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Meet the Fofanasa Baltimore family facing a constant threat of deportation. Their story, which features three distinct immigration battles within one household, shines a light on the complexities of the U.S. immigration system and the challenges facing reform.

Macky Fofana, 21, spends his days flipping pizza dough and his nights searching for news on immigration reform. His soft-spoken brother Mohamed, 14, is a middle-school basketball star. And then theres 17-year-old Ramata, fashionista and high school track athlete, who cooks dinner for her two brothers in their three-bedroom Baltimore apartment every evening while their mother and father work.

Macky was recently granted a permit to work here legally under an Obama administration rule issued last summer. Mohamed is, for all practical purposes, without a legal status. Ramata has permission to stay in the U.S. temporarily, due to a judges ruling that if she were to return to her native country, shed almost certainly be pressured to undergo female circumcision. And this year marks the tenth timebut not the lastthat parents Coumba Konte and Aliou Fofana must reapply for permission to continue raising their three children in the U.S.

For an individual, attaining U.S. citizenship can be like groping through a maze. For the Fofana family, and the 16 million others living in mixed-status families in the U.S., becoming part of the American dream requires navigating several different mazes, the paths of which are constantly changing. The family arrived in the U.S. more than a decade ago, and while each family members goal is the same to achieve American citizenship their roads to get there are strikingly different.

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Defying Tradition

Coumba, 50, remembers the precise moment her daughters secret was discovered. It was 2001. Her mother-in-law was bathing then 4-year-old Ramata, in their rural town in southwestern Mali, when she realized the girls clitoris was still intact.

Her relatives were furious, Coumba says, and accused her of shaming them by going against tradition in a country where more than 80 percent of women across all swaths of social stature and education levels undergo female genital mutilation, most of them at a young age. The most common form involves cutting off the clitoris with a saw-toothed knife, and Coumba, who was circumcised herself as a child and describes the still-lingering pain as unbearable, says she couldnt stand to watch her daughter grow up the same way. Instead, she and her husband lied and said their daughter had the procedure done shortly after her birth.

Ramata sits in her room in Baltimore with her brother Mohamed. Photo by Ruth Tam

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The almost American family