As a witness, I can say our immigration reform is the ‘worst of the worst’ | Opinion
In the fluorescent haze of the ICE office lobby, an agent hands the plane ticket back to me. Outside in the rain, a man peers in through the glass door, watching his son with an ankle monitor do a check-in with officers. A gnome dressed as Santa dangles from the metal detector, and laughter from “The Price is Right” studio audience bounces from the lobby TV. I try not to get distracted by the mix of frivolity and stress around me.
“But, the judge’s written order says to deliver this ticket to you….” I can feel right away that my words don’t matter. Neither, apparently, does the court order.
I am there on a cruel errand: deliver someone’s passport and plane ticket to ICE, so that they can deport him. It is a favor to a friend, because the deportee’s family finds the thought of the ICE office too intimidating, and they wanted someone else to go. I said yes.
The “criminal” to be deported — I’ll call him Cesar — is an average guy in our part of the world. Early 20s, loves his family, grew up in Appalachia attending church and public schools and playing sports, eventually married a young woman he had met in high school. His “crime?” Being brought across the border from Mexico when he was 3 years old. Like the majority of ICE detainees, Cesar has no criminal record. What he does have is a decent job, a loving family, and a baby due in April.
Cesar’s family hired an attorney to request his deportation be cancelled, and after two months in detention, got before an immigration judge in Memphis, Tenn. Everyone from his high school soccer coach to his pregnant all-American wife showed up to testify. But the judge cut it short, saying “I don’t have time to listen to what everyone has to say. What are they going to talk about? His good moral character? … This is not the type of person we want in our country.”
The judge did allow one request: voluntary departure. From the family’s understanding, Cesar will be allowed to fly “like a normal person” on a commercial flight, with an agent ensuring that he boards the final leg into Mexico. The family bought his ticket, making sure to meet the judge’s departure deadline. The destination is a city almost 600 miles from the US, deep into Mexico, where some relatives live, though Cesar has no recollection of ever meeting them.
Three hours in at the ICE office, agents give me the final “no” on the plane ticket. They want to fly him out themselves. I ask what happens when they drop him off — when and where will it be? How will he contact anyone? They say he will be given his flight details the day before, and that he will be able to call his family. They assure me that he will receive all his remaining detention commissary funds loaded on a pay card, and will get back his phone and this passport I’m handing to them.
Sadly, this stuff never happens. Instead, they take him in the middle of the night, no warning, no chance to call. They keep his phone and his commissary account, which the family had loaded $100 into the day before. They fly him out shackled at the wrists, waist, and feet. And they dump him just across the border, hundreds of miles from his relatives in either country. No phone. No money. Pointless cruelty, for the crime of once having been 3 years old.
We didn’t remove a dangerous criminal from our midst. We deported — in chains — an innocent Kentuckian to a country he is unfamiliar with. We left a pregnant U.S. citizen and her unborn child without a husband/father. We removed a reliable, productive worker from a small business. We spent thousands of taxpayer dollars; the average cost to arrest, detain, process, and deport someone is $70,236. And, we cost a Kentucky family more than $20K for attorney, fees, a $5K bond (supposed to be refunded once he left the country, but has not been so far), commissary, and worthless plane ticket.
Had Cesar been allowed to stay, we would not only have an intact local family, but we would also have retained Cesar’s economic activity, including spending his wages locally as well as taxes he would have paid. (Analysis found that if the U.S. deports all undocumented residents, it would cost us more than $76 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, over $28 billion in Social Security and Medicare, and $257 billion in purchasing power. Remember that undocumented workers do pay various kinds of taxes, but do not qualify to use public benefits like Medicaid, SNAP, or Social Security). We would have kept a spot filled in a local job, in a state consistently worried about workforce shortages. And we would have less fear rippling through households of Kentucky residents, keeping them afraid to work, go to school, and live their lives.
Many of these points are economic, but reducing Cesar to a fiscal data point is far from my intention. He is a person. He is a Kentuckian. A neighbor, father, son, brother, husband, friend. And now he is just ... gone. This policy of mass deportation — targeting innocent people, harming our community, and ripping apart families — in my view, it’s basically the worst of the worst.
Mary is a ninth-generation Kentuckian, and is the Director of Kentucky Refugee Ministries/Lexington.