I talked about the outsize impact on the state of California, because I believe California is a microcosm of who we are as Americans. I explained that we have farmers and environmentalists, welders and technologists, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and more veterans, and more immigrants—documented and undocumented—than any state in the nation. When it came to DACA, I reiterated what I had said in Kelly’s confirmation hearing: that we had promised recipients that we would not use their personal information against them, and that we could not go back on our promise to these kids and their families.
I spoke as a lifelong prosecutor and former attorney general of the largest state in this country when I said that the administration’s Muslim ban and immigration actions presented a real and present threat to our public safety. Instead of making us more safe, the increased raids and executive orders instill fear. “For this reason,” I said, “studies have shown Latinos are more than 40 percent less likely to call 911 when they have been a victim of a crime. This climate of fear drives people underground and into the shadows, making them less likely to report crimes against themselves or others. Fewer victims reporting crime and fewer witnesses coming forward.”
I also talked about the economic consequences, noting that immigrants make up 10 percent of California’s workforce and contribute $130 billion to our state’s gross domestic product. “Immigrants own small businesses, they till the land, they care for children and the elderly, they work in our labs, attend our universities, and serve in our military. So these actions are not only cruel. They cause ripple effects that harm our public safety and our economy.”
I closed my remarks with a call to action: that we have a responsibility to draw a line and say no—that as a coequal branch of government, it is our duty to uphold the ideals of this country.
The next month, I invited a young woman from Fresno who is a University of California at Merced alumna, a biomedical researcher, and a DACA recipient to be my guest at a joint session of Congress. Yuriana Aguilar’s parents moved their family from Mexico to Fresno when Yuriana was just five years old. None of them had papers. Her parents were agricultural workers who supported the family by selling vegetables. Still, as Yuriana recalls, “somehow they knew in order to succeed, you have to have an education.” Yuriana took her parents’ message to heart—literally. Today she works at Rush Medical College, in Chicago, studying how the heart’s electrical system functions. DACA made it possible for her to pursue her education and earn a PhD.
Yuriana has described how, when she first heard about the creation of DACA, she cried with relief. Then she went back to her research, doing her part to help others live healthier lives. As she says, “Science doesn’t have borders—there are no limitations on its advancement.” My mother would have loved her.
When we talk about DACA recipients, Yuriana’s commitment to giving back to our country is the rule, not the exception. The vast majority of DACA recipients are employed—more than 75 percent of them. They wear our nation’s uniform, they study at our colleges and universities, and they work in U.S. companies large and small. In fact, if DACA recipients were deported, it is estimated that the U.S. economy as a whole could lose as much as $460 billion over a decade. These young people are contributing to our country in meaningful ways.
I kept Yuriana top of mind over the course of the drama that would unfold through the year. She was the first person I thought of when, on September 5, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions cruelly and arbitrarily announced that the administration was ending the DACA program, throwing the fates of hundreds of thousands of people into limbo.
Without DACA, eligible young people who had been brought to the United States as children are faced with a terrible choice: they can live here without papers and in fear of deportation or leave the only country they’ve ever known. They have no path to citizenship. They can’t leave the country and get in line to immigrate here. There is no line. And for this administration, that’s the point.
Congress can fix this. There is bipartisan legislation in the House and the Senate that I’ve co-sponsored—the DREAM Act—which gives these young people a permanent path to citizenship. Every day that the DREAM Act goes unpassed is another day they have to live in fear—despite having done everything we asked them to.
I’ve met many Dreamers over the years, and on a nearly daily basis throughout my first year in the U.S. Senate. They bravely came to Washington to meet with members of Congress and tell their stories. There was one day when I was supposed to meet with five Dreamers from California who were in town as part of a group from all over the country. The others wanted to join, too, so I invited them into my conference room. It was packed, standing room only, with people lined up against the walls.
I was struck by one of the California kids, Sergio, who was a student at the University of California at Irvine. He talked about his mother working in Mexico, unable to make ends meet, and the decision she had made to come to the United States to give him a chance at a better life. He talked about how hard he had worked through school and how he had focused a lot of his energy on doing outreach to help people get health care. Like so many Dreamers, he was taking on a life of service. That’s the thing about the Dreamers: they really do believe in the promise of this country. It is their country, too.
There was so much passion in Sergio’s eyes. But I knew he was also frightened. The administration’s decision to end DACA had been so dispiriting and demoralizing, so counter to the better history of our country, so counter to the promise of opportunity on which he had relied. And as he and most of them searched my eyes, looking for confidence that they would be okay, I fought the pain of knowing how wrong and unfair the situation was, and that I could not, on my own, control the outcome. It pains me still today.
Three days after Sessions announced his actions, the University of California filed suit against the administration “for wrongly and unconstitutionally violating the rights of the University and its students” by rescinding the DACA program on “nothing more than unreasoned executive whim.” The president of the University of California system, Janet Napolitano, had served as President Obama’s homeland security secretary and had been responsible for drafting and overseeing the DACA program as originally conceived. For her, and for all of us, this was personal.
On January 10, 2018, the federal court sided with the university, issuing a temporary nationwide injunction blocking the government’s decision. This was a huge relief, as it restarted the DACA program and halted the administration action. But the operative word is “temporary.” Congress must still act to provide these young people with permanent protection from deportation, which can come only through legislation. Until then, Dreamers will remain in constant fear that a new court decision could rip them away from their families and the only country they’ve called home. And with a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court, there’s every reason to believe that such a reversal could be forthcoming.
February 2018 was a pivotal month in the immigration fight. The administration continued its cruel and outrageous conduct, going so far as to remove a reference to the United States as “a nation of immigrants” from the mission statement of the agency responsible for citizenship and immigration services. Meanwhile, the administration and many congressional Republicans effectively held the Dreamers hostage.
As part of the budget bill debates to fund the government, the Senate had agreed to take a vote on the DREAM Act, which would create a path to citizenship for the Dreamers. But there was a catch. In exchange, the legislation included $25 billion in taxpayer money to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
There were a number of reasons why I opposed this. Purely from a dollars-and-cents perspective, it was a total waste of taxpayer money. I am a strong believer in border security—but experts agree that a wall will not secure our border. Moreover, I worried that those billions of dollars would be used to implement the ad
ministration’s anti-immigrant agenda—including raids that target California and its residents, and families across the country. For the same price tag, we could do anything from funding a full-scale effort to combat the opioid crisis to expanding rural broadband and upgrading critical infrastructure.
But there was a bigger reason to oppose the border wall. A useless wall on the southern border would be nothing more than a symbol, a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value, but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built. The Statue of Liberty is the monument that defines to the world who we are. Emma Lazarus’s words—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—speak to our true character: a generous country that respects and embraces those who have made the difficult journey to our shores, often fleeing harm; that sees our quintessentially optimistic, can-do spirit in those who aspire to make the American Dream their own. How could I vote to build what would be little more than a monument, designed to send the cold, hard message “KEEP OUT”?
The immigration debate is so often defined by false choices. I remember a town hall I held in Sacramento, where a group of the president’s supporters showed up. One man said he thought I cared more about undocumented immigrants than I cared about the American people. It was a false choice. I care deeply about them both. Similarly, the budget debate was offering a false choice: fund the government or oppose the wall. I believed we could do both.
In the end, we were presented with two bills. I was proud to support the first, a bipartisan compromise drafted by Senators Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, and the late John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, which included measures to protect Dreamers from deportation and provide them with a path to citizenship, and did not include funding for the wall. The other proposal—which included the DREAM Act in exchange for the wall—was something I simply couldn’t get behind, regardless of the pressure. I voted against it. Ultimately, neither of the bills became law.
The fight on behalf of Dreamers continues. And here’s what I believe: These young people were brought into our country, in many cases before they could walk or talk, through no choice of their own. This is the only country they’ve ever known. This is their home, and they’re contributing. So I won’t let up until they are recognized as the Americans they are.
* * *
• • •
There’s a region in Central America known as the Northern Triangle, which includes three countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Together these countries have the menacing distinction of being among the most violent in the world. Between 1979 and 1992, El Salvador was undone by civil war that left as many as 75,000 dead. Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala’s civil war resulted in the deaths of 200,000 civilians. Honduras didn’t have a civil war of its own, but the violence in neighboring countries bled across its borders and made it, too, one of the world’s most dangerous places to live.
Even after the wars ended, the violence didn’t. A broken economy with deep poverty and few jobs, awash in weapons and generational destruction, led to the formation of organized criminal organizations that used murder, rape, and other sexual violence to control territory and take over large swaths of the region. In the years since, more people have been killed and kidnapped in the Northern Triangle than in some of the world’s most brutal wars. Between 2011 and 2014, nearly fifty thousand people were murdered in the Northern Triangle, and just 5 percent of the deaths resulted in judicial convictions.
For residents of these countries, life is often defined by terror. Gang violence, drug trafficking, and corruption are rampant. The largest and most notorious of these transnational criminal organizations, MS-13 and the Mara 18, are reported to include as many as 85,000 members worldwide. They extort small business owners and residents in poor neighborhoods into paying hundreds of millions of dollars each and every year. Those who don’t pay risk death, for them and their families. The gangs recruit young men to join their ranks through threats and intimidation, and they force teenage girls to endure sexual violence as so-called gang girlfriends.
Indeed, for women and girls in these countries, violence is systemic. In July 2014, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women reported that violent deaths of women in Honduras had risen by 263.4 percent between 2005 and 2013. There are stories of children being robbed, raped, murdered—including an eleven-year-old girl in Honduras whose killers slashed her throat and stuffed her underwear in it. If there was a ground zero for brutality and bleakness, the Northern Triangle would be it.
The only option is escape. And so hundreds of thousands of people have fled the region into neighboring countries and up through Mexico to the United States. In the past, we have welcomed asylum seekers in accordance with international law, granting them special protected status because of the severity of the hardships they face. Sometimes they come as families. But all too often, the journey is impossible to afford, leaving parents with an excruciating choice: Do they keep their children close but in the midst of mortal peril, or do they send them to the United States, knowing that if they survive the perilous journey they will have a chance to be safe and free?
In the summer of 2014, an unprecedented surge of tens of thousands of children and adolescents fled the violence of the Northern Triangle through human smuggling networks that brought them to the United States.
I was attorney general at the time, sitting at home watching the evening news, when I saw an image that struck a chord. In Murrieta, California—a town roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego—several buses carrying roughly 140 undocumented children and parents were on their way to a processing center. A crowd had gathered, blocking the street, waving flags and signs and yelling, “Nobody wants you!” “You’re not welcome!” “Turn around and go back home!” There were children inside the buses, looking out of their windows at faces filled with hate and vitriol. Their only wrong was that they had fled horrific violence.
And it wasn’t just the protesters in the streets. At the same time, a big push was coming out of DC to expedite the decision-making process so that they could quickly turn undocumented kids and families back. The aim was to assess and reach asylum decisions in about two weeks. Now, to be clear, the process requires someone to make a decision about whether the asylum seeker was fleeing real harm. That means that children have to share facts and tell their story in a comprehensive way.
I knew, having prosecuted child sexual assault, that in these types of cases, it takes a long time to earn a child’s trust, and for a child to be able to tell his or her story in a court of law. What was worse, I learned that these asylum-seeking kids had no right to a lawyer to guide them through the process. And that mattered a great deal. If you don’t have a lawyer, there’s about a 90 percent chance that you will lose your asylum case. If you have legal advice, there’s about a 50 percent chance you will prevail. Given that deportation would take these children back into the heart of danger, whether or not they had a lawyer was a matter of life and death.
I had to do something about this, and I knew there wasn’t any time to waste. So I personally got on the phone with managing partners of some of the most prestigious law firms in California, as well as corporate lawyers from big entertainment companies like Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Entertainment, and asked them to come to my office to help me make sure these children, some as young as eight years old, had lawyers, and thus had access to due process. Representatives from dozens of law firms convened in the conference room of my downtown Los Angeles office, and I took on the role of auctioneer.
“Okay, can I get five hundred hours of pro bono from you? How about you? And you? What about your firm? What can you guys do for us?” Soon after, we held a similar meeting in Northern California, where I did the same. We rallied the private lawyers to work through one of the community agencies that was offering legal services to help unaccompanied kids. Then I sponsored legisla
tion to provide $3 million to other nonprofits that were providing these children with legal representation.
This was my first experience with the crisis in the Northern Triangle and the consequences it had wrought on children and families. But it wouldn’t be the last.
In January 2017, one of the new administration’s first orders of business was signing an executive order that revoked the temporary protected status of immigrants from the Northern Triangle. As a result, some 350,000 immigrants are in the process of losing their right to live and work in the United States. The administration also ordered a change in the way asylum cases are considered, making it more difficult for immigrants to establish a legal basis for staying in the United States. Between February and June 2017, the number of applicants found to be eligible for asylum dropped by 10 percent.
In March 2017, Secretary Kelly went on CNN, where he was asked about a report that, in order to deter more people from the Northern Triangle from coming to the United States, he was actively considering the possibility of forcibly separating parents from their children at the border. “I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America from getting on this very, very dangerous network that brings them up through Mexico into the United States,” he said, confirming that it was under consideration.
Shortly thereafter, Elaine Duke, the deputy secretary of homeland security, appeared before the Homeland Security Committee. “Do you know when this is supposed to take effect?” I asked her, trying to gauge the likelihood that something so atrocious could be under way.
“It is not a decision,” she said. “The Secretary—I talked to him personally about it. He considers it still a possibility. They are looking at a wide range of deterrents, and it was raised as a possible method of deterrence but there is no decision made and there is no implementation plan currently.”
The Truths We Hold Page 16