Annette Bernhardt
Dreamers, San Francisco, October 2013.
By chance, I was waiting in line at the U.S. consulate in Oaxaca, Mexico, when the news came down that the Trump Administration had rescinded DACA—the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allowed 800,000 undocumented youth in the United States to go to school, find jobs, and carry on their daily lives without fear of imminent deportation.
All around me, as I scrolled through the newsfeed on my phone, Mexican families were waiting in the hallway to see the American consul. An older man offered me his plastic chair. He was clutching a photocopy of a younger relative’s passport, waiting, patiently, for his turn to straighten out some bureaucratic nightmare with the U.S. government.
As I waited my turn, I dialed into a press call hosted by America’s Voice, with representatives from the ACLU, United We Dream, and other immigrants’ rights groups. The call was organized immediately after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s announcement that DACA was dead. The spokespeople from the civil-rights organizations were audibly upset.
Cristina Jiménez, executive director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the United States, which successfully pushed for DACA in 2012, was outraged. The decision, she said, “fulfills the very sick white-supremacist scheme developed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to terrorize people like my brother, who is twenty-three and has DACA.”
“Ending DACA means mass deportations, make no mistake,” Jiménez added. “But we will not be pushed into the shadows by these racist politicians.”
Lorella Praeli, director of immigration policy and campaigns for the American Civil Liberties Union, recalled the celebration, five years ago, when DACA took effect, “and what it meant for tens of thousands of people.”
“We will continue to move forward,” she said, “with the courage and resiliency our parents taught us.”
“Trump has caved into the extremist elements in his Administration,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “This is a painful day for all of us—especially DACA recipients. . . . It was painful to hear the Attorney General criminalizing my community.”
Later, when I watched the video of Sessions’s speech, I couldn’t help but agree with the shock and hard words. It was stomach-turning to listen to Sessions describe Dreamers—including Gloria Montiel, who was told “Don’t you know Mexican girls don’t go to Harvard?” and went anyway, and Alonso Guillen, who died rescuing his fellow Texans from Hurricane Harvey—as “illegal aliens” who are eroding the safety, freedom, and prosperity of our society.
The truth is that Dreamers contribute to the economy—and ejecting them will cost billions, Tom Jawetz of the Center for American Progress explained.
“This decision puts nativism ahead of the national interest,” Jawetz said.
What else to call it besides white supremacy?
When I finally got my turn at the consulate, I held my breath while a U.S. official talked to her counterpart in the Mexican immigration office. What a day for a U.S. official to try to get the Mexican government to take pity on a U.S. citizen!
What else to call it besides white supremacy?
I was waiting to see if I had to get a whole new round of birth certificates with special “apostille” legal seals—each issued by the state where each member of my family was born.
I’ll miss the deadline for my long-term residency visa if this turns out to be the case, and we will have to fly back to the United States, or drive down to Guatemala, to cross the border and get a new six-month tourist visa.
I tell you this not to compare my relatively minor inconvenience with the very serious and life-threatening situation faced by the Dreamers now that DACA has been revoked.
My point is the utter absurdity of Sessions invoking the “rule of law” and the majesty of the U.S. Constitution to imply that hardworking Dreamers are criminals and their presence in the United States somehow erodes our respect for law and order.
This is petty bureaucratic tyranny deployed in the service of racism. Spend some time running from office to office trying to get the proper papers in order with the proper stamps, and tell me how much it enhances your respect for government.
We Americans have a tradition of disliking that sort of “show me your papers” heavy-handedness. It used to be that a healthy number of Republicans and Libertarians were particularly disdainful of it.
In the case of the crackdown on Latino immigrants, in a nation of immigrants, founded on land stolen from native peoples, it just stinks.
It’s a shame and an embarrassment, and as Americans we ought to do all we can to comfort the people unjustly targeted, and to loudly renounce the sheer ugliness of it.
Ruth Conniff is working as editor-at-large for The Progressive from Oaxaca, Mexico.