Immigration reform activists pray in front of the York County detention center. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Trump's
Season of Fear: Inside the Devastation Left by Immigration Raids
By Delphine Schrank,
Guardian UK
13 March 17
As Ice’s chokehold on undocumented immigrants tightens, many have
resolved to lay low in hopes that they don’t get a visit that could upend their
lives
Just
after 8am on the first of March, Lucia Gomez sat snarled in traffic on her way
to her office when she received a call from an undocumented worker – an elderly
member of the labor union where she works as an organizer. Two officers from
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) were knocking at the door of the
man’s apartment building in Union City, New Jersey. Should he let them in? Was
it unlawful to not let them in? If he didn’t open the door, would they find a
way to arrest and deport him anyway?
The
man, who makes a living hauling asbestos waste, had been walking home with
groceries for breakfast when the Ice officials had intercepted him. They asked
for his name, which he gave, and his identity papers, which he said he needed
to gather from his apartment. He’d be right back, he told them.
Instead,
dashing inside, he locked the door and waited, frozen in fear. Twenty-two years
since he left his home for the US, he was careful to renew his drivers’ license
each year and had long since received certification to handle hazardous waste
that he was still carting in his late 60s. But he lacked legal residence papers.
Through
his window, he could see the officers lurking.
Calculating
a half-hour drive at least to the man’s home, Gomez phoned an immigration
attorney, then another, and a third. No one picked up. She sent them texts.
Nothing. It was early. People were probably commuting to work. Perhaps they
were out of range. Her heart racing, she burst into tears. “My level of anxiety
was through the roof,” Gomez said.
Tough-minded
and raspy-voiced, Gomez had worked for years as an immigration advocate before
joining Local 78, a union that
represents asbestos, lead and hazardous waste handlers in New York and New
Jersey. Still, she said, she was at a loss about how best to counsel her union
member – unclear on his rights, his obligations, and the rapidly vanishing
options for undocumented or ambiguously documented people in Trump’s America.
Among
the expanded powers that Trump’s executive orders and accompanying memos have
given law enforcement since his inauguration, undocumented immigrants can be
arrested and deported on mere suspicion of a broad array of offenses. According
to immigrant advocates, that might include selling DVDs on the street,
lingering in a park by nightfall or walking through an open gate in the subway.
Under
the Obama administration, immigration authorities prioritized those convicted
of committing serious crimes, such as murder or sexual assault. Trump’s new
policies have begun to implement his campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and
come atop a months-long barrage of statements in which the president and key
members of his administration had demonized immigrants as drug dealers and
rapists, pouring over the border unchecked and by the thousands to steal jobs
from Americans.
Last
Thursday, advocates gathered in front of the Ice offices in Manhattan in support
of a man who was inside for a mandatory check-in with immigration officials,
concerned that he would only re-emerge on a bus bound for a deportation center
then shortly be deported to Trinidad. In a similar incident in
Phoenix last month, a woman who would have been considered low priority under
the Obama administration went in her for annual check-in
with immigration authorities and was instead placed in detention and deported
back to Mexico.
If
keeping heads down and working hard has long been part and parcel of a life in
the shadows, the uncertainty and anxiety across New York and the country has surged,
rippling from undocumented immigrants to relatives, friends, co-workers and
whole neighborhoods.
In
anticipation of crackdowns, people say they have stopped driving, stopped
shopping, stopped sending remittances to countries of origin. Small businesses
fret about closures from fewer customers. Families are forgoing medical care,
afraid to have their identities examined in hospital emergency rooms. Children
wonder aloud if they’ll come home from school to find their parents gone.
Some
of the fears have been amplified by rumors of Ice checkpoints thrown up at
street crossings that spread virally in text messages or on social media. To
dampen the potential hysteria, immigrants’ advocates are counseling that any
reports of sightings be immediately verified and photographed. But other fears
are justified by mounting evidence of raids and deportations across
the country.
On the
way to the apartment of the man – who requested anonymity because of the
sensitivity of his case – Gomez heard back from one of the immigration
attorneys she had phoned – Angela Fernandez of the Northern
Manhattan Coalition for Immigration Rights. No need to open the
door; warrants can be slipped underneath, she said. Failing that,
the man could and should stay silent.
By the
time Gomez arrived at the man’s apartment, the Ice officers were gone. Why they
were prowling, who they were after and whether they would return remained a
mystery. With the man’s help and a few strategic calls, Gomez began to piece
together the semblance of an explanation.
A call
to Union City officials and the local police department turned up a drug charge
for someone – no one could specify who – in the man’s building, which contained
several apartment units. The man’s son, now 27 and undocumented like his
father, had been convicted some years earlier for driving under the influence.
He had subsequently failed to complete the community service that a judge had
prescribed. Had the DUI charge triggered a “drug charge” suspicion sufficient
to send the Ice office sniffing? If so, did that mean police and Ice officers
were collaborating, an old concern that immigrant advocates have fought hard
against?
As
Gomez sat talking with the son and his father in his living room, a traffic
officer in the street began towing away his daughter’s car. Unlike her brother,
the young woman had received legal protection under the Obama-era Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrival (Daca) program, which since 2012 provides
temporary protection to children born and raised in the US to undocumented
immigrants. Gomez rushed outside. According to the traffic policeman, the
woman’s vehicle permit had expired on 1 February. She owed a $140 fine. Could
that have been the minor infraction that had apparently set off a chain
reaction through law enforcement sufficient to spur Ice into action?
The
possibility wasn’t inconceivable. In nearby Staten Island, in early February,
Ice officers loitered outside a courthouse and arrested an undocumented
immigrant from Mexico who emerged from a hearing, charged with driving under
the influence. The man awaits trial on 14 April and near-certain deportation in
a jail cell in Hudson County correctional facility, along with convicted
criminals, according to Gonzalo Mercado, who works for the immigrant advocacy
organization La Colmena. Mercado spoke with the man’s wife and
daughter, who say that he hopes not to be deported back to the violent parts of
Mexico. Instead he told his wife that he was bidding on Canada.
The
chilling effect carries a whiff of life in a police state, under authoritarian
or semi-authoritarian rule, where security forces strike unpredictably, rarely
with just cause, and most often with inhuman efficiency.
The
presence of men in uniform doesn’t reassure. It intimidates, inviting the
likelihood of a shakedown or an arbitrary arrest. Nightfall brings heightened
anxieties about the knock on the door, and the disappearance to detention
centers where terms of release are discretionary and
capricious. By day, people glance over shoulders, careful about what they say
or who might be listening. Laws, when applied, turn on technicalities whose
mutability and application serve the whims of the state.
But
law enforcement is only one pillar of an autocracy’s machine. A system’s
longevity often depends less on foolproof organizational rigor than its
capacity to keep fear alive through the bogeyman of uncertainty. People, of
their own volition, shrink – from self-expression, from public life, from
standing up for their or others’ rights.
For
supporters of Trump, the new policies are a necessary assertion of law and
order. But in New York, a region of immigrants whose streets are a carnival of
pluralism, the hardline anti-immigrant approach of the Trump administration feels, to many, like a
dystopian aberration.
“It
flies in the face of our historical progress,” said Fernandez. “Unfortunately,
racism is part of the DNA of American history. But so are incredibly victorious
civil rights and social justice struggles that, when they were won, they led
the way for other countries.”
On a
recent morning at a parking lot in Brooklyn beside a Home Depot, clusters of
day laborers waited for construction jobs. Among them stood Carlos, who knew
the price of living as an undocumented immigrant. In 2008, his eldest son, then
18 years old and a senior in high school, was arrested by Ice officials, sent
to a detention center in Texas, and deported back to Honduras. Three years
later, he was dead, killed by members of a narco-trafficking ring in the
climate of insecurity that Carlos had sought to shield his family from when
he’d left for the States years earlier.
“That
is half of me,” he said, a finger stabbing at his heart, his dark eyes misting.
But
even for Carlos, whose temporary work visa expired in 2002, the surge of
anti-immigrant rhetoric and likelihood of security crackdowns in Trump’s
America are unprecedented. He appreciated President Obama’s immigration
policies, he said. There was a logic to them. His son might even have avoided
deportation if the Ice raid had come after Daca’s implementation.
The
policies of the Trump administration, by contrast, were akin to smashing a leg
out from under a table, destroying the fabric of New York work and family life.
“You
know what? If I get $600 in my pocket, maybe $50 I send to my country. But the
rest stay here. Because we got to pay rent, we got to pay bill. We got to pay
cellular, we got to buy food, toy for children, everything. Money stay here,”
Carlos said.
As for
life as a day laborer, Carlos could not remember a February that had been so
bereft of work. He opened wide his empty wallet. All last year, he said, he
could count on carrying $400 (he pays for everything in cash), thanks to a
healthy run of jobs – mixing and laying cement, tiling, loading truck. But the
weeks since Trump’s inauguration have run dry. Perhaps it was a function of a
winter halt in construction, although the climate this year has been relatively
mild.
More
likely, day laborers agreed, Trump’s policies had brought a new season of fear,
including among contractors – rightly or not – that hiring an undocumented
worker could result in fines of up to $10,000 for repeat offenders. For law
enforcement, day laborer sites are among the most traceable and easy to raid.
“The
problem right now, people don’t go buy clothes. People don’t go buy shoes.
People don’t buy nothing to send back,” he said. “Because we don’t know. We
don’t know what happen tomorrow.” A friend recently sold his deli for $30,000,
which about half what he paid for it. Better to take the loss, the friend told
him, than lose everything.
“When
children see police they say: ‘Papa, papa! Police is there, let’s go!’ They
move from here, they see police, they think police catch them.”
Oscar,
another undocumented immigrant, agreed. “We are scared. We are scared. We watch
all the time the news,” he said, a pencil tucked behind one ear, a measuring
tape fixed to a hip. Since Trump’s policies were announced, he has stopped
driving, for fear of being caught without papers. He would, in the unlikely
event of being given a choice, ask for deportation to Mexico this
time. But leaving isn’t actually an option. Here in the US, he has a son, 10, a
daughter, seven, and a newborn.
“They
are afraid,” he said. “In the morning, they say: ‘OK, you go work? I’m going to
see you tonight.’”
After
the election, non-immigrant residents in Staten Island, the only New York
borough that voted Trump, reached out to La
Colmena, the immigrant advocacy organization, to ask how they might
help. Since then, the group has assembled undocumented immigrants alongside
non-immigrants for sessions that include legal guidance and efforts to build
community through activities, such as cooking and Spanish classes.
“The
fact that we have these non-immigrants at these meetings, that gives a sense of
relief for a lot of people,” said Gonzalo Mercado, the organization’s director.
“Especially in Staten Island that not everyone is a Trump supporter.”
Immigrant
advocates are careful to weigh preparation for impending crackdowns against the
need to keep panic at bay.
“That’s
what Trump wants to do,” said Mercado. “He’s campaigning on fear. So we have to
turn that rhetoric around – focusing on community, focusing on solidarity.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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