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migrant rights
How to Argue With the Deportation Advocates in Your Family This Holiday Season
I work with Latino migrants every day—here’s the history to help you stand up for people like my students during Christmas dinner.
Dec 23, 2024
Once again, the holiday season is upon us. Whether we choose to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa—or simply participate in ongoing festivities—we can all agree that it’s a special time of the year, graced by extended time with family and friends, good food, and merrymaking. For obvious reasons already enumerated in countless media outlets, it can also be a stressful time, a lonely time, and a sad time. This year, but a few weeks after the 2024 Presidential Elections, the stakes are even higher. The probability of uncomfortable dinners has grown, perhaps exponentially, as we take stock of how deeply divided our nation truly is.
2025 will bring us Trump Show 2.0, with the president-elect promising mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, many from Latin America. Indeed, immigration was THE issue of the 2024 presidential election, so conditions should be ideal for Christmas dinners, family get-togethers, and champagne toasts to be riven by divergent opinions on the influx of newcomers to the U.S., whose growth over the past years was significant enough to be labelled, at least by some news outlets, a “surge.”
How can we talk productively about our historical moment and ourselves as we sip eggnog beside the yule log and under the mistletoe? How can we gift our interlocutors with arguments wrapped not in vitriol but rather, history? How can we look beyond the ill-willed gaslighting particular to once-a-year family reunions? For some of us talking more cogently about these delicate topics may lessen the pressures of the holiday season. For others, a more humane and reasoned public discourse may be a matter of life and death. After all, nothing less than the weight of history itself has brought them here.
Migrants and residents, undocumented and documented individuals, are living the same neoliberal moment, in which wages are pushed down, the informal economy grows, and workers experience a new flexibility as precariousness.
While I teach Spanish and Latin American culture at the collegiate level during the day, I teach both ESL and a Spanish-language version of the GED during the evening hours. These two roles inform how I think through our present moment. Let’s give ourselves the gift of both history and experience for Christmas—headlines and heartbeats, doubt and decisions.
First is the formidable list of number ones we enjoy in the United States. We are both number one in terms of consumption and, less joyfully, prisons. We are simultaneously the biggest mall and the biggest jail the world has ever known. We are a nation defined by emphatic commerce on one hand and, on the other hand, consequences for those who don’t follow along.
Our bounties are especially notable in terms of foodstuffs and, perhaps even more notable in terms of who produces our food. Latinos make up roughly one-third of those employed in the poultry industry—a major economic force for documented and undocumented workers alike in places like rural Missouri, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and Mississippi. Slaughtering chickens is no easy task, but catching chickens may be even more difficult. Latinos also have a foothold in the dairy industry; cows can, in fact, be milked three times a day, so those working will have to be available during the early morning hours. Gardening, construction, and drywall are also significant employers of Latino labor in the United States.
Beyond what newspapers and anthropologists tell us, I know that my ESL and GED students—some of them documented, some of them not—often work in these sectors. They also work in places that are closer to home for most of us: restaurants, hotels, and even Walmart. Indeed, the behemoth retailer Walmart was sued once some 20 years for abusing undocumented workers. If I am listening to my students correctly, it may be time again to examine the chain’s labor practices. Staffing agencies seem to be crucial in allowing the continued employment of undocumented labor: They provide a means to muddle up paperwork, intake non-English speakers, and forge employer-employee connections.
In both of my evening classes, my Latino students come and go. Their enthusiasm is palpable, but so is their exhaustion. Almost no one enjoys perfect attendance given the heinous flexibility of their jobs. Roofers can’t lay shingles in the rain. Housekeepers don’t clean rooms where guests haven’t slept. But when they are called in, they seemingly can’t afford to say no. Their education, naturally, is pushed on the proverbial backburner. It’s no fun being fungible.
In my GED class, we have studied how to develop arguments for the expository essay section. When asked to justify their claims in writing, my Latino students inevitably signal financial concerns as paramount. No matter the prompt and no matter what issue students are asked to weigh in on—junk food in high schools, obligatory military service, the humaneness of zoos, etc.—students consistently turn to personal finances to back their arguments. Maybe junk food is a low-cost alternative to cooking? Does the army pay well? Can zoos be self-funded? For my students, personal financial matters are preternaturally totalizing and give me a glimpse as to what they are really thinking about on a daily basis.
But again: the specter of deportation and possibility of changing hearts at the dinner table.
What the current debate misses is the deep history of these contemporary phenomena. Few Americans are aware of the Bracero Program or Operation Bootstrap, two accords (one between the U.S. and Mexico, another between the U.S. and Puerto Rico) that first brought thousands of workers to the lower 48. As American servicemen and women fought in two theaters overseas during World War II, workers were still needed to operate wood lathes, pull weeds, and lay railroad tracks. The briefest survey of amazing photographs culled from this mid-century moment make plain how we should think about that time. For Latino workers, it was a story of both commerce and control, opportunity and degradation, pride and poverty. Above all, what we should remember at the dinner table was that it was an invitation—an offer to enter the world’s largest mall and its biggest prison. During downturns—or, after soldiers returned to the U.S.—these actions were reversed.
The next bit of history that helps to explain our present moment takes us to 1994.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a pivotal time in the southwestern United States borderlands. The passage of NAFTA in 1994 marked a new era of trade between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, aimed at boosting the flow of goods by loosening trade restrictions. This shift allowed the U.S. economy to dominate the Mexican market, leading to instability in Mexico’s labor force and driving many to seek opportunities in the U.S., resulting in a surge in undocumented crossings at the Southern border.
While NAFTA was intended to open borders for trade and close them for people, the increased migration highlighted the human impact of market policies. These changes coincided with a shift in U.S. border policy under President Bill Clinton, focusing on prevention through deterrence. This strategy involved concentrating surveillance forces in urban areas like El Paso and San Diego, pushing undocumented migrants into the harsh terrain of Arizona.
As immigration from Latin America has risen, anti-immigrant sentiment has also grown. You may see some of this at Christmas dinner. It has also led to stricter laws, a more controlled border, and U.S. pressure on Mexico to militarize. Discussion of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border may arise during your merrymaking, too. Most of us don’t realize that even in places with the roughest terrain, where building a fence would be amazingly difficult, individuals find ways to cross. Conversation may then turn to ideas about the “sovereignty” of a nation. But defining what a nation is has—and continues to be—a rather difficult task. Others gathered for the festivities may put forth that immigrants sap social services. The fact is, however, a great many undocumented workers pay taxes. Finally, others that are present at your Christmas gatherings may claim that migrants are stealing away jobs from other Americans. The truth may be, however, that migrants and residents, undocumented and documented individuals, are living the same neoliberal moment, in which wages are pushed down, the informal economy grows, and workers experience a new flexibility as precariousness.
Perhaps around the time that dessert comes out, you may introduce a bit of theory to your guests—the Foucauldian notion that workers, within capital, whether documented or undocumented, have been increasingly rendered “docile bodies” over the past 50 or so years: powerless, susceptible, and constantly in movement. This is not to say we should forever characterize migrants as passive agents, thrown to the wind, capable of little more than provoking liberal guilt. Rather, we should interrogate what about our present moment created the most flexible, most fungible, most vulnerable—and perhaps, most usable—population in the history of humanity.
I, for one, will raise a glass at the end of my Christmas meal, toasting my students, their work ethic, and their hopes for a better life. I hope they can return to my classroom in the New Year, not dragged off by the promise of another siding job, another garden gig, another chicken coop in the next state over.
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To Fight Trump’s Mass Deportations, We Need Local Efforts to Defend Immigrants
The best way to resist enforcement activities, we learned under the first Trump administration, is for citizens and noncitizens to claim one another as fellow community members, and then work together.
Dec 22, 2024
Throughout his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised mass deportations of the more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Those of us on the ground who work with immigrants are apprehensive about what that will look like and how we can respond.
During the first Trump administration, I was part of local organizations working on issues of migrant detention and deportation defense in Washington state and writing my dissertation on interior immigration enforcement. I was also active with migrant justice efforts during the Obama presidency.
Some of what happened during these periods involved large-scale raids that made national news. Such operations are expensive to plan and orchestrate, are highly disruptive to the communities where they occur, and provoke opposition. This can happen again. However, much more immigration enforcement took place quietly, through the intensive targeting of specific locations such as workplaces, highway stretches, bus stations, and apartment complexes where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents believed there may be undocumented people.
Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.
At any point, ICE could round up those immigrants under remote surveillance, through GPS devices and mobile phone apps, who now number 181,000 people. ICE agents also capture people as they are being transferred from police custody, jail, or prison. Traffic stops, domestic disputes, and altercations with neighbors lead to deportation. This kind of enforcement is the most efficient for ICE; it has made up more than 90% of ICE arrests under President Joe Biden and will likely happen even more aggressively under Trump.
The Trump campaign drummed up support through scapegoating “migrant crime.” This is a pretext for mass deportations. There is no evidence of a crime wave related to immigration, but tying together the criminal justice system and immigration system becomes a way to ensnare people in the deportation dragnet.
The best way to resist these kinds of enforcement activities, we learned under the first Trump administration, is for citizens and noncitizens to claim one another as fellow community members, and then work together. Much of this work happens at the local level.
For example, Pacific County Immigrant Support was formed in 2018 in a rural county in Washington state that has voted for Trump for the past three election cycles. Citizen and noncitizen community members tracked ICE arrests and organized community protection.
Group members accompanied immigrants to ICE appointments and court dates, raised funds for immigration attorneys and bonds, and provided know-your-rights training to immigrants and employers of immigrants. They also sat down with the local sheriff to ensure that he wasn’t collaborating with ICE.
What is needed now is a blossoming of local-level efforts to defend immigrants. In Washington state this includes the Washington Immigration Solidarity Network hotline for reporting deportation events and connecting people who are facing enforcement with resources. The Fair Fight Bond Fund provides bonds to immigrants in detention while going through their proceedings in Washington, as does the National Detention Bond Fund at the national level.
Washington’s Shut Down the NWDC (Northwest Detention Center) campaign in Tacoma, and other campaigns nationwide coordinated through the Detention Watch Network, have exposed deadly and inhumane conditions in migrant detention centers, gathered support for people to survive detention, and strategized to shut down the detention infrastructure.
There is evidence that shutting down detention centers is an effective strategy for restraining immigration enforcement. There is also evidence that ICE enforcement was not able to function as smoothly in jurisdictions regulated by sanctuary ordinances. Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.
The first Trump administration was vengeful towards those who thwarted its restrictionist agenda. Trump revoked some federal funding to sanctuary cities. As I have documented in my scholarship, ICE agents also targeted activists, community organizers, journalists, and artists who spoke out against them.
The Biden administration refused to place restraints on ICE’s capacity to repress activist immigrants. Also during the Biden administration, the revanchist mantle was passed to state governments, like Texas, which bused asylum seekers to sanctuary cities, prosecuted immigrants for trespassing, and punished border humanitarian organizations. We can expect more of this kind of thing.
That is why it is crucial that we build solidarity within our local communities and get ready to defend against the coming attacks.
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Democrats Introduce Bill to Boost Migrant Family Reunion
Rep. Delia Ramirez said the bill she co-authored "aims to urgently reunite families, and to affirm that families should never be separated by our government at our borders."
Dec 18, 2024
Facing the looming specter of revived anti-migrant policies during the second term of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, congressional Democrats on Wednesday introduced bicameral legislation to authorize a Biden administration task force "to continue its work to reunite the thousands of families torn apart by Trump's zero-tolerance policy that inhumanely separated children from their parents," and "prevent future separation."
On International Migrants Day, Democratic Reps. Delia Ramirez (Ill.) and Joaquin Castro (Texas), along with Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), and Ed Markey (Mass.), introduced the Family Reunification Task Force Act, which comes on the heels of a report by human rights groups revealing that as many as 1,360 migrant children who were separated from their parents during Trump's first term have yet to be reunited.
"Trump's cruel zero-tolerance policy of ripping families apart intentionally inflicted irreparable trauma on immigrant parents, children, and communities," Ramirez said in a statement Wednesday. "It's a practice we will never—and should never—forget or repeat."
"While we can never fully right those wrongs, the Family Reunification Task Force Act is a critical means to address the harm inflicted on the families separated at our border," she added. "Our legislation aims to urgently reunite families, and to affirm that families should never be separated by our government at our borders."
Democratic President Joe Biden created the Family Reunification Task Force via a 2021 executive order that immigrant advocates fear will be rescinded after Trump takes office next month. Thousands of migrant children were separated from their families during Trump's first term. According to a ProPublica report published last week, the Biden administration has also separated hundreds of migrant children from their parents or legal guardians.
Trump has vowed to begin mass deportations on his first day in office. He is also seeking to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment, and has suggested that instead of separating families in which children are U.S. citizens, he would deport them along with their undocumented parents.
"The first Trump administration's family separation policy was a catastrophic failing, and still, six years later, hundreds of children remain apart from their parents," Blumenthal said Wednesday. "The Family Reunification Task Force has done important work to identify and reunite families traumatized by this cruel policy and that work is not yet done. This bill is a necessary step to continue to right the wrongs of family separation, no matter who is in office."
Dozens of advocacy groups are supporting the legislation.
"My family and I thank the members of Congress who support the Family Reunification Task Force so that children that are still separated from their families can be reunited at last," said Kseniia M. of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, one of the groups backing the bill.
"The months we were separated from our then 3-year-old daughter were incredibly painful, and as a family, we will live with the repercussions of that separation for the rest of our lives," she added. "We urge the U.S. government to continue to prioritize reunification and justice for all families affected by family separation policies."
Sarah Mehta, senior border policy counsel at the ACLU, said, "The family separation policy was one of the darkest chapters of the previous Trump administration, with babies and toddlers taken from their parents' arms, and thousands of families ripped apart."
"For too many families still awaiting reunification, this disastrous nightmare continues," Mehta added. "We need legislation like the Family Reunification Task Force Act so that these children are not forgotten and can finally return to their loved ones."
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