One of the issues that will dominate the 2016 Presidential campaign will be immigration. As the election approaches we can expect to hear all varieties of slurs, insinuations and other assorted rabid demagoguery on the issue, predominantly from the Republican Party. It seems that few things antagonize the Republican base to such a degree as the prospect of very poor people with limited English-speaking skills performing menial, largely invisible work that the average Republican voter wouldn't dream of having his child doing. So it's worthwhile to understand the issue from the perspective of those on the front lines of the debate, those actually exposed to its consequences--the immigrants, most recently from Central America, places like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala--whose fates and lives are subjected to the whirlwinds swirling around what the media treats as an occasionally entertaining, provocative political football.
As reported by Wil Hylton in a lengthy article for the New York Times Magazine, there are are hundreds of small children who are languishing with their families, often a sole parent, in metal warehouses surrounded by barbed wire in conditions that should make any sensible American ashamed, whatever your political persuasion is. The fact that there is no outcry, no media coverage, or really much concern at all that thousands of people fleeing from violence in their native countries are subjected to these conditions when they arrive in the U.S. speaks volumes about the callous, xenophobic society we've allowed ourselves to become, and the values that we project to the rest of the world.
The front room was empty except for two small desks arranged near the center. A door in the back opened to reveal dozens of young women and children huddled together. Many were gaunt and malnourished, with dark circles under their eyes. “The kids were really sick,” Brown told me later. “A lot of the moms were holding them in their arms, even the older kids — holding them like babies, and they’re screaming and crying, and some of them are lying there listlessly.”
The families described here are from gang-ravaged hellholes in Central America, where
[A] surge of violence...has brought a wave of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. According to recent statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, the number of refugees fleeing Central America has doubled in the past year alone — with more than 61,000 “family units” crossing the U.S. border, as well as 51,000 unaccompanied children.
These families are not crossing the border looking to make a quick buck in the El Norte and mail a check back home. They are not here to take advantage of our schools or get free medical care. They are not here to get a driver's license. They are here because they are fleeing death.
The explosion of violence in Central America is often described in the language of war, cartels, extortion and gangs, but none of these capture the chaos overwhelming the region. Four of the five highest murder rates in the world are in Central American nations. The collapse of these countries is among the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time.
What has occurred in Central America over the last twenty years is
largely the product of Americans' insatiable appetite for drugs, coupled with a now almost forgotten legacy of the Reagan Administration and its efforts to prop up brutal military regimes in the name of anti-communism. Wylton's article does not delve into the root causes of the violence that now permeates countries like El Salvador, but plenty of others have:
According to Central American migration researcher David Bacon, “Media coverage focuses on gang violence in Central America, as though it was spontaneous and unrelated to a history of U.S.-promoted wars and a policy of mass deportations. In truth, the United States’ meddling foreign policy and a history of the U.S.’s own harsh immigration measures are responsible for much of the pressure causing this flow of people from Central America.”
When Reagan's puppet dictatorships unleashed their brutal waves of repression and murder on their own people in the 1980's, hundreds of thousands of people in Guatemala and El Salvador fled the country for the U.S., seeking asylum. Many settled in California and the American Southwest, with a large segment coming to Los Angeles. As is typical of all immigrant groups, they gravitated towards each other. Many of the young people were caught up in gang culture.
While many of the refugees arriving at the U.S. border point to gang violence as the impetus for their exodus, critics blame Reagan’s policies as the roots for the gang problem. According to the Washington Post, “Many gang members are people who had fled the wars, learned gang culture in Los Angeles or New York, then brought it home, creating the region’s most critical security issue.”
U.S. Law Enforcement responded with mass deportations in the 1990's and into the 2000's. Unfortunately, when these newly-formed gangs of criminalized young men returned to their homes in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, they were greeted with high unemployment and poor social conditions, again
ultimately the byproduct of harsh trade agreements imposed by the U.S. which continued to support dictatorial regimes as long as they operated in the interest of American multinationals:
The failure of Central America's economies is largely due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements and their accompanying economic changes, including privatization of businesses, the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects and cuts in the social budget. The treaties allowed huge U.S. corporations to dump corn and other agricultural products in Mexico and Central America, forcing rural families off their lands when they could not compete.
Of course, they also returned to a flourishing drug culture supplying the insatiable U.S. market. And while the U.S. continued to provide self-serving economic support to the repressive governments of these countries, aid was conditioned on harsh drug enforcement, leading to a continual cycle of (in El Salvador particularly) of imprisonment and more gang membership for the countries' young males. The result is that El Salvador, for example, no longer functions as the type of country you and I or any Republican Tea Party voter has any inkling of:
While criminal organizations like the 18th Street Gang and Mara Salvatrucha exist as street gangs in the United States, in large parts of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador they are so powerful and pervasive that they have supplanted the government altogether. People who run afoul of these gangs — which routinely demand money on threat of death and sometimes kidnap young boys to serve as soldiers and young girls as sexual slaves — may have no recourse to the law and no better option than to flee.
The people who live in these countries have a choice--they can stay and try to survive, hoping things will get better, or they can flee. Most do what normal human beings would do when faced with the prospect of leaving their own homes, country, family, relatives and heritage--they stay until staying becomes unthinkable and they have no other choice:
The woman explained that she had to escape from her home in El Salvador when gangs targeted her family. “Her husband had just been murdered, and she and her kids found his body,” Brown recalls. “After he was murdered, the gang started coming after her and threatening to kill her.” Brown agreed to help the woman apply for political asylum in the United States, explaining that it might be possible to pay a small bond and then live with friends or relatives while she waited for an asylum hearing. When the woman returned to the back room, Brown met with another, who was fleeing gangs in Guatemala. Then she met another young woman, who fled violence in Honduras. “They were all just breaking down,” Brown said. “They were telling us that they were afraid to go home. They were crying, saying they were scared for themselves and their children. It was a constant refrain: ‘I’ll die if I go back.’ ”.
And, of course, they end up here where they become pawns in a political game played by the Republican Party. One thing is certain--Charles and David Koch don't spend any time thinking about the fates of these people, nor in any way do immigrants of any stripe impact their livelihoods or their bottom lines. They see them as politically useful pawns, tools to twist and infuriate the racists who make up the Republican base into electing Koch-compliant puppets to Congress.
Under the terms of a settlement reached in a case called Flores v Meese, children who enter the country without their parents are supposed to be released, as a matter of general policy, to relatives or foster groups. There are specific rules about the treatment they are to receive such as schooling and adequate medical care, and keeping them away from unrelated adults. The Federal Courts have held these rules and standards as they are written "unambiguously" apply to those children who arrive with adults. The recent influx of undocumented Central American immigrants has involved children coming with (often) a single parent. In 2005, however, the Bush Administration decided to ignore the Flores guidelines and instead began incarcerating people in a Camp called Hutto in Austin, Texas for months at a time, housing young children with adults, keeping the lights on while they slept and forcing them to use open-view group toilets. The Bush Administration kept this up until suit was brought; only then did they promise to "improve" conditions." In 2009 President Obama, to his credit, did away with the Hutto camp.
Then, the numbers of immigrants fleeing from Central American began to spike coincidentally with the rise of the rabidly anti-immigrant "Tea Party" Republicans in Congress. Faced with increased political pressure, the Obama Administration caved to anti-immigrant hysteria and began to tout a policy of unprecented deportation, even while pushing pro-undocumented immigrant policies such as the Dream Act for undocumented children who had been in the country for a longer period of time, and supporting Democratic legislative initiatives for immigration reform.
After Hutto was closed a new "camp" was set up, in Artesia New Mexico. The "camp" is the main subject of Hylton's article, specifically the experience of lawyers who volunteered their time to provide services to those housed there, and their valiant efforts to navigate through the byzantine process of seeking asylum. The article illustrates how difficult it is for most of these immigrants, who do not speak English, to convey the reality of their persecution in the "magic language" required by U.S. law. And those are the ones who have legal assistance.
From the get-go the purpose of the camp was understood to facilitate deportation, not review petitions for asylum. But while American policy had taken a different tone, the horrible situation in Central American did not improve--the stories were the same:
One was the constant threat of gangs in their lives; another was the prevalence of sexual violence. A detainee in Artesia named Sofia explained that a gang murdered her brother, shot her husband and then kidnapped and raped her 14-year-old stepdaughter. A Guatemalan woman named Kira said that she fled when a gang targeted her family over their involvement in a nonviolence movement at church; when Kira’s husband went into hiding, the gang subjected her to repeated sexual assaults and threatened to cut her unborn baby from her womb. An inmate named Marisol said she crossed the U.S. border in June after a gang in Honduras murdered the father of her 3-year-old twins, then turned its attention to her.
Meanwhile the Artesia camp conditions were atrocious, particularly for the children imprisoned there. The article vividly describes sick children, emaciated and malnourished children with nothing to do, no stimulation, often sleeping eight to a room, and children who, raised on a diet of tortillas and beans, simply refused to eat the food provided at the camp:
Many of the volunteers in Artesia tell similar stories about the misery of life in the facility. “I thought I was pretty tough,” said Allegra Love, who spent the previous summer working on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. “I mean, I had seen kids in all manner of suffering, but this was a really different thing. It’s a jail, and the women and children are being led around by guards. There’s this look that the kids have in their eyes. This lackadaisical look. They’re just sitting there, staring off, and they’re wasting away. That was what shocked me most.”
The article that notes that those immigrants fortunate enough to have the assistance of a lawyer--and very few lawyers are available--are
nearly all able to satisfy the requirements for political asylum. That statistic alone would appear to be a good reason for improving the treatment of these people. In many cases, however, the Obama Administration could claim credit for successfully following through on its deportation mandate. In one of the rare cases when someone actually followed through on what happened to those deported back to their own countries, the results spoke for themselves:
[C]hildren who come back from U.S. detention “return just to die.” Jose Luis Aguilar, the city councilor for Artesia, recalled a group deportation on the day in July when Secretary Jeh Johnson visited the facility. “He came in the morning, and that same night, they took 79 people and shipped them to El Salvador on the ICE plane,” Aguilar said. “We got reports later that 10 kids had been killed. The church group confirmed that with four of the mortuaries where they went.”
The article describes the disdain by local citizens and officials for the lawyers who try to obtain asylum for these people, even though they are proceeding in accordance with U.S. law, a fact that seems lost on many. The Artesia facility is now closed, but several new facilities in Texas, through private contractors, have been opened in Texas to accommodate the growing number of undocumented immigrants fleeing from Central America. One contractor managing the new facilities is C.C.A., the same firm that ran the infamous Hutto facility created by Bush. C.C.A. has its own shoddy record of abuse in its facilities:
In 2006, federal investigators reported that conditions at a C.C.A. immigration jail in Eloy, Ariz., were so lacking that “detainee welfare is in jeopardy.” Last March, the F.B.I. started an investigation of C.C.A. over a facility the company ran in Idaho, known by inmates as the “Gladiator School” because of unchecked fighting; in 2010, a video surfaced of guards watching one inmate beat another into a coma. Two years ago, C.C.A. executives admitted to fraud in their government contracts at the prison, including 4,800 hours of falsified business records.