Gilberto Reyes-Herrera was a model citizen—whether or not he had the papers to prove it. He and his wife came to the United States from Mexico more than a quarter-century ago. They settled in western New York, where they raised three children. One has graduated from college, one will soon graduate, and one is in middle school, on the honor roll.
Reyes-Herrera worked hard to provide for his family, often putting in thirteen-hour days in the vineyards. He paid taxes and was known for helping others with home projects. Family friend Nancy Richardson tells The Progressive, “He never had so much as a speeding ticket.”
Last June, Reyes-Herrera was a passenger in a car pulled over by a New York state trooper. The driver was cited for not wearing a safety belt; Reyes-Herrera was buckled up. The trooper, improperly, asked about his immigration status. One thing led to another and Reyes-Herrera found himself in detention, charged with being in the country after a prior deportation.
During an emotional court appearance in January, Reyes-Herrera fought back tears. “My heart is destroyed from separating from my family,” he told the court. Reyes-Herrera pleaded guilty to illegal reentry to the United States. U.S. District Court Judge Charles Siragusa, noting the large number of supporters who turned out for the case, praised Reyes-Herrera for being “a good man,” adding, “I hope that by some miracle you can stay in the country.”
Reyes-Herrera’s friends and family did all they could to make that happen. According to Richardson, they reached out to U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats of New York. They enlisted the help of the Worker Justice Center of New York. They challenged the legitimacy of his detention, noting that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014 directed state police to not use their resources to apprehend undocumented immigrants. Last September, after Reyes-Herrera’s arrest, Cuomo made this policy even more explicit.
None of these efforts made a difference. Judge Siragusa accepted Reyes-Herrera’s guilty plea, sentenced him to time served, and ordered him to pay $7. But then he was taken away in shackles to face an immigration judge. On February 13, the judge rejected a request to stay his order of removal. On February 28, Reyes-Herrera was deported to Mexico.
Two weeks after Reyes-Herrera was arrested, his family closed on the purchase of their first home, something he had worked toward for decades. He may never get to live in it.
“It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever been involved in,” Richardson says. “It makes no sense.” The government’s actions will destroy Reyes-Herrera’s family, deprive the community of a well-liked and respected resident, and be detrimental to the economy. “He’s the kind of worker we need here,” Richardson says. “The vineyards are increasingly having problems finding workers.”
Reyes-Herrera’s ordeal—covered for The Progressive by writer James Goodman in an op-ed distributed to newspapers across the nation—is cruel but not unusual. It squares perfectly with other actions taken by President Donald Trump, building on the track record of his predecessor, “Deporter-in-Chief” Barack Obama.
Since launching his candidacy by accusing Mexicans of being criminals and rapists, Trump has sought to focus resentment on immigrants, including his vulgar slur against people from “shithole countries.” He does this deliberately, because pitting groups of people against each other is integral to his governing philosophy.
Trump is obsessed with the idea of kicking and keeping nonwhite people out. David Mahoney, the elected Democratic sheriff of Dane County, Wisconsin, came up against that during a recent visit to the White House as part of a delegation from the National Sheriffs’ Association. Mahoney told The Progressive that he tried to talk to the President about the opioid crisis and mental illness, both areas where he saw opportunities for federal assistance. But Trump—who later unveiled his opioid plan: sentence drug dealers to death and continue to wink at the pharmaceutical companies that created the crisis—was focused on something else.
“The wall is my priority,” Mahoney recalls the President saying.
Mahoney, who believes Trump’s rhetoric and policies are making communities less safe because crime victims who can’t prove they are in the country legally are afraid to call law enforcement, tried to question this approach, to no avail.
Trump’s blustery rhetoric regarding immigrants is surpassed by his actual malevolence.
Trump’s blustery rhetoric regarding immigrants is surpassed by his actual malevolence. He threw thousands of people’s lives into chaos with his hasty and unconstitutional Muslim ban. As Arun Gupta reported in this magazine last year, government agents are launching raids aimed at nabbing and expelling immigrants. And, as Goodman examined in our last issue, the Trump Administration is increasingly using detention for immigrants awaiting asylum hearings, in violation of established rules.
Trump’s rhetoric has emboldened the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, who have engaged in increasingly aggressive raids. A sweep in February in California resulted in more than 200 arrests and flew in the face of local sanctuary laws.
Trump has called for ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the program that protects Dreamers, for whom he professes to have “great love,” and has repeatedly torpedoed efforts to protect them. Only intervention by the courts has kept them from expulsion—for now. When Democrats, in a rare and short-lived display of backbone, threatened to shut down the government to force action on this issue, Trump accused them of wanting “to have illegal immigrants pouring into our country, bringing with them crime, tremendous amounts of crime.”
There is no one in Donald Trump’s world, including his repeatedly cheated-on immigrant wife, whom he would not in an instant throw under a bus. That the fate of Dreamers rests in his hands is a nightmare.
Trump is also ramping up attacks on legal immigrants, whom he characteristically seeks to portray as a danger to the Republic. Take his ravings about so-called chain migration—the process through which immigrants already here can facilitate the arrival of family members.
“Chain migration is a total disaster,” Trump declared in a meeting with fellow Republicans. “[It] threatens our security and our economy and provides a gateway for terrorism.” The problem, he explained during his State of the Union speech, is that “a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.”
These pronouncements, like most of what comes out of Trump’s mouth, are demonstrably false. The law since 1965 allows immigrants who have gone through the five-year process of becoming U.S. citizens to petition to be joined by immediate family members. That’s spouses, children, parents, and siblings—not aunts, not uncles, not grandparents, not cousins, not “distant relatives” of any kind. Legal immigrants with green cards can seek to bring in only spouses and children.
All prospective arrivals are subject to income standards and vigorous background checks. There are firm upper limits on the number of people allowed in under this program per country per year; the average waiting period for some countries, Mexico included, exceeds twenty years.
One final twist: Trump’s own mother and paternal grandfather were “chain” migrants, having followed family members to New York. His wife, Melania, brought her parents over from Slovenia.
The problem with Trump’s stance toward immigration isn’t just that it’s divisive and based on lies. It also runs counter to what America in its best moments stands for, that we are e pluribus unum—out of many, one.
Indeed, as if to prove this point, the federal agency charged with issuing visas and green cards has purged its mission statement of language calling the United States “a nation of immigrants.”
Trump’s anti-immigrant crusading is an attack on our national values, as dangerous as the attacks that Russia, with Trump’s support, has launched on the integrity of our elections. It is as much a threat to our national security as Trump’s reckless and belligerent actions on the world stage.
So how do we respond? By refusing to accept it, and refusing to be silent.
Americans are, by and large, much better people than their President. His values are not our values.
Recent polling by Quinnipiac University Poll has found: 80 percent of us support a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers; 65 percent oppose spending $25 billion, as Trump wants, to build a border wall with Mexico; and 78 percent think the amount of legal immigration into the United States should stay the same or be increased. Large majorities also disagree that undocumented immigrants take jobs away from citizens or that they commit more crimes. (True fact: they commit fewer.)
But these opinions matter only if we aggressively assert them. In Phoenix, Arizona, authorities backed down from deporting Jesus Berrones, a father of five including a five-year-old son with cancer, after widespread outrage. Berrones has lived in the United States since he was eighteen months old. After years of compliance with federal immigration rules, he became one of the 155,000 immigrants arrested in 2017. Now he has been granted a year’s reprieve.
There will be plenty more opportunities for outrage. If DACA is allowed to expire, one thousand Dreamers will lose their protections and work permits every day.
This is not who we are. Until we are finally able to oust Trump from office, we must fight his agenda with everything we’ve got. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the remarkable push for gun sanity being led by young people across the nation prove it can be done. It will take courage, it will take creativity, it will be hard, but it can be done.