Reporter
Washington Post
Theresa Vargas reports for WashPost:
By Theresa Vargas
June 20 at 10:30 AM ET
Angel Romero was about 8 years old when his bus rides home from school changed.
His family was living in Prince William County in Virginia at the time, and the elementary school student didn’t understand much about the agreement the county had entered into with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He knew only that some of his classmates had arrived home after school and found their parents gone.
“I started worrying if I would have parents when I came home,” he recalls.
On those bus rides home, he would sit with his anxiety until his bus came to his stop.
Some days, he would see his mom and dad standing there, and feel immediate relief that they hadn’t been deported. Other days, his mother would wait alone, because his father had to work at his construction job, and the boy would carry his fears with him until his dad walked in the door.
“It would be really scary not knowing if he was at work — or somewhere else,” the now 21-year-old tells me when we talk on a recent morning. “There is still that subconscious fear that has stuck with me. It’s never gone away.”
In the past week, Romero has been able to celebrate on a personal level two nationally recognized victories: Prince William County’s decision to not renew its 287(g) agreement with ICE and a Supreme Court ruling that blocks President Trump’s attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that offers protections to immigrants who were brought to the country as children.
[[Large Virginia county ends immigration enforcement agreement]]
Romero, who is a DACA recipient, stood in front of the Supreme Court on the day that decision was made. At one point, he took a knee and raised a fist in the air. A line of people, who, like him, had worked with the immigrant advocacy group CASA toward that moment, did the same.
It’s a posture that has been seen over and over again in recent weeks as streets across the country have filled with people protesting police brutality and other racial inequities. The push to “Defund the Police,” which has grown from those protests, may seem a distant fight from the effort to “Abolish ICE,” which immigrant rights groups have demanded, but many of the activists who are on the front lines right now, pushing for change, see the two as connected. They see them as two cries in the same battle.
What “Defund the Police” and “Abolish ICE” share is an acknowledgment that bad law enforcement practices, no matter what the badge looks like, unjustly separate families. They leave children not knowing whether their dads (or moms) will make it home, not because of what they did that day, but because of who they are.
Both also directly affect black immigrants.
In rallies that took place before the Prince William County decision, brown hands held white signs declaring “Black Lives Matter.” And in the hours after the Supreme Court decision, black activists called for an end to how the country enforces immigration. The system, which has seen in-custody deaths of adults and children, criminalizes people for entering the country while not providing clear paths to citizenship.
“These movements should be very linked, and I believe they are getting more and more linked as we are fighting together,” says Luis Aguilar, the Virginia state director for CASA. He is a DACA recipient and has spent years working toward seeing Prince William County end its agreement with ICE.
He is also Afro-Mexican. His dad comes from a region of Mexico where runaway slaves settled.
“When I see things like what happened to George Floyd, it goes beyond the personal,” the 33-year-old says of the police-custody killing that has sparked weeks of protests. “It goes to a space where you start thinking about why these things are happening, and you realize that currently society isn’t in a place where it truly respects each person as a human being.”
Aguilar was 15 and living in Falls Church when his father was deported.
“I would not want any other child to experience the results of a broken immigration system,” he says. “I think we owe it to society to fix the system.”
The decision by Prince William lawmakers not to renew its agreement with ICE when it expires at the end of the month received a blip of attention compared with the Supreme Court decision. But it is a significant development for the Washington region. That program changed the county. It created a hostile atmosphere, and not just for undocumented immigrants. It forced Latino families to leave the county and some to avoid calling the police, even when they needed help.
I know this not only from studies that have been conducted over the years, but also from personal observation.
When I came to The Washington Post, it wasn’t as a columnist. I was hired to cover the Prince William County Police Department. I had been in that job less than a year when county lawmakers approved 287(g), which gave law enforcement officials some of the same powers as immigration enforcement agents. They did that despite hearing concerns from the police department that it would erode community trust, prevent immigrants from reporting crimes and require a whole lot of money.
When Corey Stewart was running for a Senate seat, I wrote about what I saw and experienced after the crackdown happened — including how a man yelled at me, “Go back to your country!” — to show the intangible ways in which it failed the community. (And for those who want to point to it as a solution to crime, Prince William Police Chief Barry M. Barnard was recently quoted as saying, “I’m not seeing any hard data where the 287 program has been shown to be the direct cause of any measurable crime reduction.”)
Instead, it left people feeling scared and targeted — and it did that to residents who weren’t even out of elementary school yet.
Angel Romero says for him, “that moment just changed everything.”
“It changed my personality,” he says. “I used to be a really talkative kid, and I had like a switch, where I became very closed off and introverted.”
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Reporter
Madison.com (WI)
Sophie Bolich reports for the Madison.com:
When Sharet Garcia heard the U.S. Supreme Court decided to uphold the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, all she could do was cry.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” she said.
As a DACA recipient and founder of the online networking space UndocuProfessionals, Garcia said that the decision came as a shock. “We’re very excited, of course, and very happy…but at the same time, we know there’s still a lot of work to be done,” she said.
In the year since its creation, UndocuProfessionals has garnered a nationwide following. In the past months, it has become a gathering space for DACA recipients — also called DREAMers — to find support through the uncertainty of the approaching decision.
Garcia said she stayed awake into the early hours Thursday morning answering messages from other DREAMers who were anxiously awaiting the results.
“I was there trying to support them in the best way I can,” she said.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision, which came after months of anticipation, ruled that the Trump administration improperly ended the DACA program in 2017. The announcement left DREAMers and their loved ones with “an amazing feeling of relief,” said Centro Hispano director Karen Menendez Coller.
It was the second defeat this week for the Trump administration, coming just days after the court ruled in favor of anti-discrimination protection for LGBTQIA+ employees under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“The emotional impact is huge,” Menendez Coller said. “I can’t even describe the burden that this has lifted from so many people in the community.”
Anticipating the court’s decision against the backdrop of the pandemic, she added, was “an incredible load to carry,” noting the financial impact as well as the daily emotional turmoil that DREAMers face.
“You kind of have to put [the worry] at the back of your mind and ignore it,” said a Madison-area DACA recipient, who asked to remain anonymous. At the same time, she said, the thought was always lurking. “At any moment, had the outcome been negative, your whole world is going to change.”
She added that while many people weren’t hopeful about the decision, she was.
“There’s a lot more opportunities that people have had now for eight years,” she said, noting that, since the program’s 2012 inception, DREAMers have started small businesses, graduated college and worked for big companies.
“I think that that’s a big reason why I was like, maybe they’ll think twice about it. And thankfully they did.”
Though she counts the decision as a win, Menendez Collar said that the path to equity is “a long road.” Centro Hispano plans to continue mobilizing and raising funds to assist DREAMers and the undocumented community. They plan to collaborate with the Immigration Office of Affairs and increase the Immigrant Assistance Fund, which is housed at the Madison Community Foundation and helps DREAMers access legal help and cover fees associated with filing DACA applications.
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Read the rest of Theresa’s and Sophie’s articles at the respective links above.
Imagine how many lives could be saved and changed for the better and how great America could become as a nation if Chief Justice Roberts and all other Federal Judges could find it within themselves to stand up for the legal, human, and Constitutional rights of refugees, asylum applicants, and migrants in every case challenging the Administration’s systemic, lawless, and invidiously motivated attacks on our legal system and the lives and humanity of the most vulnerable among us?
And, special thanks to Theresa and Sophie for reporting that puts humanity back in the law where it belongs. Without mercy, humanity, fairness, and decency, there can be neither law nor true justice.
Due Process Forever!
PWS
06-21-20