The Deported

December 14, 2015 8:21 AM

Kelvin Villanueva was almost home one night last June when a policeman stopped him for a broken taillight. From his truck, he could see his longtime girlfriend, Suelen Bueno... Before [she] reached them, the officer had arrested Villanueva. Bueno still had not revealed to any of the children that Villanueva had been deported. ‘‘It’s very difficult, because I don’t know how to explain it to them,’’ she said. ‘‘They’ve never been separated from him before. I don’t know what to say. I just keep telling them that he’s traveling for work, he’ll be home soon.’’

Although entering the country without documentation has always been a crime, as recently as a decade ago public attorneys rarely prosecuted migrants in federal court. That has changed. Today, illegal entry and re-entry are the most-prosecuted federal offenses in the United States, and the Justice Department receives more cases from ICE than it does from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives combined.

posted by billiebee (18 comments total)

Ugh. I shouldn't have read the comments.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 9:24 AM on December 14, 2015

Next time people start claiming that good cops exist, I must remember that "good cops" expose people like Kelvin Villanueva to this nightmarish process on a regular basis. Even the hypothetical "good cops" can't actually be good people, because what kind of good person would expose another person to this treatment over nothing but a broken taillight?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:42 AM on December 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm not going to read the linked piece because just the excerpts here enrage me, but thanks for posting about this. Something has to be done about this inhuman overreaction.
posted by languagehat at 10:56 AM on December 14, 2015

For anyone reading the comments here before clicking the link, the piece is beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking. It's worth your time.
posted by migrantology at 11:09 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Also it's wrenchingly, sickeningly, desperately sad (I know you already said it's heartbreaking, but it's, well, beyond heartbreaking).
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:11 AM on December 14, 2015

Don't forget burning rage-inducing. "You probably don't know this but there's a major sports ball event that I didn't go to in order to help you guys" said the lawyer asking for thousands more dollars for a case he knew he wouldn't win. That's about where I lost it. It really did break my heart today. The girl playing violin, the children at the end who knew better than to ask where Daddy is, the skeleton of the forgotten teenager over the border, Suelen working every night to feed her kids and pay back the money lenders...so much hopelessness. And for what?
posted by billiebee at 11:25 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is horrifying. I hadn't realized that you can't get residency through your children if those children are minors -- you'd think those cases would be highest-priority.

Also, $1 per minute for a phone call from county jail. Whoever's making money off that should be ashamed of themselves.
posted by ostro at 11:31 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, $1 per minute for a phone call from county jail. Whoever's making money off that should be ashamed of themselves.

That would be the county sheriff who has no plans to repent the practice. In fact, they've threatened to remove phones if their scam is curtailed by the FCC.
posted by Talez at 11:41 AM on December 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

An estimated 4.5 million American-­born children have undocumented mothers or fathers, and every year tens of thousands of them lose at least one parent to deportation. In November 2014, President Obama took executive action to institute a series of reforms that would have granted temporary work permits to some parents of United States citizens and residents. Texas and 25 other states promptly filed a lawsuit arguing that the order was unconstitutional, and a federal judge in Brownsville — a major crossing point for migrants and asylum seekers on the Texas border — issued an injunction against the programs.

And yet the assholes who keep beating the drums for merciless deportation are the same assholes who have spent the last decades insisting how important it is that children grow up with both a mother and a father.
posted by biogeo at 12:26 PM on December 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

Parents of US citizen children have a very-well established process and priority in the family unification visa system. It hardly seems just for parents who obeyed US immigration law to be subordinated in priority to those parents who violated US immigration law.
posted by MattD at 12:30 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

It hardly seems just for children to be separated from one parent for 20 years and have to spend their lives afraid that their other parent will be abruptly, legally taken from them one day, but here we are.
posted by biogeo at 12:35 PM on December 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Parents of US citizen children have a very-well established process and priority in the family unification visa system. It hardly seems just for parents who obeyed US immigration law to be subordinated in priority to those parents who violated US immigration law.

It's only available for kids over 21 and there's no priority. You're a citizen and over 21? Your parents get to come, no numerical limit.
posted by Talez at 12:36 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's a heartbreaking situation, and I think most everyone agrees that the current immigration system is senseless and opaque. But it also exists this way because there are no good fixes. For me, the only solution that is coherent and logical according to the rest of my world views is to basically get rid of borders all together - how can we say that one person is worth more than another, why should a person born in one country be entitled to something different than their neighbor in another, etc. I truly believe the world would eventually be better off in a stateless utopia of free movement, but the ten or twenty or thirty year transition would be far, far worse than the status quo, and we could easily end up with something much worse.

If we accept that borders exist for a reason, that in general our system of nation states is worth preserving and that it's based on a contract between a government and its people and that requires knowing who its people are (ie citizenship as a concept), decisions are much harder. Many people seem to read stories like this and get outraged that our immigration law was enforced in whichever case tugs at the heartstrings, but advocating for a system in which we only enforce the law against people we don't like (people who are childless? People who have been here less than two years, or five? People who are convicted of certain crimes but not of others?) means we're going to have one group of people (the ones who we like, for now) living as third class citizens, always afraid that they'll eventually fall into the other category when they're caught with a broken tail light. It also means we're going to have more irregular migration, since people respond to incentives and the chances for success are better than a system in which ICE conducts nightly raids on irregular migrants and instantly deports anyone who can't produce a valid visa. This is exactly the combination of circumstances that produce sad stories in which people build lives and families and communities in a place and are then abruptly removed, and the rest of us end up feeling angry for a few minutes when we read about it in the paper.

That leaves the option of coming up with different laws ruling migration and actually enforcing them effectively, but this is obviously also really hard to do. If you believe migration should be based on humanitarian concerns, you need to expand the definition of refugee and eliminate caps on the number of refugees accepted. That's an option, but there are many millions of people living in hardship and danger in the world. If a country accepts a refugee, it has a responsibility to take care of that person - set them up with housing, with a job or the education necessary to find a job, clothes and food and healthcare for the months or years it takes to establish oneself. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that even a rich country like the US simply can't do that for everyone who deserves a better life. And if you start drawing lines - we can accept people from places where the murder rate is above X and the median income is below Y - you're basically left with a different version of what we have now, inevitably arbitrary, inevitably rejecting good and deserving individuals. Some of whom will migrate illegally. Some of whom will get married and have kids and then get deported, because remember, we're actually enforcing our immigration laws now.

Some systems are based on a sort of "good person" standard that seems to address the problems we read about in these stories. They try to attract law-abiding, hardworking immigrants who will be able to contribute economically to the host country. Canada's system is something like this, with points awarded in different categories and those with the most points given residency. It makes it easier for many people to immigrate illegally, and provides fewer incentives for illegal migration. Personally, I think something like this may be as close as we'll get to the least bad option, but it's still plenty bad. A "good person" system is incompatible with the type of family reunification-based system that currently exists in the US, which makes it a bad change for a lot of folks. Awarding points or setting criteria is the kind of social engineering that governments are historically very bad at. It doesn't solve the problem of people living in San Pedro Sula, and it still deports irregular migrant parents of kids born in the host country (and others who aren't determined to live up to the standard).

It's a good thing that articles like this are written; we need to be confronted with the consequences of the status quo. Unfortunately, designing a system in which these stories don't happen isn't as simple as "Vote Bernie!" or "there are no good cops!" or any other statement ending in an exclamation point. Coming up with something better is going to involve hard decisions that hurt people, and it's counterproductive to pretend otherwise.
posted by exutima at 1:35 PM on December 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

You're a citizen and over 21? Your parents get to come, no numerical limit.

No numerical limit, but just like getting a visa/residency via marriage there are lots of restrictions and process involved (one example: you have to prove you have sufficient income or assets to support your parent at 125% of poverty level, same as via marriage. So many many children would fail this test, unless they had an inheritance or something. Your parents/spouse's income _does not matter_). And they still have background/medical checks, etc. So "your parents get to come" is definitely not guaranteed in any case.
posted by thefoxgod at 3:19 PM on December 14, 2015

> It's a good thing that articles like this are written; we need to be confronted with the consequences of the status quo. Unfortunately, designing a system in which these stories don't happen isn't as simple as "Vote Bernie!" or "there are no good cops!" or any other statement ending in an exclamation point. Coming up with something better is going to involve hard decisions that hurt people, and it's counterproductive to pretend otherwise.

Bracketing off the question of national-level politics, I would urge people to push for sanctuary ordinances in their municipalities, and, if their municipalities already have sanctuary ordinances, to support pushes for stronger sanctuary ordinances. This is a more realistic goal than electing Bernie Sanders is.

And then, bracketing off electoral politics altogether, one way that the problem of deportation of people here without papers affects your life even if you're not a person here without papers is that you may at some point be faced with a decision to assist or not assist the police. For example, a college friend of mine grew up in a rural community where the police would fairly regularly set up roadblocks and check the citizenship status of non-caucasian drivers. Whenever my friend (caucasian, blonde, US-born) saw roadblocks, she'd call one of her friends (who was here without papers) and tell him where the roadblocks were; he'd warn his family members and friends, who would in turn warn their family members and friends. This is the sort of opportunity to help that we should look for.

We must be ready on a personal level to make the right choice when we have a chance to help our neighbors without papers — to do what we can protect them from the state, instead of exposing them to the force of the law. I trust most mefites to make the right choice in these situations. I trust every police officer to make the wrong choice.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 7:14 PM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

exutima, I absolutely agree that there are no simple solutions. But it seems to me the height of absurdity that the debate is framed as if there is no room between abolishing all regulation on travel across national borders on the one hand, and on the other hand the immediate, uncompromising deportation of all people found to have violated immigration rules, even if they have been in the country for years, paying taxes, and contributing to the economy. Surely there is room for more sensible legislation and jurisprudence than this black-or-white worldview would seem to suggest. An undocumented immigrant who commits a felony or has a felony record in their home country seems a good candidate for deportation, but someone who has been in the country for years paying their taxes? Wouldn't justice be better served with fines, community service, and maybe requiring them to take civics classes at a community college?
posted by biogeo at 7:39 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Biogeo: In my opinion, no. Or rather: of course it isn't a matter of closing our borders or eliminating them, but the middle ground lies in deciding how many folks we want to allow and encourage to immigrate legally, not in deciding when we want to enforce the laws that are currently on the books.

We as a country need to decide what we want and what we think is right. If we want to allow anyone without a felony record to immigrate, great! Let's do that, and let those people immigrate legally. We can have a conditional period of however many months or years in which a felony conviction leads to immediate deportation, with an eventual path to unconditional citizenship. That has a lot of the downsides of my first scenario: mainly, that I truly do not believe that the US has the capacity to immediately, responsibly accept all of the non-felons in the world who would like to immigrate; but there are definite upsides too. It's certainly better to do this than to have a shadow, de facto system in which people with the means and the desperation pay coyotes (in almost every case, at least recently, an extension of the same organized crime that is ravaging many countries) to make a very dangerous trip in which they will face violence, extortion, and, as the article points out, risk of death, to potentially arrive and live for years or decades in a pseudo-legal state in which they are unlikely to find decent work with benefits and in which they may be deported as soon as they misbehave, according to whatever standards current public opinion has set (a felony can be a very different thing in different states, for example). I think it is the height of irresponsibility to have poor laws and selectively enforce them rather than being bold enough to just make the decision: these are the people who can immigrate, these are the people who cannot. And then stand behind that decision.
posted by exutima at 7:59 PM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I appreciate the thoughtful response. I'm not suggesting we enforce the law selectively; I'm suggesting that we should adopt punishments that are proportionate to the crime, and recognize the injustice of breaking up families and deporting people whose situation is so desperate that they are willing to risk violence, extortion, and death in the trip to the U.S. to flee the even worse violence, extortion, and risk of death in their home country. (A state of affairs, I should note, that the U.S. had a hand in creating with our imperialist policies of the 19th and 20th centuries, crafted to benefit U.S. businesses at the expense of local autonomy.) The law is the law, but doesn't motive factor into our understanding of the punishment for a crime? Why is blind, pitiless deportation the only fit punishment for undocumented immigration? After all, theft is theft, but I think most of us would think theft for pleasure merits a different punishment than theft for survival. (I will admit the recent thread on shoplifting has me questioning that belief now, though.)

It's probably clear that I would prefer opening the doors to more legal immigration. (And in fact I am unconvinced that the U.S. lacks the capacity to accept dramatically more immigration than we do -- keep in mind that a sizeable fraction of undocumented immigrants come only to work for a season or a few years before leaving, a phenomenon that has been a normal part of the economy of the American Southwest for decades.) But my point is that even if we believe it is necessary to restrict the number of legal immigrants, our approach to enforcement of the law is wildly disproportionate to the magnitude of the crime. And even if you think that deportation must be a part of any enforcement, the kind of kafkaesque nightmare in which someone can be pulled over for a broken taillight and be abruptly arrested and deported with no opportunity to get their affairs in order or even to say goodbye to their children is grotesque, even evil. (Not to mention the holding facilities in which undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation are tortured with blasts of frigid air.)

In short (tl;dr the modern vernacular), we can enforce immigration law uniformly while recognizing that its violation is not the threat to our republic that the xenophobes and demagogues of the Right would have us think, and we can adopt punishments that are proportionate to the relatively venial nature of the crime.
posted by biogeo at 9:12 PM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]