The 119th US Congress Lurches Rightward. The Betrayal Will Only Get Worse if We Don't Stop It. Tell The Dems...
When a system is "broken," the fix is never more of the same. VOTE NO to HR 29/SB.5!
In Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, I recount the tales of three individuals whose lives were upended—and one torturously lost—because of provisions written into the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which the Laken Riley Act, now headed to the Senate after being approved by 48 DINOs, intends to transform from cement into stone.
Please, readers, call your Senators today, in particular those from AZ, GA, NV, MI, VA, and CO (find their staff contacts here). Implore them to vote NO on HR 29/S.5!
Tell them:
This is NOT a border “security” bill. Rather, it is a cynical manipulation of one family’s personal tragedy to criminalize and demonize immigrant communities, nationwide.
That it provides a backdoor to Trump 2.0’s promised mass detention and deportation machine, making the bill’s only winners the private prison profiteers.
That it targets DACA recipients, strips away due process under the law, and will tear parents and children apart…
That it puts our neighbors, family members, colleagues, and friends at risk of indefinite detention until deportation, and…
That it betrays the promises of the US Constitution as well as international commitments to human rights to which the US is a signatory.
Tell them it is politically motivated and will do nothing to prevent future tragedies.
Here are three examples from Crossing the Line of the horrors this bill will unleash across the US, making us less safe while destabilizing our communities and economies.
I. Chapter 15, Collateral Damage, recounts the story of Robert Vivar. A “good immigrant” even by MAGA-party standards, Robert arrived in the US at the age of six as a “documented childhood arrival.” His older brother proudly served as a member of the US Armed Forces. Yet, when Robert pled guilty to a shoplifting charge he was stripped of his green card, imprisoned by state authorities for eight months, then turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which sent him into exile—expelled from the only home he had ever known.
Robert paid not once, not twice, but three times for a misdemeanor all because IIRIRA made it impossible for a judge to exercise prosecutorial discretion.
The unfortunately named Laken Riley Act will similarly subject folks, even those with permanent residency status, to prolonged, indefinite detention without bond until deportation on mere allegations of what would be petty offenses for you and me, denying them their constitutional right to defend themselves.
II. Chapter 16, The Border Hardens, tells that tale in bloody technicolor. It spotlights the 2010 arrest and extrajudicial killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas by seventeen US federal law enforcement agents, from ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Border Patrol. None of them, nor their supervisors, were ever held accountable for Anastasio’s torture and murder, though their blood sport was captured on camera; though the names of all seventeen perps, and their bosses, are part of the public record.
Anastasio’s crime? There wasn’t one.
He allegedly shoplifted some food items from a corner store, which was never proven. Anastasio, what’s more, was a self-made man among the 11-12 million US residents who’ve never been provided a path to citizenship despite living lawfully in the US for decades. Anastasio is remembered as a celebrated community and family man. In the US for 27 years at the time of his arrest, he had no criminal record. Yet he was murdered in public. And the criminals in uniform got away with it.
III. Chapter 30, Locked Out, shares the experience of Cameroonian asylum seeker Pauline Binam, one of the women incarcerated at the notoriously brutal ICE lockup in Ocilla, Georgia: Irwin County Detention Center. Pauline had been picked up for shoplifting and ripped away from her preschool-aged daughter, then passed, like Robert, from state to ICE custody. She had been locked out of justice and separated from her family for three years when she was forced to undergo an unnecessary gynecological procedure at the hands of Dr. Mahendra Amin.
Dr. Amin denies the charge that he was making money off women jailed under ICE, billing the government for operations they did not need. But who can ever really know when members of Congress remain blind to the reports of human rights abuses suffered every day by those trapped under ICE’s cruel knee?
Pauline blew the whistle. ICE immediately tried to deport her. Because that’s what ICE does: it gets rid of people who speak out about its well-documented and routine criminal behavior.
Under the Laken Riley Act, if passed, there will be many more Paulines, Anastasios, and Roberts who will suffer state-sanctioned abuse and violence because agencies nested under the Department of Homeland Security know no transparency and suffer little accountability. This deplorable bill, on top of all the other deplorables, like IIRIRA, that criminalize innocent people rather than those actually violating the law, could force the indefinite detention and deportation of single mothers and striving fathers forced to shoplift to feed their hungry children because they can’t obtain a work permit, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and unable to earn a living wage.
The Laken Riley Act does not offer a fix to our “broken” immigration system. I put “broken” in quotes because the system works just fine for the demagogues and private prison profiteers who benefit from it.
The Laken Riley Act is a tool to support Trump 2.0’s promise of mass deportations, which themselves commit crimes against humanity, every day.
If passed, the Laken Riley Act will allow anti-immigrant governors and state attorneys general to unleash further chaos on the already decimated immigration system and refugee protection regime. It will make a mockery of the US Constitution and put the US in further violation of international human rights commitments. It will create a need for concentration-camp-style detention centers practiced under Trump 1.0…
…and enable the already extant deportation machinery that is lying in wait to devastate our communities and tank our economy while further enriching the oligarchs making bank off the Border Industrial Complex.
Please tell your Senators that “cruelty is not okay.” Recommend that inside of casting a knee-jerk vote to appease a wannabe strongman, they get pissed and then get educated. They need look no further than Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, now considered “the primer text to the immigration issue.”