Tag: deportation

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At Large Opinion

Margaritaville

Who’s to blame? (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

There’s a Mexican restaurant near me where I go for dinner every week or so. The hostess and the waitresses know me. I’m the guy who always orders the fish (or camarones) tacos, a side of queso dip, and a house margarita — and tips nicely. They even know the booth I like. 

The place is usually populated with diners of all ethnicities. The background music is some kind of Ameri-Mexican blend with bright pop hooks and a beat you could dance to if you had more than one house margarita. There’s usually a soccer game on the television. It’s a clean, lively, friendly place. I can eat, look at my phone, and sip my margarita in peace.

The hostess and waitresses speak English better than most of their customers. They’re smart and engaging and easy to chat with. The busboys, not so much. Sometimes, I’ll stop one and ask for something — a fresh napkin, a straw — and they just shake their heads and smile, and go get a waitress. They don’t understand English very well, I assume. They could have crossed the border legally and are waiting for a work visa or a disposition on their application for asylum, but it’s also quite possible they are here without papers, working hard and laying low, hoping to avoid the coming storm. 

From my seat, I can hear the busboys and kitchen staff chattering in a Spanish spoken so quickly and colloquially that it would baffle Duo the Lingo Owl. It makes me wonder what’s going to happen in a month or so if the new president and his minions follow through on their campaign pledge to institute “mass deportations.” 

Will sheriff’s deputies, U.S. Marshals, or even the National Guard barge through the front door of my favorite little haunt at dinner time and march off with half the staff in handcuffs? Will they then sweep their way down Summer Avenue, stopping at all the Hispanic-owned businesses, demanding, “Papers, please”?

Will the same law-enforcement brigades start hitting up the construction sites around town, taking away the crews who build our homes and office buildings? Will they begin visiting the massive farming operations across the South and West that rely on millions of immigrants to harvest the nation’s crops? Will they raid the packing plants where immigrants prepare the beef, poultry, and pork for our grocery stores? 

If it happens, it’s going to be another of those moments when ideology meets reality and it’s not going to be pretty. When fulfilling a campaign promise leads to a major disruption of the economy, when ensuing worker shortages lead to abrupt price increases, when oranges, tomatoes, and all our other produce lie rotting in our fields and orchards, will Trump and the GOP hard-liners blink? Will they really risk an economic meltdown to own the libs? Will the Americans who voted for this madness finally figure out how effed-up it is?

When millions of families are separated from loved ones, when there are mass camps of “illegal” humans of all ages across the country, when the real costs and the enormous cruelty of trying to deport 10 million people become obvious, will the politicians who ran on this xenophobic bullshit back down? Who knows?

Reporters around the country are already asking governors whether they will cooperate with federal deportation plans. Such cooperation might well involve authorizing state National Guard troops to help with rounding up suspects. In red states, including Tennessee, governors have mostly spouted the GOP party line when questioned, saying that they would do whatever the president asked them to do. In blue states, the opposite reaction has mostly occurred, with governors, mayors, and other regional officials saying they would not use local resources to help with mass deportation. 

Look, if Republicans really wanted to fix immigration, they would start at the top and start prosecuting employers who hire undocumented laborers. Problem solved. But that’s never going to happen. Employers are the wrong color and they have money to grease political palms. And since the polarization game plan just won an election, I suspect it will be in play for the next four years. My advice is to speak out for justice when and where it’s possible. Then go have a margarita, if you can find one.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Apocalypse Now?

Photo: Alkan2011 | Dreamstime.com

In the week since the end of the 2024 presidential campaign, various experts, partisans, and pundits have been holding forth on the meaning of it all. 

Well, with your indulgence, it’s my time for a little thumb-sucking. Really, I just wonder how this new order is supposed to work. The incoming Trump administration is pledged, as its first order of business, to expel somewhere between 2 and 20 million undocumented immigrants in what the president-elect has promised will be “the largest mass deportation in this nation’s history.”

Probably a majority of those being targeted are embedded to some degree in the fabric of society — as mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and students and toilers (significantly, in that last category, as taxpayers).

Those Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who became the bane of Republican rhetoric during the campaign, were not here as scavengers of dogs and cats and geese, nor is there any reason to believe they performed as such. They were not border-jumpers, by the way, but nose-to-the-grindstone workers legally imported to do local infrastructure jobs that native-born sorts wouldn’t touch.

Remember all those new houses that went up during the building boom of the ’90s? To a substantial degree, the grunt work on them was done by Mexicans, most of them undocumented, to be sure.

After the deportation of all these willing hands, there is sure to be some serious attrition within a labor market that is arguably under-strength already.

And what about the sheer expense of such a massive operation, estimated to be as high as $315 billion, and the human costs of all this forced dislocation? 

There are few parallels for mass deportations on such a formidable scale, most of them stained by controversy, disrepute, or worse — the Turkish expulsion of Armenians, the German boxcars of Jewish victims eastward to death camps in World War II (and the retributive exodus of that country’s own civilians, driven in the other direction by Russian tanks), the Nakba of Palestinians in 1948, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia in 1992.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But that’s the name I myself would give to the whole imagined immigrant scare.  

Compromise. Consensus. Those are indispensable qualities of the democratic process, indeed, of the human contract itself. And there is no sign of them as concepts of this plan — no indication even of a reliable means of distinguishing between the rank and file of the immigrant population and the relative few malefactors that may lurk within them. Nor of an inclination to apply such means.

No provision to earn future citizenship for the long-term residents whose worth as permanent members of the American body politic has already been demonstrated by their conduct and contributions to society. On top of it all is the expressed intent of the incoming administration to renounce that traditional birthright of citizenship that is automatically conferred on those born here.

And the most flagrant cheat of the whole thing? These all-too-disposable migrants are here by express invitation. Latinos in the main, they are — man, woman, and child — the blood brothers and sisters of all the upstart populations that have come to America before them — the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons and Jews and Italians and Slavs and Irish and Asians who, amid unimaginable hardship and life-and-death circumstance, answered the call of one Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words adorn the Statue of Liberty in the beckoning waters of New York harbor:

“… Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Keeping that lamp lit for others, not snuffing it out, should be the concern of those of us fortunate to find ourselves secure behind that door.

Categories
News News Blog

Detained Journalist to be Released on Bond

CREDIT: Memphis Notacias


Memphis Notacias

Manuel Duran

The Memphis journalist who was arrested during an immigration protest last year, and later taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is being released on bond, according to a Thursday post on the “Free Manuel Duran” Facebook page.

“ICE has set a bond for Manuel and we paid it,” the post reads. “We are in [sic] our way to Alabama to bring him back home.”

Manuel was the owner of and reporter for Memphis Noticias, a local Spanish-language newspaper, before his detainment. The journalist was arrested last spring while live-streaming an immigration protest Downtown.

The charges were dropped and the case was dismissed, but Duran was not released from the Shelby County Jail. ICE officials picked up Duran from the jail and he was transported to the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana.

Facebook

Duran arrested during a protest.

After 15 months in various detention centers, most recently in the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, the Board of Immigration Appeals ordered that his case be reopened earlier this month, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), one of the groups who’ve provided Duran with legal assistance.

Reopening the case sends it back to a federal immigration judge to have his asylum claim heard.

The SPLC did not immediately respond to the Flyer‘s request for comment. 

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This comes as the conversation on immigration issues and action against ICE raids and migrant detention centers heat up around the country.

Memphis is one of more than 200 cities slated to hold a candlelight vigil Friday night to shine a light on the issue of immigration detention centers.

Organizers of the Lights for Liberty: A Vigil to End Concentration Camps are partnering with organizations across the country and worldwide to protest migrant conditions that organizers call inhumane.

Mid-South immigration Advocates (MIA), Mismo Sol 901, the Tennessee Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and other advocacy groups are hosting the Friday’s vigil here. It will take place at the Memphis immigration Court on Monroe from 7:00-9:00 p.m.

So far more than 450 people have indicated they are interested or will attend the demonstration on the event’s Facebook page.

Across the country, at least one city in every state has an event planned. Around the world, participants as far away as the United Kingdom, Spain, Israel, and Japan will join in.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Top Priority

It didn’t take immigration officials long to nab fugitive immigrants after setting up a new local office.

On September 25th, the second day of operations for the Memphis-based U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Fugitive Operations Team, Romanian citizen Gheorghe Turcas was arrested for failing to comply with a deportation order stemming from a 1996 sex offender conviction.

The local ICE team, which serves Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, was created last month to assist the region’s New Orleans-based office in tracking down illegal immigrants who have committed crimes or have failed to comply with deportation orders.

Of the 62,000 illegal aliens apprehended by the effort since the teams began in 2003, more than 17,000 had convictions for serious crimes, such as homicide, robbery, sexual exploitation of children, and other aggravated felonies.

“We prioritize our fugitives and try to get criminal aliens first,” says Philip Miller, assistant field office director. “There’s a number of reasons a person can be deported from the United States. One is based on their criminal history. Those people are our number-one priority.”

Besides setting up the local federal office, ICE has also partnered with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office to start a Criminal Alien Program (CAP), which focuses on singling out inmates who may be in the country illegally.

CAP requires jail intake officers ask each inmate three questions as they’re being booked: 1) Where were you born? 2) Of what country are you a citizen? and 3) Do you claim citizenship with another country?

“If they say they’re foreign-born, we call ICE and alert them that we have a potential illegal,” says Shelby County sheriff Mark Luttrell. “They come down and see if the person is deportable. If so, we hold them until they’re moved out.”

Luttrell says criminal aliens aren’t a huge problem in Shelby County. Only 4 percent of the current jail population is foreign-born, and about half of those people are illegal immigrants. By comparison, 10 percent of the jail population in Nashville’s Davidson County are foreign-born.

Pablo Davis, executive director of Latino Memphis, hopes the regional effort will focus only on fugitives who commit serious crimes.

“We are very concerned that ICE’s work to apprehend immigrant fugitives truly be targeted, rather than a net that ends up catching people who are living orderly lives, working, paying taxes, and so forth, but who happen to be undocumented and driving to work … without a driver’s license,” Davis says. “[We don’t want those people] to suddenly find themselves on a fast train to deportation.”

Davis says surveys of Latinos living in Nashville, where a similar criminal alien program already has been implemented, indicate less confidence in local police. Though an immigrant may not be committing a crime, stricter measures targeting undocumented workers cause some to fear calling the police even when they need help.

“We hear frequently from immigrants in Memphis who are less willing to report crimes or otherwise seek police assistance due to their perceptions of the overall climate,” Davis says.

The Fugitive Operations Team focuses solely on immigrants who are fugitives from the law, and Luttrell says the CAP program will only target illegal immigrants who commit crimes.

“We’re not going to start driving around looking for illegals,” Luttrell says. “But if they commit crimes, we’re set up to handle that.”