On every story involving details of immigrants being arrested, jailed improperly or wrongly deported, there has been one consistent response from many Americans.
Why didn’t they come here legally?
Or: Were they here legally?
Like clockwork, in the comments on any social media post containing such a story, these questions dominate from every person wearing one of those stupid red hats in their profile picture.
But on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast, which dropped this morning on all podcast platforms, guest Emily Barfield – a good friend of Giovanna Hernandez, whose arrest and ICE detainment has brought outrage from the general public – said something that paints a clear picture of exactly why such questions – and the judgment of others that comes with them – are really misguided.
“Gio worked on obtaining her legal status for most of her adult life,” Barfield said. “She was always getting paperwork together. She had an attorney who was helping her. It’s just such a complicated process for someone like her.”
That’s putting it mildly.
The fact is the citizenship process – the actual process that involves paperwork and background checks and meeting with various agencies and people – is extremely complex and takes, in many cases, more than a decade, depending on where you’re from and your family status and work history. And that’s if everything goes right.
But the complexities do not stop there. Often, the politics of various administrations come into play, along with actions by Congress and a number of other factors that can change an immigrant’s pathway from month to month.
Did you know, for example, that the process is different depending on your country of origin? It’s not the same for a person from Mexico as it is for a person from Canada.
It also can be different depending on your age, your family’s status, your employment, your education and your financial situation.
Very often, all of those things combine together to create a scenario so confusing that it’s impossible for the person involved in the process to even understand what they should do, or if they’re here legally in the eyes of current day laws.
Let’s take Gio’s situation, for example.
She was brought to this country, according to Barfield, when she was 7. But most importantly, she was brought here a few months too late to be covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). A couple of months earlier and she’d never have to worry about her legal status.
Well, in theory.
Because the laws for undocumented people in this country are constantly changing, due to the whims of the lawmakers in office and whatever rhetoric they’re selling to voters at the moment. From Reagan to Clinton to Bush I and II to Obama to Biden and Trump, the overall attitude towards immigrants has shifted dramatically depending on the moment.
Even for someone like Hernandez, who knows she doesn’t fall under DACA, it’s likely that for the past several years she has believed – because her government told her so – that so long as she followed the laws, stayed out of trouble and was a productive member of society, she had nothing to worry about. Even the current guy in the White House said repeatedly during the most recent campaign last year that she had nothing to worry about, that they were only going after the criminals and gang members.
Hernandez is neither. She’s a social worker and advocate for immigrant children. She’s a college graduate and a decent human. Until being stopped for speeding a few days ago, she had no history of trouble. In short, Gio is a person who made America a better place.
Her parents and brother have obtained their citizenship. But even working with an attorney and forking out tens of thousands of dollars over the years, Hernandez was still mired in the system, awaiting her hearings and her chance to obtain her citizenship.
None of that seems to matter to the Trump administration or to the hundreds of people in this state who have taken to social media to mock Hernandez and celebrate her arrest and detainment. Underneath the Bible verses on their Facebook pages, they have taken great glee in the suffering of someone they don’t know and passed judgment on a situation they quite obviously do not understand.
And that’s probably the most troubling aspect of all of this – the outright hate.
It has been ignited by the ignorant oaf in the White House and his band of abhorrent humans, but it has been readily accepted by millions of people, particularly in the Bible Belt, where the teachings of Jesus supposedly dominate. The hatefulness is worn plainly and without shame, and they take every opportunity to spread it, and to pretend that somehow the immigrants in their communities have lessened their lives.
That is absurd, of course. As are their belligerent cries to “follow the laws.”
The truth is America has welcomed these immigrants to do jobs we don’t want and prop up entire American industries. We have provided them with government documents, sold them health insurance and car insurance and given them bank loans. We have insured and bonded their companies, which they’ve also registered with our secretaries of state. We have taught their children and sold them government services.
They’re American in every sense, except for that dumb piece of paper we’ve been dangling in front of them like a carrot. But let a doofus looking to give his billionaire pals a tax break need a scapegoat for working folks to focus on, and here y’all are screaming about “come here legally!”
All the while not even knowing what that actually means.
