The mainstream media certainly has its priorities in order. Tonight, when President Obama announces his new plan for immigration reform, you can be sure that the networks will be airing totally ignoring the speech on one of the most pressing and relevant issues facing not only the country but the world. That’s right, ladies and gentleman ABC, CBS. NBC and Fox (duh) have said they won’t be covering the speech live.
In all fairness, this makes sense. After all, why should the networks cover this issue when it is soooo stale? It’s so ten years ago. Or eight years ago, to be precise. All four networks covered President Bush’s 2006 speech on immigration. So why should they cover another speech on the same issue? I mean the president’s have totally different policies and the context is pretty different. But, still, what’s the new angle? I don’t see one. Do you? Bush announced he was sending National Guard troops to protect the U.S./Mexico border. Obama will announce an executive order that will grant legal status and work permits for as many as 5 million people. When you strip away the political jargon, aren’t the two policies identical to each other?
Actress Diane Guerrero experienced our draconian immigration policies first-hand when she was 14 years old, and came home from school to an empty house. Hours later she would find out her family had been taken to a detention center and would be deported. Guerrero is using her voice to speak out for humane, fair, and sensible immigration reform.
Guerrero is best known for her roles in shows like Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin. But she is also an advocate for undocumented people and their families and volunteers with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. This past weekend Guerrero penned an op-ed for the LA Timesabout her experience with our broken immigration system. While Guerrero was born in New Jersey and thus a legal citizen, her parents and older brother had immigrated from Colombia. She writes,
Throughout my childhood I watched my parents try to become legal but to no avail. They lost their money to people they believed to be attorneys, but who ultimately never helped. That meant my childhood was haunted by the fear that they would be deported. If I didn’t see anyone when I walked in the door after school, I panicked.
And then one day, my fears were realized. I came home from school to an empty house. Lights were on and dinner had been started, but my family wasn’t there. Neighbors broke the news that my parents had been taken away by immigration officers, and just like that, my stable family life was over.
Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me. No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.
Guerrero uses her painful experience to push for reforms that are not only just, but in the best interest of legal citizens:
[I]t’s not just in the interest of immigrants to fix the system: It’s in the interest of all Americans. Children who grow up separated from their families often end up in foster care, or worse, in the juvenile justice system despite having parents who love them and would like to be able to care for them.
I don’t believe it reflects our values as a country to separate children and parents in this way. Nor does it reflect our values to hold people in detention without access to good legal representation or a fair shot in a court of law. President Obama has promised to act on providing deportation relief for families across the country, and I would urge him to do so quickly. Keeping families together is a core American value.
Congress needs to provide a permanent, fair legislative solution, but in the meantime families are being destroyed every day, and the president should do everything in his power to provide the broadest relief possible now. Not one more family should be separated by deportation.
While her piece was eloquent and moving, it was her television appearance on Monday that caught people’s attention and made the headlines. During a CNN interview with Michaela Pereira, Guerrero spoke from the heart and off the cuff and broke into tears, saying, “We’ve been separated for so long, I feel like sometimes we don’t know each othe… I’ve grown up without them. There are things about them that I don’t recognize. I know that I’ve been by myself, but I feel like they have lived a very lonely existence themselves.”
See the transcript in this article and watch the video above.
Last Tuesday I blogged about the fact that Sheriff Joe Apaio’s obsession with immigration resulted in the commission of additional sex crimes. Thursday the Department of Justice issued a report that described Arpaio’s “systemic disregard” for the constitution as well as his penchant for racial profiling and denying prisoners’ rights. According to the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights division:
We found discriminatory policing that was deeply rooted in the culture of the department, a culture that breeds a systematic disregard for basic constitutional protections.
And today, Ernest Atencio is on life support, after he fought with deputies in a Maricopa County jail over the weekend. State Senator Steve Gallardo said of the case: read the rest of the post on Feministing
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