Illegal Immigrant Loves Wife From Across Border Agustin Portillo checks the oil in his wife's car, stores her luggage in her trunk and then drives her from his apartment in Tijuana to the U.S. border entry port because she is too afraid to maneuver the twisting streets of this sprawling, violent city by herself. As they wait in the hours-long checkpoint line, he kisses and holds her hand. A romantic ballad comes on the radio and he sings to her softly. She responds with a smile. When they are nearly at the border checkpoint, Agustin signs. He kisses his wife and steps out of the car. This is as far as he can go. After 20 years of living with his wife in Los Angeles, he is stuck here, on the wrong side of the fence. Love, it turns out, does not conquer all, especially when it comes to U.S. immigration law. "To see your family go and you can't go with them, it breaks your heart," he said. It's a common misconception that an illegal alien married to a U.S. citizen is immediately granted "green card" status or citizenship. But Ana and Agustin, and thousands of couple like them, know the truth. Ana, 60, is an immigrant from El Salvador who was allowed to become a U.S. citizen because of her homeland's war-torn past. She has a son who is a legal resident in Las Vegas and another son who is an illegal immigrant in Los Angeles. Her three grandchildren were born in the United States. Agustin, 49, is an illegal immigrant from Mexico without much money, an unattractive candidate for legal status under U.S. immigration law. They can live together in one of the poor, violence-plagued nations that they fled decades ago, or they can live like this, divided by a man-made border, desperate for the U.S. government to bless their marriage and unite their lives once again. "I have some friends who say, 'I don't understand how you can live like that,'" Ana said. It's very hard to find someone who is a good match for you... He really understands me. They have been separated for nearly two years now. She misses his companionship, the way he took care of her when she was sick. He longs to see her every day, to seek her counsel when something troubles him, to feel her heat in his bed at night. "Without her, I am practically nothing," he said. They were both illegal immigrants living in the same Los Angeles apartment complex when they meet at a mutual friend's birthday party in 1988. "We half-danced and that was it," Ana recalled. They ran into each other again and again, in the hallway, in the neighborhood, at other parties. A courtship ensued. Before leaving El Salvador, she had left her two young sons with their grandmother so she could earn money in the United States and return to start a business. But her family told her she couldn't come home, it was too dangerous One day, she told Agustin needed to go back to fetch her sons and help them cross the border illegally. The boys were 12 and 9. They were too young to travel by themselves with a coyote, the smugglers who bring immigrants into the United States. Agustin told her he had crossed many times and she would need his help. They were "three times a wetback," her oldest son likes to say, because that's how many borders they had to illegally cross. Agustin carried the children's luggage on his back through Guatemala and into Mexico. They were detained by Mexican and U.S. border agents three times. Drug smugglers and gang leaders threatened their lives.