they did for us.” 

In 2003, ten years after they first arrived in the U.S. with four young children and the few possessions they brought with them, the Ayllon-Ramirez family purchased and moved into the home Raymundo and Lucia still live in.

‘I’m scared for everyone’

Following her graduation from Widener University Delaware Law School in 2016, Nancy has been the principal attorney at the Ayllon-Ramirez Law Firm in Kennett Square, where she specializes in immigration and family law. After a career in mortgage banking and the insurance industry, Lucy, whose husband Sergio is a supervisor in the local mushroom industry, is a legal billing coordinator at her sister’s law firm. Jose Antonio, a resident of Oxford, works for a utility company and Juan Carlos has been a U.S. Marine for the past 17 years and is currently stationed in North Carolina. 

The opportunities the Ayllon-Ramirez family received through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 represent a radically different way of life when compared to recent legislation and initiatives put forth by the U.S. government that seek to remove as many as 11 million undocumented citizens from the country. First launched as a concept during his announcement to run for the U.S. presidency in 2016, President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement plans were instituted on the day of his inauguration and are now fully underway. On Jan. 26, just six days after Trump’s inauguration, Immigrant Enforcement Protection (ICE) began deportation operations in Chicago, Atlanta, Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, Texas and, as of March 5, when ICE officials detained three employees at a tire store in Kennett Square, the operation has extended its efforts in Chester County. 

Repeatedly, Trump has said that while undocumented residents accused of crimes will be the initial targets for deportation, all undocumented residents who are in the U.S. illegally could be subject to deportations. For Nancy, witnessing the impact of the deportation efforts has had on her clients is reverberating throughout the area, and that her most difficult task of her role as an immigration attorney is to say to an undocumented resident that they have no legal recourse. Since opening her firm in 2021, she has had over 900 consultations, and her active caseload now numbers between 200 and 300, assisted by Lucy and her two staff members. Nancy said that among the chief concerns of her clients is to be separated from their children who were born in the U.S., the safety of their assets and the future of the homes they have purchased.

“Before Jan. 20, their belief was to raise their families, work and make sure they were okay, but after Jan. 20, the rhetoric and the hate and the way things are being implemented is causing so much fear and concern in our community, and for the immigrants in particular,” she said. 

While she acknowledges that these undocumented residents have arrived in the U.S. without authorization, Nancy said that these residents have both “human” and “civil rights.”

“Regardless of how they entered the United States, if they have no prior orders for removal, they have the right to be heard by an immigration judge, to determine whether they are allowed to remain in the U.S or be deported to their country,” she said. “They have rights like any citizen who is facing a court proceeding. They have a right to an attorney, to have an attorney present before they sign anything, and they have the right to their day in court.”

The path to U.S. citizenship for an undocumented resident is even more complicated, she said, a process that could take as many as seven years, and sometimes more than ten years. 

“With this administration, we could add several more years to processes,” Nancy said. 

Fear and hope

By definition and in practice, the Ayllon-Ramirezs are huggers, readily open to embrace – an act made stronger by the presence of four grandchildren who listen to the discussion – three that join the conversation and one, Nancy’s two-year-old daughter, who is napping in another room. Everything spoken about and shared, be it their migration to the U.S. over 30 years ago or what they are witnessing their fellow Hispanic neighbors endure, documented or undocumented – is funneled through the common thread of family - even their fears and their hopes.

“At the law firm, it’s honestly shocking to see how drastically things have changed from Jan. 19 to Jan. 20, [the day that Trump took office as the 47th president],” Nancy said. “It’s very frightening, and it’s not just those who have no status and have had contact with law enforcement. I’m honestly scared for everyone - my father and my husband, who both work in landscaping – to think that they are targets for any individual who is making assumptions that because they are doing his work, they are undocumented. It’s my fear that anyone will be targeted, questioned and picked up, just because they won’t have their U.S. passport or proof of their lawful status in hand when they are working.”

“My fear is about the imagery that is being shown, the message it conveys to see multiple black ICE SUVs picking up one person,” Jose Antonio said. “It creates an ideology that says, ‘You don’t belong here.’ Parents and households then talk among each other and their children overhear them and then go to school and see the Hispanic kids. It hurts me to know that children all around the country are being discriminated against for their looks and my children are included.”

Lucy said that over the past two months, random strangers have entered the law firm and asked if they could be of any help to the families who are facing deportation.

“They ask us what they can do to lessen the burden on these families,” she said. “The picture that is being put out to the public is a scary one – that suggests that everyone who is undocumented is a bad person. Because we are Mexican, we are often placed in a bubble, and I don’t want anyone to say anything bad to my parents or any member of my family, should they encounter people who are ignorant of the immigration process.”

Nancy said that her fear lay in the insinuation by the Trump administration that suggests that responsibility for deportation efforts control could eventually be passed down to local governments and police departments.

“That fear is getting closer and closer to us,” she said. “The hope I have, however, is bigger than the fear, especially because we have the support in our community. I see hope in the form of our younger generations, those who are coming up behind us, for whom we hope to have been influences. It is my hope that they create significant change in the future.”

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].