Undocumented immigrants are our friends, our coworkers, our classmates, our neighbors. They run and operate businesses that not only keep communities thriving, but have revitalized entire cities that were at one time facing economic decimation due to an aging population. Nearly 6 million U.S. citizen children—tomorrow’s leaders, professionals, doctors, teachers, and innovators—have at least one undocumented immigrant parent. “Immigrants, with their hopes and energies,” Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs, wrote last year, “should be seen not as threats but as blessings.”
But threats is what Donald Trump has made undocumented immigrants out to be. The fact is that because Trump’s mass deportation force tears at the very nucleus of our nation—families and communities—it tears at us all, no matter our legal status. And as a new editorial from the Salt Lake Tribune states, Trump doesn’t just pose a threat to immigrant families, as many of us already know: he also poses a threat to our very way of life.
It's how dictators operate.
Pick a relatively small, politically powerless group of people and portray them as objects of fear and derision. Then swoop in with the power of the state to arrest members of that disfavored group and reap the political benefits of protecting the state from the threat that you invented.
This is why the current administration's move to arrest and deport more people who are in the United States without proper documentation, but who have committed no other crime, is so troubling and so counter to what America should stand for.
Whether by design or default, this is a policy of divide and conquer, one that re-enforces irrational fears of The Other among many citizens while pushing members of immigrant communities further into a parallel world where contact with all government services — including legitimate law enforcement — comes to be feared and shunned.
This does not make anyone safer. It makes us all less safe, less able to move freely and do our business without looking over our shoulder.
As the editorial notes, the arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record have spiked after the Trump administration threw out the deportation priorities that the Obama administration had set up in order to ease widespread fears in immigrant communities with deep and longtime roots to this nation.
But during the first few weeks of the new administration we saw Silvia Avelar-Flores, who came to the U.S. when she was only 7 years old and has no criminal record, face imminent deportation after she was arrested by ICE in a shopping center parking lot as her young daughter looked on. Thanks to the advocacy of the local community, she was spared from deportation, though her case remains ongoing. Others haven’t been so fortunate.
The editorial continues:
The argument that the law is the law and must be enforced in all cases is the philosophy of a soulless automaton. No law is, or can be, enforced in each and every case. Prosecutors and law enforcement agencies do, and must, make choices about where to put their emphasis and their limited resources.
And the situation only arises because Congress, over many years and under control of both parties, has been unable to reform the system in a way that is both enforceable and humane.
Republicans control every branch of government, and for years have branded themselves as a small-government, pro-family values party. But the immigration agents knocking on doors and sweeping restaurant kitchens to tear hardworking parents from their U.S. citizen children—an estimated 5,000 U.S. citizen kids are in foster care following deportation of both of their parents—makes them anything but. What’s needed is strict oversight of ICE, and now. And if the Republicans controlling Congress refuse to do it, Democrats must stand firm on not funding it. “Taking a mother away from her family when all she did was be here without government imprimatur is not conservative, not American and not a reasonable use of our law enforcement resources,” concludes the editorial. You can read it here.