Two days before Christmas, a 21-year-old Milan approached his mother and said he was going to America. With dreams of working in Hollywood as an animal handler and $ 100 from his father tucked in his socks, the native of rural Culiacán, a town in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, spent weeks trying to enter the Tijuana border.
“My life was just on the wall. It was almost like a zoo animal against the wall, back and forth, back and forth,” he recalled in a 2019 interview with DailyMailTV. “A lot of times, I let immigration get me, so I can eat, because you don’t feed the Mexican police, but the Americans. At least they give you bread with bologna and coke and that gives you sugar, and some carbs, and some salt. That’s good. That’s not a healthy meal, but it at least keeps you alive. “
He had run out of options when, “This guy was out of it, very thin guy, dirty, and he was smoking a cigarette and he said, ‘Do you want to cross the border? I’ll charge you $ 100,’ “he shared” That for me is a sign, because no one knows how much money you have. “
After going through a canal and spending two months sleeping under freewaters, washing cars and dishes, he moved to Los Angeles, where he changed a job as a walker in dog to a gig washing kennels – and then his own Pacific Point Canine Academy and finally a TV empire – with a little help from pal Jada Pinkett Smith, who hired him an English teacher.
“We work together in the full spirit of survival, destiny, inclination to feed our families,” Milan, who became a U.S. citizen in 2009, said of himself and his family. fellow immigrants. “We left home not because we wanted to. It was because there were no opportunities, so we’re here to push your economy harder than you think. We’re the fuel.”