Making immigrant aid a crime is not a solution
Getting laws changed would be more productive than griping about crisis — or exploiting it
Conservatives and xenophobes are displaying a lot of angst over events at our border with Mexico. They are angry because they can’t get liberals to even call it a “crisis.” OK — I’m willing to help them with that. I am to the left of most liberals, and I will admit that there is a crisis on the border. But it is a crisis that (President Donald) Trump initiated and exacerbated.
It is a crisis made worse by Border Patrol agents pouring out jugs of water meant to keep migrants from dying of thirst and separating migrant children from their families.
I have been an immigration activist since 2004. I used to leave jugs of water and energy bars in the desert between Palomas, Mexico, and Deming in an effort to keep people from dying in the desert. From 2009 until April of 2012, my girlfriend and I ran a safe house for undocumented immigrants in Reno, Nevada. We kept these folks out of the hands of human traffickers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, found them jobs under the table and got their kids enrolled in the Washoe County public schools. Some of those kids made the honor roll.
We hadn’t intended to open a safe house; it started when we took in a young undocumented woman and her three children. It was either stay with us or go to “Tent City,” a homeless encampment in Reno. Tent City was no place for a woman with three small children, so we took them in. It sort of grew exponentially from that point, and over the course of two and a half years we helped some 200 people settle into new lives, including a lot of children. I helped make an awful lot of school lunches of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and carrot sticks.
Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor. Overstaying a visa isn’t a crime at all but merely a civil violation. In contrast, what we did by sheltering those folks was a federal crime, a felony, each and every time we did it. If we had been caught, and the book thrown at us, we could have conceivably been given more years in prison than we have left on earth. Thank God for the statute of limitations. We had to close up shop in 2012 when I took ill, but I don’t regret the work we did back then.
The current crisis is being exploited by drug traffickers, human traffickers and politicians of all political stripes. There is little interest in solving the problem because the status quo can be used to fire up the political bases of both parties.
To President Trump and his supporters, I say this: You cannot stop human migration any more than you can stop a tornado by setting up a roadblock. If you don’t like our immigration laws, work to change those laws. Increase the number of immigration judges so that asylum seekers get their day in court within a reasonable time frame. Or, you can continue to do nothing, and complain, and let the humanitarian crisis fail to get resolved. You can lament or cheer armed and masked vigilantes holding people captive. Everyone — U.S. citizens and the refugees — deserves better.