All I could see as I stared at the boys was young Pepeton staring back at me.
7.
The Machine
To understand how the boys and I ended up inside that jail cell, you must unravel a vast enforcement apparatus that is part police force, part frontier cavalry, part deportation machine, and altogether unprecedented in immigration history. For the most part, it’s also been largely unheralded, hiding in plain sight for the past quarter century as cries of “Build the wall!” got louder and louder. This apparatus grew in the 1990s, its predatory arms extending their reach after the 9/11 attacks.
The gruesome attacks on 9/11, carried out by foreigners who legally immigrated to the country on temporary visas, proved to be a turning point. As our country geared up to fight the “war on terror,” immigration was wedded to terrorism. That was the clear message from the Bush administration, which shuttered the eighty-four-year-old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and replaced it with the Department of Homeland Security, whose chief task was protecting Americans from terrorists. And that insidious message—the narrative of immigrants as potential terrorists, a threat to our national security—blanketed news coverage.
Around the same time my mother in the Philippines sent me to California to live with Lolo and Lola, in the mid-1990s, the federal government moved to control the border. My first few years in America were the “tough-on-crime” years as defined by President Clinton and the lawmakers who were part of the Republican Revolution that swept Congress. Getting “tough on crime” led to getting tough on “criminal aliens,” which turned out to be a bipartisan affair.
In 1994 Pete Wilson, the Republican governor of California, championed the successful Proposition 187 ballot initiative, which aimed to ban “illegal aliens” from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services. Not to be outflanked on the right, Clinton launched “Operation Gatekeeper” in the same year, its mission to regain control of “the borders,” particularly the San Diego–Tijuana border, at that point the busiest land crossing in the world. New miles of fencing were built. Hundreds of new agents were trained. The budget of the Border Patrol, which fell under the INS, was doubled. Though the Clinton administration declared victory, the policy was considered a failure. The only success, if you can call it that, was shifting illegal crossings from the suburbs of San Diego and El Paso toward treacherous mountains and deserts.
Egged on by congressional Republicans, Clinton deepened the damage, signing two omnibus bills that laid the groundwork for an enforcement apparatus that has only grown under every subsequent president, Republican or Democrat. Two years after signing a “crime bill,” and fresh on the heels of signing “welfare reform,” Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. Together, these two bills made it easier to criminalize and deport all immigrants, documented and undocumented, and made it harder for undocumented immigrants like me to adjust our status and “get legal.”
Before 1996, immigrants, regardless of status, could get deported following state or federal conviction for murder, rape, or other serious felonies.
Since 1996, immigrants, regardless of legal status, can get deported for theft, counterfeiting, or possession of stolen property, among other relatively minor offenses.
Before 1996, immigrants who had been living in the U.S. for at least seven years, were of “good moral character,” and were “conviction-free” could get legal status if they showed that deportation would cause them or their lawfully present relatives “extreme hardship.”
Since 1996, a process called “expedited removal” empowers immigration agents to deport immigrants without bringing them before an immigration judge for a hearing if said immigrants cannot prove that they have been in the country for two years. What’s more, the majority of undocumented immigrants cannot adjust their status and “get legal” even if they marry a U.S. citizen or qualify for a green card because of a relative. I’ve met dozens of undocumented men—it’s always been men—who are married to U.S. citizen women but can’t adjust their status. Worst of all, undocumented immigrants are banished for at least three years if they’ve lived in the country without proper documentation for six months; if they’ve been here illegally for a year or more, the banishment lasts ten years.
Taken together, these bills not only expanded the criteria for who can get detained and deported, they also expanded the population of immigrants who couldn’t adjust their status, leading them to fear detention and deportation at any point. It’s a government-created, taxpayer-funded catch-22, and we’re all tied up in it like a Gordian knot. If I chose to leave and go back to the Philippines, then I’d face a ten-year ban on reentry into the U.S., since I’ve been living illegally in the U.S. for twenty-five years. And even if I returned to my country of birth, there’s no guarantee I’d ever be allowed back to the country I call my home. Put simply, for the government, keeping people “illegal” is much easier than allowing them to get “legal.” Perhaps it’s no accident that the ITIN, which allows undocumented workers to pay federal taxes, was created in 1996.
As the years wore on, the enforcement apparatus locked up more and more people, spending billions in the process. Since the Clinton era, detainment became mandatory for certain immigrants, including asylum seekers and those with criminal records, however minor the offenses. Immigrants filled detention beds in prisons and jails across the country, many of them private, for-profit facilities. The average daily number of immigrants locked in detention skyrocketed after Clinton left office. A detention bed quota of thirty-four thousand immigrants on a daily basis was established during the Obama administration. At that time, no other law enforcement agency was subjected to a daily statutory quota.
If we are not detaining immigrants, we are deporting them. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, our country went from deporting seventy thousand immigrants in 1996 to removing four hundred thousand per year through the first term of the Obama administration. Though activists and advocacy groups have branded Obama as “Deporter-in-Chief,” the number of deportations started increasing during the Bush era because of a program called Operation Streamline.
Under Operation Streamline, border crossers approach a judge in small groups, no more than seven or eight, their bodies shackled and chained. Their prison sentences range from days to months or years. As documented in the book Indefensible: A Decade of Mass Incarceration of Migrants Prosecuted for Crossing the Border, by Judith A. Greene, Bethany Carson, and Andrea Black, almost a quarter of people locked up by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2015 were noncitizens, most of them charged for illegal entry or illegal reentry. Locking up people for the “crime” of improper migration is overcrowding federal prisons, worsening our mass incarceration problem.
The cost of enforcing our laws and protecting our borders is almost astronomically absurd. A 2014 article published in Politico found that the U.S. government spends more money each year on border and immigration enforcement than the combined budgets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Marshals. Altogether, the article noted that more than $100 billion of our tax dollars have been spent on border and immigration control since 9/11. And these numbers preceded the Trump era, with President Obama spending record sums on immigration enforcement even as he championed a broader legislative solution that neither political party had been able to deliver.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the country’s largest law enforcement agency, employs an estimated sixty thousand people and operates a fleet of about 250 planes, helicopters, and drones, making it the largest law enforcement air force in the world. The Border Patrol, which is part of CBP, uses a “digital wall” comprising eight thousand cameras to monitor our southern border and ports of entries, and employs 18,500 agents on the nearly two-thousand-
mile-long U.S.-Mexico border. Extending from California to Texas, about seven hundred miles of fencing that includes wire mesh, chain link, post and rail, sheet piling, and concrete barriers has been constructed at a cost of between $2.8 million and $3.9 million per mile.
And all for what?
To protect Americans from whom?
8.
National Security Threat
What transpired in the summer of 2014 epitomizes the moral bankruptcy that characterizes how we talk about immigration in America during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Headlines from even reputable news organizations like CBS News read: “Is the Surge of Illegal Child Immigrants a National Security Threat?”
A couple of days after I read that CBS News story, Cristina Jiménez of United We Dream, a national youth-led immigrant rights organization, sent me a text message, asking if Define American would be interested in joining a delegation traveling to McAllen, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Among the longest rivers in North America, the Rio Grande marks the official border between Mexico and the U.S. Following America’s victory in the Mexican-American War in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the U.S. the Rio Grande as a boundary for Texas, not to mention ownership of California and a vast terrain that included most of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona and parts of Wyoming and Colorado, all for the price of fifteen million dollars. When you meet Mexicans who say that the border crossed them, this is what they mean.
The goal of the trip, Cristina said, was to organize a vigil welcoming arriving Central American refugees, most of whom were children fleeing for their lives. Many traveled alone, a journey of hundreds of miles by trains, buses, and on foot just to get across the Rio Grande. Unavoidably, the Rio Grande became ground zero for political posturing, attracting the conservative firebrand Sean Hannity, who taped his Fox News show on the banks of the river. Republicans including Rick Perry, the Texas governor, blamed the “border crisis” on DACA, the program that gives temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But as congressional Democrats and the Obama administration pointed out, the unaccompanied minors did not qualify for DACA. What they did quality for, according to human rights experts, was refugee status—something President Obama was careful not to give them. The politics of immigration was so poisonous even helpless kids couldn’t be seen as kids. When Hillary Clinton, a longtime champion of children’s rights, was asked to weigh in, she said tens of thousands of children and teenagers should be sent back to their home countries. “We have to send a clear message: just because your child gets across the border doesn’t mean your child gets to stay,” Clinton said at a CNN-hosted town hall.
Whether you call them migrants, immigrants, or refugees, their journeys included an arduous trek through blistering desert terrain. Often, they lacked food, water, and shelter. Many arrived dehydrated and hungry. Some required medical attention. Once they crossed the Rio Grande, they didn’t try to hide from Border Patrol agents. They walked up to the officers and gave themselves up.
I wasn’t sure if I should fly to Texas. I was not a refugee. I wondered if my showing up there would take attention away from their plight. But the more I read about what was happening in McAllen, the more I wanted to go. My dear friend Paola Mendoza, a Colombian-born filmmaker who has made immigration central to her art, suggested that we film the vigil. My plan was to fly in, participate in the vigil, help Paola with the filming, and fly out. I’d never been to southern Texas. My only experience of being close to the border was in Southern California, where some of my relatives live. The Texas border was a whole other experience, a militarized occupied territory swarming with Border Patrol agents, Department of Public Safety officers, and immigration officials. Along the three-mile drive from the McAllen Miller International Airport, where I was picked up, to my hotel, I counted seven Border Patrol cars, just driving around. Nearby, a Department of Public Safety helicopter hovered. At the Starbucks not too far from the hotel, many of the customers were uniformed agents and officers on their breaks.
When my friend Mony, an immigration lawyer who used to work in the area, saw on my Facebook page that I was in McAllen, she texted me: “I am so glad you are visiting the kids near the border. But how will you get through the checkpoint on your way back?” A curious question, I thought, and one I dismissed. I’ve visited the border before, in California. What checkpoint? What was she talking about?
Then Tania Chavez, an undocumented youth leader from the Minority Affairs Council, one of the organizers of the vigil, asked me the same question: “How will you get out of here?” Tania grew up in this border town. As the day wore on, as the reality sank in, Tania spelled it out for me: You might not get through airport security, where CPB also checks for IDs, and you will definitely not get through the immigration checkpoints set up within forty-five miles of this border town. At these checkpoints, you will be asked for documentation. “Even if you tell them you’re a U.S. citizen, they will ask you follow-up questions if they don’t believe you,” Tania told me.
When I told Cristina about the situation, her eyes widened. “Oh my God, Jose! I forgot you don’t have DACA!”
At the Texas border, “border security” is an inescapable daily reality, a physical and existential reminder of where you cannot go, what your limitations are. “Border security” means running random checkpoints anywhere within one hundred miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, a Constitution-free zone in which agents can stop your car, inspect your belongings, and ask for your papers, regardless of your immigration status. (The Fourth Amendment does not allow for citizens to be subjected to random search and seizures, but in the interest of “national security,” the Fourth Amendment does not apply within a hundred miles of the border.) For residents of the Rio Grande Valley who are undocumented, or who are U.S. citizens but live with parents or siblings who are undocumented, “border security” means knowing you can’t drive for more than half an hour south, no more than an hour and a half east, and no more than two hours north.
Soon Cristina was strategizing on how I could leave McAllen quietly and discreetly. She kept apologizing for not remembering that I didn’t have DACA. “We need to get you out,” she texted. “We can drive you to SA.” San Antonio. Someone suggested hiding me in the trunk so I could get through the checkpoint.
The moment that suggestion was made—hide? in the trunk?—I knew in my heart that I had to stay. Paola agreed with me. “This happened for a reason, Jose,” she said. “You are stuck here for a reason.” I called Ryan and told him what was happening. I texted Alida: “I’m in McAllen and I’m stuck.” Within hours, Ryan and Alida decided to fly to McAllen, just so they could be with me regardless of what happened. I decided to continue what I’ve been doing since I stopped hiding who I am. To practice “radical transparency,” I wrote an essay that was published in Politico the following day:
“I write this from the city of McAllen. . . . In the last 24 hours I realize that, for an undocumented immigrant like me, getting out of a border town in Texas—by plane or by land—won’t be easy. It might, in fact, be impossible.”
The headline: “Trapped on the Border.”
Some people thought the whole thing was a stunt, including activists in the immigrant rights movement. “He’s just trying to take away from the kids,” a Dreamer I knew posted on Facebook, and since we were friends, I saw his post. My stomach dropped. It was an accident. I didn’t know I was going to be cornered there. I had to call Lola and assure her everything would be fine. I drafted an email to my loved ones and explained what was happening and what could happen. After consulting with immigration lawyers, we decided that I would leave McAllen in the same way I arrived: by plane. A wealthy friend offered to get me a private plane, which I thought was a joke until he assured me it wasn’t. I declined the offer and said I wanted to fly out how I flew in. Alida volunteered to accompany me at the airport. She and I would be on the same flight. With the help of Lara Drasin and Maria Cruz Lee, my
colleagues at Define American, Ryan was prepared for all possible scenarios.
I flew into McAllen from the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, where I used my Philippine passport—the only piece of acceptable identification I had at the time—to get through security. Like all the other airports across the country that I had flown into and out of, there was no Border Patrol agent checking papers of domestic travelers at JFK. The McAllen airport was different. At the McAllen airport, a Border Patrol agent would stand next to the TSA agent checking everyone’s papers. So, as Alida and I waited in line, I inserted my Philippine passport inside my pocket copy of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, as if that act provided some sort of protection. My heart pounded in my chest as I approached the agents, as my mind cataloged every possible outcome.
A TSA agent checked my passport and compared it to my plane ticket. Then a Border Patrol agent took my passport from the TSA agent and flipped it open.
“Do you have your visa?” the agent asked.
“No, there’s no visa,” I replied matter-of-factly, as if I was writing a news article and answering the question for someone else.
The moment he asked, “Are you here illegally?” I reminded myself that it was me he was talking to.
Without any hesitation, I answered with a clipped “Yes.”
Dear America Page 15