Out of the Woods

    Our border with Mexico: a national disgrace.

 

 
Francisco Cantu, a Mexican-American born and raised in Arizona at age 23 joined the Border Patrol. It did not take him very long to become appalled by the inhumane treatment the border patrol meted out to people crossing the border without  proper papers. Four years after enlisting he left the border patrol. Today he volunteers to visit detained immigrants to bring them small gifts and to try to help them maintain their spirits in hope as they wait for the often inscrutable decisions of the US border bureaucracy.

    In a recent article in the New York Times Cantu describes the fate of one of the persons he visits in one of the many privately owned prisons in Arizona. Here is a woman he calls Ysabel who presented herself at the US border after fleeing violence in Venezuela. She ends up in a detention center and after some months  is told that her request for asylum has been granted. She expects to be released but that expectation is disappointed. She remains in detention in what are essentially prisons for criminals judged to have broken the law. She has done no such thing but continues in this prison.

    Her friend Francisco makes inquiries. After many phone calls to different government agencies he is told that the government is trying to appeal her grant of asylum. No date is set for such an appeal. If the appeal is ever considered by the Board of Immigration Appeals, there will be no public hearing. Isabel will have no opportunity to speak for itself. The board will make its decisions in private.

    This entire process contravenes traditional standards of justice. The immigrants are considered guilty and the burden is on them to prove that they deserve to be accepted into the United States. The hearings are secret; immigrants are not given a chance to speak for themselves. They do not have the support of lawyers.

    The government is very clear: the point of all these violations of traditional standards of legality is to deter people from coming to the border in order to ask for asylum. Human rights and legal rights count for nothing.

    Many Americans, especially supporters of the president, will reply to these complaints about government malfeasance at the Mexican American border by saying that immigrants who are crossing the border without proper papers are breaking the law and are therefore at fault. They deserve to suffer because their actions are illegal. They deserve punishment. They deserve to be sent back to where they came from.

    But that is an excessively simplistic way of thinking about the law and lawbreaking. The seriousness of lawbreaking depends on the law being broken. Some municipalities, for instance, try to reduce the number of automobile accidents by setting the speed limit very low. Most motorists break that law; they simply cannot bear to drive that slowly. No one thinks that their lawbreaking makes these drivers into pariahs because the law that is being broken is thought to be unjustified.

    In the 1920s, during prohibition, most Americans broke the law because they thought it was in error. No one thought that people who bought  illegal alcohol were serious lawbreakers who deserved harsh punishment such as being sent back to their country of origin.

     After the Civil War,  Southern states reacted to the emancipation of former slaves by passing a large body of laws that seriously circumscribed the lives of black Americans. The laws determined where African-Americans could sit on the train or the bus, where they could get a drink of water or relieve themselves. So-called Jim Crow laws imposed curfews and many other illegal limitations on former slaves and their descendents. They deprived African-Americans of the legal rights of white Americans. They deprived African-Americans of recourse to the legal systems. They were once again close to being enslaved. This was an utterly shameful set of legislative actions motivated by completely unacceptable racial prejudice. The laws were enforced not so much by police and sheriffs but by a series of public tortures and lynchings of black persons. In the 1890s a Black person was lynched every second or third day. The frequency declined in the 20th century but lynching did not end until late in the 20th century. Police shootings of Blacks have taken the place of lynching.

    If someone broke any of these Jim Crow laws we would not call them a law breaker who deserved serious punishment. How should we think of people fleeing violence and poverty in their country of origin? Do they deserve the harsh treatment meted out to the Ysabels of this world? There is no justice in our treatment of immigrants from South and Central America.