By Melissa Mundt
Deportation: it can happen to anyone. That is, if you’re a non-citizen- oh, or one of the hundreds of US citizens detained and put into deportation proceedings every year (Immigration Officials Detaining, Deporting American Citizens). And to be more precise, it happens disproportionately to society’s most vulnerable. The poor, mentally ill, and people of color are particularly targeted. The detention and removal of thousands of workers, fathers, daughters, and grandmothers takes place quietly, the dimensions of this human rights crisis cloaked in rhetoric of security and economic expediency.
Anti-immigrant factions seem to believe that “just getting rid of” the estimated 11 million and growing number of people without documents in the U.S. would not only be feasible but economically advantageous. I won’t delve into the absurdity of removing a large part of our workforce and the logistical impossibility of carrying out such mass deportations, but rather want to emphasize the human tragedy that is already wracking communities and families.
When politicians talk about securing the border, increasing enforcement, and number of detentions and deportations, they are talking about community members being displaced. The number of immigrants deported in FY 2007 was 261,000, up from 177,000 two years ago (Immigration Detainees are at Record Levels).
What these statistics cannot record, however, is the shock to the expelled person, the devastation to her family, or the impact on the “home” country they are forcibly returned to. The debates about immigration and global economic policy fail to recognize the trauma that is spreading and deepening across our nation and our borders; a generation of American citizens missing pieces of their family like severed limbs: (Tres niños viajan desde EEUU para reunirse con su madre); entire regions of Mexico and Central America with no men; the shock and loneliness of being deported back to a country where you have barely lived and do not speak the language.
Even if comprehensive immigration reform eased the human rights crisis that is the exploitation, discrimination, detention and deportation of the massive population of Latin American in the US, the same economic imbalances and trade policies would exist in our countries that motivate migration in the first place.
This crisis is multinational like the identities of immigrants. The challenges and trauma of the migrant experience and psychosocial impacts to migrant communities on both sides of the border must be acknowledged, and we must strive for healing and reconciliation beyond borders.
I learned about immigration while I was living on the Mexican side of the Border. Growing up in a small city in Montana, there was no immigrant community to speak of. And during my time with CASA in Chiapas and Oaxaca, instead of meeting immigrants, I met the family members that were left behind. I saw the communities abandoned by young men. I understood that the house being built with new cinderblock, iron fencing and a new coat of paint, was fully funded by money from the United States. But I didn’t understand why those sisters, sons, granddaughters, and uncles wouldn’t return to their remarkable, powerful, beautiful communities in Mexico. Sure, some would come back for the holidays, but with an increasingly militarized border, less and less immigrants without papers take that risk.
In communities in Central and Northern Mexico, where steady migration to the U.S. surged in the mid-1900s (due to coercive recruitment and ultimately exploitative guest worker programs to supply America’s labor shortage during the two World Wars), entire towns have been emptied out completely, permanently. I knew the greatest motivation for out-migration was economic necessity, but why would people stay in the U.S.?
Only this last year while working in Arizona with a legal defense organization for detained immigrants, did I begin to learn the depth, dimension and crisis of the Latino/Chicano communities in the United States. I realized that after a year or two or twenty in a new country, no matter how greatly you stay connected to your homeland, you have your friends, your apartment, your kids, established in the U.S. and you no longer know how to go back. Perhaps that’s an obvious statement, but it seems so fundamentally absent from the debate on immigration policy reform. Some days I speak to literally hundreds of people who have been detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or who have been affected by the detention of a loved one.
I can perceive the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids being carried out across the country without reading the news, through the people that wind up talking to me in the DHS detention center. I read the national news of immigration and security on the shattered faces of our clients, in the sobbing voices of their families, in the pleading letters from their children, neighbors, pastors, bosses, and teachers.
What I said before in hyperbole—that anyone can be deported—is a statement on the proliferating police state that we are easing ourselves into here in the US. A good percentage of our population is not safe from police raids, arbitrary detention, questioning, warrant-less searches, and coercion. The capricious and cruel Operations round up entire neighborhoods, businesses, and families. I have met 5-year olds in the Department of Homeland Security detention center. I have met high school students, 80 year olds; I have met terminally ill cancer victims, deaf people, handicapped people, mentally ill people, pregnant women, rape victims—people who were driving home from work, people who were getting on a Greyhound bus, people who have been beaten by Border Patrol, people who were flying home from vacation, people who were cutting your meat, building your houses, picking your produce. People who were paying their taxes, raising their children, going to church, trying to make a good life for themselves. They are deported, everyday, by the thousands. No one can convince me that they are a “threat to security” or burdening our economy.
The budget and the power of DHS, the Border Patrol and local law enforcement are only growing. It is increasingly legal and acceptable to harass and target anyone in public or driving and ask them for proof of citizenship. In Arizona, local law enforcement has sought accords with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be able to screen and arrest people for suspected immigration violations, and this is taking place in cities and counties around the US (See: (http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1017arpaioimmigra...).
A good number of our clients are detained after they are stopped arbitrarily or for minor traffic infraction and police call Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Permanent and random checkpoints on highways and at bus stations wave through the white people and interrogate and potentially detain the brown people. People are turned over to ICE by the local police, highway patrol, DMV, Probation Officers, employers, neighbors, or officials in the immigration office where they go to file for visas.
All this enforcement would be one thing if the laws and systems being enforced were functional and just.
However, US Citizenship and Immigration Service, the bureaucratic, visa issuing entity in this whole equation, is backlogged and dysfunctional. Visa holders who meticulously file and pay (ever increasing) fees within ample time, find themselves facing months of carrying an expired visa, because the renewal is postponed in processing. A person’s case is closed or they are ordered deported or miss the appointment for their visa all because the crucial papers from USCIS were mailed to the wrong address (Family Reunited Four Years After Deportation ). USCIS is not infallible and their determinations have often been questioned, appealed and reversed through class action suits, such as the discriminatory practices against Central American asylum seekers in the 1980s.
The poor and people of color are also disproportionately targeted and ensnared by police and the criminal justice system. It is easy to hand someone over to Immigration after they are stopped for having a headlight out, being in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, or arrested on suspicion even if no criminal charges are filed. If charged with a crime, many people take pleas because they can’t afford the time and a cost a lengthy legal battle. Poor people have public defenders, often with limited time, energy or expertise in their cases (criminal attorneys often aren’t even aware that there are immigration/deportation consequences to taking certain criminal pleas, and thus clients will not be advised of this before they accept a conviction). Language, educational and economic barriers limits peoples’ ability to defend themselves and make informed decisions about their legal cases (even more so in immigration court where there is no right to free counsel, and 90% of people go unrepresented).
Many “crimes” are deeply linked to poverty, social vulnerability, abuse, cultural differences, and marginalization. Common criminal charges I see among people in deportation proceedings: child neglect, domestic violence, welfare/tax fraud, bounced checks, false documents, driving while intoxicated, not using seat belts, resisting arrest, drug use, shoplifting, are legal terms that describe other realities: unable to afford babysitters, not knowing the rules, not understanding English, scarcity, exhaustion, desperation. The punitive focus of our criminal justice system, instead of rehabilitating or healing, traps people in endless legal battles. Court mandated fines, classes and probation are all extremely difficult to fulfill for the working poor and failure to do so can result in lengthy incarceration, where upon finishing your sentence you find that you have an ICE hold and will be deported.
When I think about the dynamics of deportation, there are a couple of populations for whom the process and policy seems especially devastating and the injustices particularly egregious: old Mexican men, who, having worked in the US for 3 decades, will be cut off from retirement benefits and the health care benefits they’ve earned; and young people, who, brought to the US as babies and children, have never known the country of their birth. For these groups the detail of having or not having papers seems arbitrary and superfluous compared to their contributions to the United States. The extent to which they’ve become Americans, for better or for worse and the fact that they have little to nothing to return to once “repatriated” make their “return” especially difficult.
I’m both eager and frightened to find people I worked with while they were detained in Arizona who have since had to rebuild their lives in their home country after a deportation. I doubt they will be able to seamlessly occupy the house their money built in the mountains of Oaxaca, pick up their machetes and plant cornfields.
The whole picture is dire: broken and abandoned villages in Mexico and Central America; thousands who brave leaving and the perils of the journey and border crossing (hundreds dying in the desert, coyotes and law enforcement who rob, beat and rape vulnerable migrants); the daily trauma of being detained, picked up out of your normal life and thrown into the nightmare of months of detention and incomprehensible legal battles; the destruction of families and communities in the United States after a long-term resident is deported; the shock to communities when “Americanized” and dislocated emigrants return. I only pray that there can be healing for this level of human tragedy. It is our clients who teach me that it is possible. They show me resilience and hope. They remind me that love springs up wherever it is planted, and life goes defiantly on. I believe these truly bi-national souls could bring depth, experience and healing to this struggle for justice without borders and a borderless world.
