Our view: Ugly deportations preview what could come next
Was it painful to watch Jorge Garcia — a 30-year U.S. resident brought here at age 10 — bid farewell to his family at a Detroit airport as he was deported back to Mexico recently?
Even worse, what about those sent home to a death sentence? The New Yorker highlighted the tragedy of 22year-old Laura S., an undocumented immigrant and mother of three who was taken into custody during a routine traffic stop near her home in southern Texas in 2009. Summarily deposited across the Rio Grande by a Border Patrol agent, she was brutally murdered by her abusive ex-husband. “When I am found dead,” she had told the agent, “it will be on your conscience.”
And just last year, there was Juan Carlos Coronilla-Guerrero, whose wife begged a federal judge not to deport him back to a hometown in Mexico overridden with violent gangs that target deportees. His bullet-riddled body was found three months later.
Such stories reflect the ugly reality of deportations, which could multiply by hundreds of thousands unless Congress and the White House agree soon on a deal to protect nearly 800,000 “dreamers” — undocumented immigrants brought to America as children.
Immigration remains at the center of the U.S. budget fight, which was postponed but not resolved by the deal that reopened the federal government late Monday. The drumbeat in the background is the Trump administration’s fable that the undocumented represent a major danger to national security.
A new Trump re-election campaign ad accuses the Democrats of being “complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.” That bigoted logic appeals to notions of collective guilt and ignores data showing that the foreign-born, legal and not, are less likely to commit crime than nativeborn Americans.
The fear-mongering also obscures the harsh realities for those caught up in the dragnet fever launched by President Obama and now aggrandized by his successor.
Some argue that country-of-origin authorities — and not the United States — bear responsibility for these lost lives. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish asylum seekers, turned away by America during the 1930s and 1940s, who perished in Nazi concentration camps.
Since early 2016, the Global Migration Project at Columbia University has counted 60-plus cases of people harmed or killed after being deported. A study this month by Human Rights First found that federal authorities are increasingly prosecuting asylum seekers under immigration laws.
This isn’t how America is made great again.
Amid the current haste to demonize undocumented immigrants, the rights of asylum seekers are melting away. The relatively few instances where undocumented immigrants commit violence are just one side of the ledger. On the other side is the violence awaiting those seeking haven, who are turned away to their detriment or death.