Days before Donald Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), one of the program’s beneficiaries, Hurricane Harvey volunteer Alonso Guillen, was killed when his rescue boat crashed into a bridge in the Houston, Texas area. He had driven more than 100 miles from his home to assist in flood recovery efforts. Another formerly undocumented immigrant rescuer, Guillen’s friend Tomas Carreon, was also killed alongside him:
On Friday, searchers found the body of Tomas Carreon, 25, of Lufkin. On Sunday, relatives spotted Guillen’s body.
“He was floating in the water,” his brother Jesus Guillen, 36, a Lufkin truck driver, said in Spanish during a phone interview.
Luis Ortega, 22, of Lufkin, who survived the boat accident, told searchers the men had been swept away by a powerful current. Ortega barely escaped by grabbing a floating gas tank, then a tree.
According to the Houston Chronicle, “Guillen's father, Jesus Guillen, said he'd asked his son not to try and rescue people in the storm, but he insisted, saying he wanted to help people. He cried and prayed on Sunday afternoon as they pulled his son's body from the water. ‘Thank you, God,’ he said, ‘for the time I had with him.’”
Guillen, who was born in Piedras Negras, Mexico, and moved to Lufkin as a teenager, headed south with his friends toward Houston after Hurricane Harvey, towing a borrowed boat. They were near Interstate 45 and Beltway 8 and trying to reach an apartment complex when they hit the bridge, relatives said.
His father is a lawful permanent, but his mother is still in the application process for legal status. [...]
"I've lost a great son, you have no idea," [Rita Ruiz de Guillen] said, weeping softly. "I'm asking God to give me strength."
She said she hoped U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials would take pity and grant her a humanitarian visa so that she could come to Houston and bury her son, but she was turned back at the border.
"When we are with God, there are no borders," she said. "Man made borders on this earth."
Carreon’s friends and family said that “if you needed a dollar and all he had was a dollar, he’d give it to you”:
And despite his undocumented status, Carreon was an outgoing member of Lufkin’s community. He participated in soccer clubs and coached his son’s tee-ball league. He worked as a mechanic at the family’s car shop in town, and when neighbors’ cars broke down, he was the first to volunteer to go pick them up, his sister, Alejandra Carreon, said.
“Or like he'd say, ‘To the rescue,’” she added.
Both men were born in Mexico, which Donald Trump has demonized as a nation of criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. And today, he made the reprehensible decision to cast out DACA beneficiaries like Guillen—a move he was too cowardly to do himself in front of cameras, leaving it to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III instead.
But the reality is, that when Donald Trump demonizes immigrants in order to justify banishing them, he’s talking about young people like Carreon and Guillen, who in the prime of their lives, gave the ultimate sacrifice in trying to do good for others. They represent the best of us, and the best of America. Remember them, because Donald Trump doesn’t want you to.