DIANE GUERRERO ON PARENTS TAKEN AWAY

In the Country We Love: My Family Divided

In the new issue of Marie Claire Orange Is the New Black star, Diane Guerrero, was a teenager when her parents were taken away. Now she's using her painful past to battle on behalf of the undocumented.​

In 2001, when actress Diane Guerrero was just 14 years old, her parents, who had left the poverty and corruption of Colombia for the United States in 1981, were deported along with her older half brother. The American-born Guerrero stayed behind with family friends to attend high school and college, paying her way with help from her parents and after-school jobs.

After years of hiding her family's history, Guerrero, now 29, spoke publicly about it for the first time in a 2014 Los Angeles Times op-ed. Since then, she has met President Barack Obama and become a White House ambassador for citizenship, out May 3rd, she publishes a memoir, In the Country We Love: My Family Divided.

Diane Guerrero Quotes:

On worrying about her parents being deported: "I feel like there's this misconception that immigrants come here and just don't care about the system and paying taxes, and that's not true. My father was desperately trying to be a legal contributor to this society.”

On how she handles critics and what happened after she went public: “Since I went public with my story, I've never experienced such hate. I sometimes want to crawl under my blanket and hide forever."

On what she thinks of immigration as a campaign issue: "We have a broken system, and we need politicians who are going to fix it. We need someone who's going to govern on behalf of everyone in this country, including immigrants. The fact of the matter is, the candidates need the Latino vote to win."