OITNB's Diane Guerrero on losing her family to deportation at 14

Imagine coming home from school one day to find your family gone. 

Diane Guerrero doesn't have to imagine that situation, she lived it. Guerrero's parents were apprehended and deported as illegal aliens, leaving the Orange is the New Black actor with a difficult decision for a 14 year old — to stay in the States or return to Colombia?

Guerrero's new memoir In The Country We Love: My Family Divided is about that moment when life as she knew it changed.

Guerrero did end up staying in the States, to complete school and continue an English and arts-based education — something she says would've been too costly in Colombia — but all the while she was keeping this secret.

"I talked to a lot of people that I went to high school with and everyone says, 'I would've never known,'" she tells Shad. "I mean, I was voted Most Happy Go-Lucky in school."

It was in college when Guerrero says the trauma of her situation started showing up, and those feelings of anxiety and loneliness lingered, which is, in part, why she decided to write her memoir.

"The issue [of deportation] was on the surface, so now I just felt like I would be doing a disservice to myself, my family and everyone who was going through what I was going through if I didn't ... humanize the story," Guerrero says, "because all I heard out there was negative rhetoric, and people demonizing immigrants and undocumented communities."

WEB EXTRA | Watch the trailer for the new season of Orange is the New Black, which premieres this Friday, June 17.