by Jorge Ramos
Her children, Jacqueline, fourteen, and Ángel, sixteen, were confused and inconsolable. What was different this time? Deportation policies under a new White House administration. New arrivals and people with a criminal background would no longer be the primary targets for deportations. Virtually all undocumented people of legal age were at risk.
In early 2017, the Los Angeles Times estimated that out of the eleven million undocumented immigrants living in this country, as many as eight million could be subject to deportation under the new priorities established by Trump’s presidency.
Guadalupe was one of the first. Perhaps the immigration agents wanted to use her as an example for the rest of the Hispanic community. But the effect on the García de Rayos family was horrific.
“Nobody should ever have to pack her mother’s suitcase.” This is what Guadalupe’s daughter, Jacqueline, said during an impromptu press conference held after learning that her mother was to be deported. “It’s very hard for me,” she explained, “not knowing if I’ll ever be able to see her face-to-face again, to give her a hug or a kiss.”
Indeed. Nobody should ever have to pack up her mother’s belongings. But Jacqueline did. Guadalupe was sent back to Mexico through the border town of Nogales, Arizona. “First I was a victim of Arpaio,” she said as she crossed over. “And now I’m a victim of Trump.”
“It was a devastating blow,” her husband said. “No child should ever have to pack up her mother’s things. There is no justice in these laws. They’re playing dirty with us.”
With Trump in the White House, the anti-immigrant climate in the United States has changed for the worse. There are frequent verbal attacks on foreigners, coupled with the perception that any undocumented person can be deported at any time, regardless of past compliance. Further, several local police forces, operating with the explicit support of their respective mayors, have begun to act like ICE agents.
The sense of fear is palpable.
Obama: Deporter in Chief
My animosity toward, annoyance at, and rejection of Donald Trump’s words and attitude regarding immigrants is clear. But this is not a partisan issue. I am registered in the United States as an independent voter and have never publicly or financially supported any political party. I have criticized Republicans and Democrats alike.
And Barack Obama was no exception.
President Obama earned the title “deporter in chief.” It was given to him by Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), and the president was never able to shed it.
I have here in front of me the statistics on deportations during the Obama presidency. They’re not pretty. In fact, they’re painful. According to official ICE data, from 2009 through 2016—Obama’s term in office—2,749,706 people were deported.
He deported more immigrants than any other president in history.
It can be difficult to criticize President Obama because he has always been in favor of immigration reform and because he protected hundreds of thousands of Dreamers from deportation. But the fact is that he needlessly destroyed thousands of Hispanic families.
If his strategy was to show that he was in full compliance with immigration laws in order to convince a Republican-controlled Congress to approve comprehensive immigration reform, it failed. Republicans never showed any real interest in cooperating with the Obama administration on immigration issues. Meanwhile, thousands of people with no criminal record were ripped from their families and deported.
Obama was also wrong not to take advantage of his first few months in office—when Democrats controlled not only the White House but also both chambers of Congress—to pass comprehensive immigration reform, as he had promised to do during his campaign.
I’ve told this story many times. On May 28, 2008, during his first presidential campaign, I interviewed him at a school in Denver, Colorado. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, had said that if she was elected, she would present a proposal for immigration reform to Congress within her first one hundred days in office. I asked Obama if he would do the same, and he said no.
But then he promised the following: “What I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year [of the presidency] an immigration bill that I strongly support….”
“In the first year?” I insisted.
“In the first year,” he repeated.
It never happened.
Obama’s unfulfilled promise is one of the greatest frustrations the Latino community has with our former president. And I let him know this on a number of occasions.
Once, during a community forum in 2012 and deep in the midst of his reelection campaign, I told Obama that he had failed us. “You promised that,” I said. “A promise is a promise. And with all due respect, you didn’t keep that promise.”
By then it was too late. Obama and the Democrats had lost control of the House of Representatives. No bill was going to move through there.
Our first mistake, I realize now, was to believe in a political promise and to not do enough to make sure Obama followed through on it. It was a serious case of naïveté, one that came at a huge, tangible cost to the lives of many immigrant families.
What bothers me the most is that it was a political decision. I have since had many conversations with members of his administration, and my only conclusion is that someone inside the White House convinced him not to push for immigration reform in 2009. Until the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy on August 25, 2009, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.
Rahm Emanuel was Barack Obama’s chief of staff at the time.
“So what happened that first year?” I asked him. “Why didn’t he present immigration reform as he had promised? You were there.”
“As you know, Jorge, in his first year he had a massive economy, that was a recession, that was going towards a depression. That was his first attention. It was what he focused on, number one,” Emanuel replied.
Janet Napolitano was secretary of homeland security during that same period of time.
“In 2009 you were in charge of the immigration department,” I said to her during a 2013 interview. “Why is it that President Barack Obama didn’t move on immigration reform as he promised during the campaign? What happened?”
“Well, I think what happened is he took over the presidency at a time when we were on a cliff to going into a great depression,” she replied, before going on to add, “We were involved in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean, he acquired a lot.”
To me, the explanations provided by Emanuel and Napolitano were nothing more than excuses. Nothing could explain Obama’s inaction or his terrible political decision to wait.
I understand that there were other priorities. The United States went through one of the worst economic crises in modern history. But aren’t we able to confront more than one challenge at a time? Someone made the decision to push immigration to the side. I don’t know if it was the president himself or one of his senior advisers, but regardless, in the end Obama made the decision.
Everyone knew that the president had made a promise on immigration reform, and everyone knows that—whether for political or strategic reasons—he decided to break that promise. I suspect the administration thought that Latinos would be willing to wait a little bit longer and that the cost of postponing it would not be too great.
And, sadly, we let it happen. To ourselves. We didn’t speak up loudly enough.
We were passed over.
Yet again.
On December 9, 2014, I had one final fight with Obama. By that time, there was nothing that could be done on immigration reform. The Republicans were never going to cooperate, yet the president was continuing to deport thousands of undocumented immigrants. Why?
Back then, the president had just announced an executive action, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), designed to protect hundreds of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers who were brought to the United States as minors by their par
ents. It was the single most important immigration decision of his entire presidency. He was truly changing lives.
But if the president had come to the conclusion that he could either stop, postpone, or suspend the deportation of the Dreamers, why couldn’t he do the same for other immigrants? I asked him this, and our exchange was extremely tense:
“If you, as you were saying, always had the legal authority to stop deportations, then why did you deport two million people?” I asked.
“Jorge, we’re not going to—”
“For six years you did.”
“No, listen, Jorge—”
“You destroyed many families. They called you ‘deporter in chief.’ ”
“You called me ‘deporter in chief.’ ”
“It was Janet Murguía from La Raza.”
“Yeah, but let me say this, Jorge—”
“Well, you haven’t stopped deportations.”
“No, no, no.”
“That’s the whole idea.”
“That’s not true. Listen, here’s the facts of the matter—”
“You could have stopped them.”
“Jorge, here’s the facts of the matter. As president of the United States, I’m always responsible for problems that aren’t solved right away….The question is, are we doing the right thing, and have we consistently tried to move this country in a better direction? And those, like you sometimes, Jorge, who suggest that there are simple, quick answers to these problems, I think—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you do, because that’s how you present it.”
“But you had the authority.”
“When you present it that way, it does a disservice. Because it makes the assumption that the political process is one that can easily be moved around, depending on the will of one person. And that’s not how things work—”
“What I’m saying is—”
“We spent that entire time trying to get a comprehensive immigration reform bill done that would solve the problem for all the people. So right now, by the actions that I’ve taken, I still have five million people who do not have the ability to register and be confident that they are not deported.”
* * *
—
That was my final conversation with Barack Obama. He did not agree to speak with me during the rest of his time in office. I learned from people close to him that he was annoyed by my continued insistence on the subject of deportations—how could we let that go?—and because we did not see the issue of repatriation in the same way.
He insisted that the majority of the deportations involved people who had just recently crossed into the United States, who were living very close to the border, and, from immigrants inside the country, who had committed crimes. That much is true. But in 2016, to give you an example, only 58 percent of all deportees had committed a crime. And many times, these were minor offenses such as traffic violations or were inherently tied to their status as undocumented individuals, such as having false identification or trying to enter the United States illegally on multiple occasions.
Obama clearly deported thousands of people who were not criminals. Period. I understand that his intention—and his administration’s priority—was to focus on the criminals, but ultimately that’s not what happened.
The figures on deportation don’t come from me. Let me give you one more example. The Migration Policy Institute concluded in 2012 that out of the approximately eleven million people living in the country illegally, only 300,000 had committed a felony. But that same year, Obama deported 409,849 of them.
Something doesn’t compute. Obama was absolutely deporting people who had committed no serious crimes, and he was doing so at a very high rate. Was it legal? Yes, it was legal. But as president—and as he demonstrated by signing the executive order known as DACA—he had the authority to suspend most if not all deportations of people who were not a risk to national security. Yet he chose not to do so.
I don’t know whether it was owing to a sense of guilt, the pressure he felt from Latino organizations, or a tacit acknowledgment that he had been wrong, but nearing the end of his second term in office, Obama reduced the number of deportees by nearly half: from 409,000 at its peak to 240,000 in his final year of governance.
We can debate the president’s numbers and his motivations until we’re out of breath, but the effects on thousands of American families were devastating. Never before had a president deported so many people.
That’s why so many people have told me that we were not sufficiently tough with Obama. And maybe they’re right. With the notable exception of the Dreamers, his policies were very harmful to immigrant families. Plus, he never lived up to a campaign promise that—had it been fulfilled—would have averted the state of panic under which millions of people are now living with Trump in the White House.
So why did the Latino community give Obama a gentler treatment compared with the way we’re currently dealing with Trump? First and foremost, Obama never insulted us. Trump did so on the day he launched his campaign. Obama talked about inclusion while Trump tries to exclude us. Obama supported legalization and a path to citizenship for most of the eleven million undocumented immigrants in this country, while Trump does not. Obama fought for what most Latinos want when it comes to immigration—just look at the polls—while Trump opposes them.
In politics, perceptions translate into votes. Obama won 67 and 71 percent of the Latino vote in the 2008 and 2012 elections, respectively. In 2016, Trump garnered only 29 percent.
Still, Obama’s deportations continue to hurt. Perhaps it’s because we expected so much from him, and he didn’t deliver. Or maybe it’s because it hurts even more when someone close to you kicks you out of your own home.
Our 2016 Mistake
What happened to the Latinos during the 2016 presidential elections that resulted in a victory for Trump?
The worst thing of all: they didn’t go out to vote. More than half of them stayed home and let others make the decision for them.
What happens in the Latino community is our own fault.
It can’t be blamed on anyone else.
In 2016, there were 27.3 million Latinos who were eligible to vote. It’s always a new record, of course, because every year an average of 800,000 young Hispanics reach the voting age of eighteen. It’s no surprise that nearly half—44 percent—of all Latino voters are millennials.
But the tragedy is that, according to the Census Bureau, only 47.6 percent of those eligible voters—12.7 million—came out to vote in 2016. This number is slightly down from the 48 percent who voted in the 2012 election.
Latinos lost in every electoral matchup. The general public turned out in a higher percentage (61.4 percent), as did non-Hispanic whites (65.3 percent), African Americans (59.6 percent), and Asian Americans (49.3 percent).
Many Latinos complain about Donald Trump’s words and policies. But 14.6 million of those who were eligible to vote chose not to. That’s their fault.
If more Latinos had turned out to vote, would the end result of the presidential election have been any different? We can never know. But we won’t lose anything if we crunch some of the data.
Trump won both Florida and Arizona. But a greater turnout in those two states—both of which have a large Latino population—could have kept a total of 40 electoral votes out of the Republican candidate’s camp, thus preventing him from reaching the 270 needed to win.
This is, of course, pure speculation. Trump won, and half of the Latino community did not get out and vote. That’s the fact of the matter.
In the wake of Trump’s insults directed at Latin American immigrants during the presidential campaign, polls showed clear feelings of disgust and rejection. Trump claimed that Latinos loved him. That couldn’t have been further from the truth.
The America’s Voice organization published a press release titled “No, Mr. Trump, the Latinos Do Not Love You,” citing several surveys that didn’t sup
port Trump’s claim.
According to a September 2015 Washington Post/ABC News poll, 82 percent of Latinos held an unfavorable opinion of Trump. And that didn’t change much over the course of the next year: according to a September 2016 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 78 percent of Hispanics still had a negative opinion of Trump. Several other polls showed similar results.
Things were looking bad for Trump. History has shown us that if a Republican candidate fails to earn a third of the Latino vote, he or she stands a good chance of losing the general election. John McCain earned 31 percent in 2008 and lost. Mitt Romney’s support dropped to 27 percent in 2012, and he lost as well. In contrast, George W. Bush gained 35 percent of the Latino vote in 2000 and 44 percent in 2004 and won both times.
That is why I said, so many times and with such great confidence, that Trump would never make it to the White House without the Latino vote.
But I was wrong.
What I didn’t see was the enormous resentment that was growing among many voters regarding the country’s economic situation. I believed in the majority of polls that showed Trump falling behind. And never would I have imagined that 29 percent of Latinos would vote for this particular Republican candidate.
(This 29 percent figure comes from exit polls conducted on Election Day, November 8, 2016, but several organizations have questioned their validity and suggested that the actual number is significantly lower.)
Considering his insults about Hispanic immigrants, his plans to deport millions of people during his first two years in office, and his promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico, it seemed to me all but impossible that Trump could eclipse Mitt Romney’s numbers from four years earlier. But among a certain, almost secret, segment of the Latino population, support for Trump was brewing.
We have to admit that many Latinos were not comfortable openly admitting their intentions to vote for Trump. Such a statement would predictably result in harsh attacks against the candidate as well as the supporter who said such a thing. Trump generates extreme reactions across the board, and that, I believe, kept Trump’s potential support among Latinos as hidden as it was silent.