While Donald Trump and Ted Cruz continually target Latino immigrants with abhorrent rhetoric and threats of mass deportation, one questioner at Wednesday night's Democratic debate put a human face on all their hateful tirades.
Lucía Quiej, a Guatemalan immigrant and mother of five children, said her husband had been deported three years ago for not having a driver's license and asked the two Democratic candidates what they would do to stop deportations and reunite families.
Janell Ross explains just how common Quiej's situation is here:
A 2014 New York Times review of government data found that about two-thirds of what at that time were the nearly 2 million people deported [during Obama’s presidency] were people who committed "minor infractions including traffic violations or had no criminal record at all." About 20 percent had been convicted of serious crimes. [...]
The government's own data tells us that between 2009 and the middle of 2015, more than half a million parents have been deported — some of them separated from their children for years or permanently.
It's disgraceful, frankly, that we are separating families in this manner, especially when many of the children are either American citizens or here legally. The Obama administration has deported more than 3.7 million people. Both Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sec. Hillary Clinton pledged Wednesday night to do everything in their power to stop deportations and reunite families like Quiej's.