Dehumanizing immigrants is dehumanizing to all of us as well
One hug. One closed-mouth kiss. One hour.
These are a few of the rules set in place for the final goodbyes of a parent or spouse ordered deported.
I was the detention officer standing guard over one man who’d been in the United States nearly two decades. He abided by these unnatural rules while sitting in a white-walled, concrete holding cell in the detention center’s visitation area. His two young daughters straddled each one of his knees while his wife of more than a decade stood next to him. The tears welling up in her eyes had not yet started running down her cheeks. Mother and father were staying strong in front of the children so their precious few remaining minutes as an unbroken family were not spent in hysterical sobs. The man’s daughters, maybe 4 and 6 years old, looked up at me with what I can only describe as a mixture of terror and utter despair while I “guarded” the last visit between them and their father.
This was my first time supervising a “contact visit” pending a removal order. It was also my last.
I knew little about immigration policy or the many forces driving people to seek refuge in the United States when I started working for the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., one of the largest immigration detention centers in the nation. I was the youngest officer at the facility. I was from a small, racially homogenous farming town, where diversity was something only heard about on TV. I thought becoming a detention officer would be an effective stepping-stone for someone without a college education to get started in law enforcement. I was admittedly more than a little naïve; yet ignorance is not equivalent to innocence.
Despite my training, and the culture among detention center staff that commonly refers to unauthorized immigrants as criminals and persons that deserve the outcome brought upon them by not entering the country “the right way,” I knew that separating parent from child is morally wrong. This was a punishment that did not fit the “crime” — whether a civil violation of unlawful presence like this father, or illegal entry like the asylum seekers who are told “to come back later” at the southern border’s legal ports of entry. Deporting parents is a barbaric practice in itself. Although the United States has had a contentious relationship with immigrants throughout its rather short history, I never imagined seeing the day we intentionally removed children from their parents’ care as a deterrent to instill fear.
While the Trump administration shifts from taking parents away from children to detaining the children in modern-day internment camps, we must address the underlying issue sustaining such failures in human decency — the dehumanization of unauthorized immigrants and asylum seekers.
Clearly, the Trump administration does not view Central American migrants as having the same worth as other human beings. This is not only apparent in the policies, but also in the demeaning rhetoric categorizing immigrants and asylum seekers as lesser persons, if persons at all. By now we have all read and heard the president refer to immigrants as rapists, animals, criminals and “not the best” people from “s—hole” countries.
Most recently, President Trump has likened asylum seekers and migrants to vermin, claiming immigrants will “infest our country” — an escalation of dehumanizing rhetoric that illustrates the foundation of such horrendous policies as caging children and separating families.
More unsettling is that this may only be the beginning. History has shown that statesanctioned dehumanization has been the precursor to some of the world’s most horrific atrocities.
We are at a turning point in our country, teetering upon a damning humanitarian crisis inflicted by our own political leaders and enacted by our own citizens.
I know what its like to find oneself in a situation that directly conflicts with moral values. I dehumanized myself every single day I followed an order. We dehumanize ourselves every day we let this continue. Dehumanization is not only an overt action, but an act of omission as well.
We must take the opportunity to stop tolerating the literal and figurative dehumanization of some of the world’s most desperate and vulnerable people. And perhaps, in doing so, save us from ourselves. Douglas Epps is a former immigration detention officer and doctoral student at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. He is co-editor of the books “Detaining the Immigrant Other: Global and transnational issues” (Oxford University Press, 2016) and “The Immigrant Other: Lived experiences in a transnational world” (Columbia University Press, 2016).