JEWISH ACTIVISTS FOR IMMIGRATION JUSTICE NEWSLETTER
Issue on Family Separation:
History, context, current forms, needed advocacy!
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This edition of the newsletter centers on the many facets of family separation.
Family. It’s an evocative word. For some, it evokes warm memories of holidays and hugs. Or perhaps the memories are not so warm, but fraught with pain and hurt. It’s likely that these memories and emotions are strong and deeply inform your sense of who you are.
Those bent on expanding and solidifying their power over others in the United States have long acknowledged, manipulated and traumatized our human connections to family. Trump’s family separation policy was only the latest in a shameful history of US efforts to subjugate targeted groups.
For almost 300 years, from 1501 until 1865, Black families were kidnapped, enslaved and torn apart at the whim and for the profit of the slaver. This barbarity led to the loss of culture, trauma for successive generations, and disruption of connection to family heritage.
With the establishment of the United States, colonization of North America by various newcomers sped up. Native American families were targeted to facilitate the takeover of their lands. From the 1800’s to the 1970’s, Native children were removed from their families, often first to go to boarding schools to inculcate them with “white” culture. Many were never returned to their families, instead being adopted by “white” families. The harm and pain to Native communities is incalculable. Source here.
Children in New York City were targeted from 1854 to 1929. This was touted as a means to deal with the “dangerous classes” and remove children (who may or may not have been orphans) from the squalor and poverty of the city. Not incidentally, the children also provided unpaid labor for western farms. From 150,000 to 200,000 children, largely from Polish and Irish Catholic immigrant families, were placed with white Protestant families in the West, most to never return. More here.
The list goes on. It includes:
- Mass raids and deportations of Mexican and Mexican- American adults during the Great Depression,( many of them citizens), who were accused of “taking jobs”, leaving children behind.
- The infamous internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, with fathers often sent separately from children.
- Operation “Wetback” in 1954, when 1.1 million Mexican Americans, including US citizens, were rounded up and transported to southern Mexico, in an effort to encourage hiring workers with documents.
Trump's inhumane policy takes its place in a historical context of systemic and systematic oppression. As we work to reverse these laws under the new administration--to end family separation, to abolish ICE-- we must be mindful of this broader context. The justice we seek must be built upon deep change to end the perpetration of state sponsored violence against vulnerable communities.
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Not just under Trump! Not only when it’s done in front of TV cameras!
Family Separation in our communities must end.
Families can be separated by more than the horrific actions of the Trump administration who tore children out of parents’ arms in front of tv cameras.
Families are ripped apart every time parents are arrested, detained and deported.
5.9 million children living in the US (most of them US-born citizens) have one or more caregiver who are undocumented. Especially over the past 4 years, many children have lived in fear of their parents being taken from them—and this has, in fact, happened to far too many.
Roughly half-a-million U.S. citizen children experienced the apprehension, detention, and deportation of at least one parent in the course of about two years, according to the most recent estimates available (analyzing ICE data between 2011 and 2013, under President Obama). And for the period from 2016 – 2017, one report indicates that tens of thousands of deported parents told ICE that they have US citizen children. Many additional children who are not US citizens are also separated from parents who are detained or deported.
More recently, CNN reported: as of March [2021], the average daily population in ICE detention for the current fiscal year was 15,914. Since most of those detained and deported are in their late 20’s and 30’s—we can surmise that many of those almost 16,000 people per day were ripped away from their children.
And beyond the statistics, there are the personal stories. In the memoir by Diane Guerrero (a cast member in Orange is the New Black), In the Country We Love: My Family Divided she writes about the effect of her parents being deported when she was 14 years old and attending the Boston Public Schools.
"I kept my story a secret, and many of my friends and classmates had no idea what I was going through…I felt like the only kid who’d ever dealt with having the people I loved most in the world snatched away from me. It would’ve meant everything to know that someone, somewhere, had survived what I was going through."
This is a powerful book to help us to carry with us the real impact of parents’ detention and deportation on their children.
The web-based project Humanizing Deportation contains bilingual digital stories (with audio and visuals) of hundreds of others. Here’s one to start with about a teen mom in the US who was deported and separated from her young child--and is not allowed to come back for 10 years! Her entire family (including her parents who are now raising their grandchild alone) are in the US--but she is in Mexico.
And children are impacted in many other ways by deportation orders. According to a lawyer who is studying the impact on children who have moved to Mexico with their deported parents:
“The term de facto deportation refers to people who are not technically deported, but who face no choice but to leave the country if they want to continue to live with a family member who has been deported. There are a lot of people in this boat...According to Mexico’s most recent census, more than half a million U.S. citizen children were living in Mexico in 2010.
When parents are deported, children suffer. This is true for children who remain in the United States, separated from their deported parent(s), and for those who leave the country in order to preserve the family’s unity. Many go back and forth, interrupting their educational progress and the development of social attachments.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has criticized U.S. immigration policy, concluding that it "violates children’s rights to family unity and is inconsistent with protecting the best interests of children.”
What happened under Trump was not an aberration; many of the people in the stories cited above were detained, deported, and separated from their children before Trump took office. Whether these horrendous stories continue to happen depends on whether we continue to fight against all forms of family separation, both on the border and also in our communities.
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Those of you who attended our virtual event, “Restoring Asylum: Updates from the Border,” on March 15, may remember that many of our speakers, people intimately involved in supporting asylum seekers at the Texas/Mexico border, called urgently for an end to Title 42. This order was issued last March by the CDC at Trump’s urging; it allows Customs and Border Patrol to immediately expel undocumented migrants, without any chance to apply for asylum, or make even a rudimentary case to border control agents that their lives are at risk if they are returned. It is being used as the primary current cause and excuse for turning away migrants and asylum seekers attempting to enter the US, and of the large rise in the numbers of “unaccompanied minors” being separated from their families.
Since March 2020, Customs and Border Protection has carried out more than 642,700 expulsions under the order, typically without conducting the required screenings. This is in spite of the border remaining open to others, with nearly 9 million people allowed to cross the southern border in one month, December 2020, and thousands of people flying into the United States every day.
Public reporting indicates that CDC scientists expressed opposition to this invocation of Title 42 from the beginning. When top CDC doctors refused to issue the order, saying there was no public health basis for it, then-Vice President Pence called then-CDC Director Robert Redfield and told him to produce the order anyway. “They forced us,” a former health official involved in the process told the Associated Press.
In May 2020, dozens of public health leaders called on the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security to lift the order, arguing that when international borders remain largely open to other travelers, there is no real excuse to turn away refugees and expel them to their home countries or to Mexico. Experts recommended that rather than singling out only migrants (overwhelmingly brown and black and destitute) for removal, evidence-based, common sense public health measures should be put in place: including COVID testing, personal protective equipment, and social distancing. To address the Title 42 order’s expressed concern that individuals held in “congregate settings” would pose a risk to the spread of COVID-19, the experts recommended that the government choose not to detain asylum seekers.
The Biden administration’s decision to admit “unaccompanied minors” even while continuing to expel both adults and children who enter with families might look more humane, but it has actually placed families in an impossible position. Since the shift in policy, some parents and guardians have made the devastating decision, calculated only out of desperation, to send their children to cross the border alone, hoping they will reach safety with relatives in the US and be able to reunite with them later.
As a result of Biden’s executive order ending MPP (a/k/a “Remain in Mexico”), the tent camp we knew best, in Matamoros, Mexico, where we met and talked to asylum seekers who were stuck in MPP, has emptied and people who had open asylum cases from before the pandemic have been allowed to enter the US to wait for the adjudication of those cases. However, all along the Mexican border, new adults and families arrive every day and find the border closed. Many of them are now living in tents.
There are no good options for these families. If they try and fail to cross the border illegally, they will be sent back to the unbearable conditions they came from, many of them to face death or violence at the hands of the cartels or cartel-protected military. Staying where they are gets more and more dangerous and difficult, as they lack basic necessities of life. A Politico reporter, in an article describing the untenable position and impossible choices of these families, quotes a local legal aid advocate: “This kind of information spreads like wildfire: If you hear about a child successfully making it, and your kids are desperate or sick or in danger, there are a lot of reasons why you would make that incredibly difficult decision.”
The result is a new form of family separation —taking place family by family, trying to deal with this impossible situation.
The developing narrative in the media and among commentary opposed to Biden’s overhaul of the immigration system claims there is a “crisis at the border,” caused by a “surge” in “illegal” entry. It is true that the number of migrants trying to enter has in fact increased, as has the number of so-called unaccompanied minors. Our friends who support asylum seekers at the border talk about the “tourniquet effect” as another factor to understand in explaining the increased numbers of people arriving: Trump’s draconian policies to prevent migration acted as a kind of tight restraint, a tourniquet, which when it is suddenly released causes increased flow, as people try to save their children and their lives.
Seeing people arriving at the border as a “surge” seems to be an expression of the ongoing racialized narrative that sees migrants as less than human and willfully ignores the actual human experience and conditions people are suffering. In November and December of 2020 Guatemala was devastated by two hurricanes in a month, causing widespread flooding and displacement. There is no food, no shelter and no safety for people in wide areas of the country.
Central America is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to the impacts of global climate change. People are undertaking the arduous, dangerous, uncertain journey north because their children are starving, because they see no alternative. People do not flee their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs unless they have to, or unless their homes no longer exist. That this obvious truth even needs to be stated is an indication of the cruelty and the racism that underlies much of the rhetoric about asylum, and immigration in general. Of course, the conditions that have been causing people to flee the northern triangle countries for decades: corruption, violence, the impunity of the drug cartels, the destruction and expropriation of indigenous lands and farms to benefit multinational development—all flourish supported by long-term US policy in these countries, and the corporate interests that influence those policies.
Like many other immigration advocacy groups, we feel strongly that the most important change we can demand of the Biden administration is to end Title 42. There is no public health justification for it, and it breaks Biden’s promise to be transparent in dealing with these issues.
As Jews we have a special responsibility to speak out, because many of our own ancestors faced similar impossible choices in Nazi Europe. Thousands of families chose to separate from their kids in order to save their lives and sent their kids alone across the border as part of the kindertransport. And we know from studies of family separation during the Holocaust that family separation is deep and long-lasting: The Victims of Trump’s Family Separation Policy Will Not Be Fine.
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In addition to ending Title 42, the Biden administration needs to be much more proactive.
They must refuse to pander to the right-wing narrative that frames immigrants as bad people trying to infiltrate our borders. And we as activists can help reframe these immigrants as hard-working people who are fleeing violence and life-threatening conditions.
We must not ignore the racist underpinnings of this narrative, which are rooted deeply in our nation’s history. Currently this has manifested by depicting black and brown immigrants as undesirable criminals and gang members. In fact, only a very small number of the people attempting to cross our border are involved in criminal activity, as pointed out here by a former Border Patrol agent. The Biden administration not only needs to stop expulsions, it needs to stop talking about the number of expulsions as a positive thing, which exacerbates the harmful and inaccurate beliefs about who these immigrants are and why they are here.
Human Rights First has put out a comprehensive article debunking this insidious right- wing narrative that infests so much media coverage, not only in conservative outlets like Fox News, but in the mainstream as well. Let’s educate ourselves so we can talk to our friends and family, write letters to the editor and op-eds, and speak out in whatever way we can to reframe this story. Yes, there is a crisis, but it’s not about the people coming to the border, it’s about what they’re fleeing, and how we’re treating them when they get here. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) recently said, “We can’t have an honest conversation on immigration without discussing the how and why. America’s capitalist interests disrupted Central America. America’s capitalist interests looted Central America. Our immigration plan needs to begin with us atoning for those wrongs.”
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Sign a petition from Every Last One with 3 main asks: 1. Stop separating children at the border from non-parental relatives. 2. Allow parents already in the US to pick up children at the border. 3. Expedite processes to release asylum-seeking children.
Write or call Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas at (202) 282-8495 (DHS comment line) or
Alejandro Mayorkas
Secretary of Homeland Security
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
245 Murray Ln. SW
Washington, DC 20528
Suggested script (please add your own wording):
Script: Hello, I’m [CALLING/WRITING] from [ZIP] in opposition to Title 42, which allows border agents to bypass normal immigration laws and rapidly expel many asylum seekers at the southern border without due process. This policy disregards our constitutional duty to provide asylum to those seeking refuge in our country, and sends vulnerable individuals and families to await their hearings in dangerous border towns. I am asking Secretary Mayorkas to end the use of Title 42 and protect those who seek refuge in our nation. (from Americans of Conscience Checklist)
DONATE TO ORGANIZATIONS ON THE BORDER
The FEMA aid to migrants was only given to some border organizations in the US, but not to the NGO’s on the Mexican side of the border where those expelled under Title 42 are waiting and hoping. The need for shelter and housing for migrants is especially URGENT in Matamoros, which is a very dangerous city. It is utterly unsafe to camp out in the streets.
Click here for a list of organizations on both the US and Mexican sides of the border that are desperately in need of financial assistance.
HELP GET CHILDREN TO SPONSORS MORE QUICKLY: VOLUNTEER WITH VECINA’S FAMILY REUNIFICATION PROJECT
VECINA is launching a project to help speed the processing of the thousands of children, family members and sponsors currently in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and Customs and Border Protection, waiting to be reunited with a family member or sponsor who is willing to receive them into their home. They are looking for volunteer attorneys, interpreters and people who can provide administrative support to assist with ORR paperwork and communicate with case workers so that the reunification process can move as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Right now the greatest needs are for interpreters--especially Spanish and Indigenous languages such as K’iche and Mam -- and people who can help with the administrative paperwork. For each case, there is a team made up of a lawyer, an interpreter, and an administrative person. Cases on average take between 6 and 8 hours to complete.
Please be aware that the Family Reunification Project is just starting, so if you fill out an online form to volunteer, it may take a few weeks for them to assign you to a case.
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Celebrate! Lucio and Irida are FREE!
We have described above how family separation has more faces than the obvious ones like kids being torn from their loved ones’ arms and isolated in detention while their family members get deported. Another one of these faces is the Sanctuary Movement.
Right here in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, two brave people decided to separate from their families in order to avoid impending deportation and lived in church basements for more than three years, unable to leave the premises without risking arrest and rapid deportation. And two brave church congregations, First Congregational Church of Amherst and the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence went well beyond simply offering sanctuary to create a “Beloved Community” (as First Congregational Pastor Reverend Vicki Kemper called it at Lucio’s freedom celebration), supporting Guatemalan father Lucio Perez in Amherst and Russian mother Irida Kakhtiranova in Northampton.
Like many targeted for deportation in recent years, they won the hearts of so many who came into contact with them. Nobody expected the need for sanctuary to last as long as it did, and nobody expected that the entire last year of their confinement would take place in isolation from most of that support network, due to the pandemic.
Lucio has four children; Irida has three. Their kids and their spouses had to cope not only with the separation but also with a loss of income, and the burden of running a busy household shifting from two people to one. And Lucio and Irida had to miss cheering on their kids if they were performing, helping them with their homework, and sharing the joy and struggle of day-to-day life. Still, Lucio and Irida were able to see their families regularly and to stay near the communities where they’d lived for years. Many others were herded onto planes (often with a ticket they were forced to purchase themselves) and deported to countries where they were in danger and where their loved ones were thousands of miles away. But even though the children got to see their parents at the churches where they were living, all family members (adults and children) suffered great pain, and at times hopelessness, because of the separation.
And Lucio, Irida, the host churches, the many other congregations that helped with food or rides or accompaniment (providing 24-hour coverage pre-COVID so Lucio and Irida were never in the buildings alone) or other services, and organizations like the Pioneer Valley Workers Center—as well as a raft of federal, state, and local elected and appointed officials—never lost sight of the goal: freedom for these two big-hearted activists (and about 40 others around the country who took sanctuary in other faith congregations) to rejoin their families.
Once the Trump administration with its gratuitous cruelty was out of office, the wheels of justice finally started turning. Both received stays of their deportation orders, and are back in the loving embrace of their own families, sleeping in their own homes. A celebration was held for Lucio on March 13, and Lucio was able to attend Irida’s gathering on April 1—the first time these two who have shared so much struggle met in person.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
Escapa por tu Vida (Escape for your Life)
Sunday, May 2nd, 3:00 – 4:30 PM (on Zoom-register below)
A Pioneer Valley Interfaith Refugee Action Group program on climate refugees from Central America to the US/Mexican Border
Keynote Speaker: Pat Hynes
Why do they leave?
Migration from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to the US-Mexico border increased rapidly from 2007 - 2021. Hunger and the consequences of historical US imperialism in their countries drove this flight. These countries are located in the Central American Dry Corridor where ‘hotspot’ temperatures, drought, deforestation and sea level rise are driving poor people from their homes and subsistence farms to our southern border.
Pat Hynes was the Director of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in western Massachusetts from 2010-2021 and is now a Board member. A retired professor of environmental health, she is the author of many books on environment.
Register in advance for this meeting by clicking this link.
Songs for the Open Road: A Concert to Drive Immigration Reform
May 13, 7:30-9 p.m.
This fun, free, online concert will have the theme of driving in Massachusetts with the goal of supporting our immigrant neighbors. Undocumented adults performing essential jobs in food supply an delivery and in health care need safe transportation options, including driver’s licenses. Join us for hummable and humorous songs with award-winning musicians: Cosy Sheridan, Greg Greenway and Rosi and Brian Amador of Sol y Canto.
Hosted by the JP Progressives Immigrant Rights Action Group
Witness at the Border is organizing bi-monthly events addressing the root causes of migration and related immigration issues. Here’s what’s coming up. You can find more information on their page.
5/5: Border Music with Libby Garza and discussion with Global Resource Management
6/3: Root Causes with Aviva Chomsky
6/17 : Climate Impact on Migration, speaker TBD
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