October 2011 - Amor & Exile

October 25, 2011October 25, 2011

Americans, family members caught in Secure Communities dragnet

The airing of the PBS Frontline documentary Lost in Detention last week is part of a growing awareness across the country of the gravity of the Bush-Obama immigrant detention dragnet.

I thought the film itself lacked focus and was dramatized in an unfortunate, made-for-television way. But the accompanying website, linked above is very useful and contains full text of the interviews that were obviously cut into sound bytes for the film, like this one of Obama Administration director of intergovernmental affairs and immigration advisor Cecilia Muñoz:

Frontline: Does President Obama believe that his aggressive policy in immigration and enforcement has been successful?

Cecilia Muñoz: The president has said a number of times, he swore an oath to uphold the law. It’s our responsibility to enforce the laws that we’ve got. Congress gives us resources to enforce the laws that we’ve got. But how we do it matters a lot. He’s talked about that as well.

And later in the interview, Muñoz picks up this same idea.

Muñoz: But at the end of the day, when you have immigration law that’s broken and you have a community of 10 million, 11 million people living and working in the United States illegally, some of these things are going to happen. Even if the law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.

They don’t have to like it, but it is a result of having a broken system of laws. And the answer to that problem is reforming the law, making sure that we have an immigration system that works here. You can’t fix the heartbreaking things that happen as a result of immigration enforcement just through enforcement policy. You have to fix that by reforming the law, and that requires the Congress to act, which is why the president has been pushing them so hard.

It’s the same line that unnamed ICE officials have taken on a recent report from the UC-Berkeley Law School condemning Secure Communities for, among other things, possibly arresting some 3,600 American citizens.

ICE officials called the report “misleading and inaccurate,” saying Secure Communities has enhanced public safety and that the report failed to acknowledge ICE’s responsibility to determine who is in the country illegally.

“If there is a question about an individual’s status, ICE conducts appropriate follow-up. If the individual is a U.S. citizen, ICE takes no additional action. In exercising its civil immigration functions, ICE does not detain U.S. citizens,” the agency said in a statement released in response to the report.—Identical quote at San Jose Mercury News and Salon.com

The report in question expands on an American Immigration Lawyers’ Association survey that we wrote about in August. The University of California—Berkeley Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy completed a study of Secure Communities [full report .pdf]. Among the findings:

Approximately 3,600 United States citizens have been arrested by ICE through the Secure Communities program
More than one-third (39%) of individuals arrested through Secure Communities report that they have a U.S. citizen spouse (5%) or child (37%), meaning that approximately 88,000 families with U.S. citizen members have been impacted by Secure Communities
Latinos comprise 93% of individuals arrested through Secure Communities though they only comprise 77% of the undocumented population in the United States

Let me repeat that: based on extrapolations of a smaller data set that the law school obtained through the settlement of a lawsuit between ICE and the National Day Labor Organizing Network, 3,600 U.S. citizens may have been held by ICE since October 2008 and some 88,000 families with U.S. citizen members have been affected by Secure Communities.

“Overall, the findings point to a system in which individuals are pushed through rapidly, without appropriate checks or opportunities to challenge their detention and/or deportation. This conclusion is particularly concerning given that the findings also reveal that people are being apprehended who should never have been placed in immigration custody, and that certain groups are over-represented in our sample population.” —Warren Report

The most chilling line in the report, for me, is that the family connections of detainees to U.S. citizens are likely underestimates: “… as immigrants may fear disclosing personal information to immigration authorities, particularly if they live in mixed-status families and fear negative consequences for family members because many detainees do not want to implicate their families in their immigration cases.”

But it works the other way as well. The 88,000 or more American families caught in this system are often not able or willing to speak out on behalf of their detained relatives because of legal concerns, family complications, lack of access to media, advocacy groups or legal aid and their sheer need to survive while a spouse or parent is held and likely deported. And so we rarely hear their stories. Obama does not hear their stories. Republican presidential candidates do not hear the stories of American citizens detained by ICE or the American spouses of immigrants put in deportation proceeding because of a broken tail light.

That is the collateral damage that Muñoz calls inevitable in our democracy, a mere budget line item, and the cost of doing law enforcement.

October 23, 2011October 24, 2011

On reporting and identity

A few weeks ago, I sat in the basement studio of Boise’s brand new community radio station discussing #OccupyBoise with eight or nine people who were fired up to cover the movement in some way. The radio station has only been on the air for about six months and we don’t have a local news segment established yet, but two talented and creative volunteer DJs who host mostly music shows wanted to report on the surprisingly robust Boise wing of #Occupy. Part of our discussion was whether or not the guys had been “too involved” in the organizing of the marches and general assemblies in Boise to credibly report on the phenomenon.

I am very reticent to judge who is credible to report on anything these days, as I think journalism ought to be—and is—judged more for the character of its content than for its pedigree. Also, I am just a volunteer at Radio Boise as well, bringing my decade of experience in the mainstream and alternative media to the table to help establish a news department at the station. Furthermore, community radio was doing consensus and direct democracy work before hash tags were even invented, so I was not about to make any decrees about who can report on what. But I did suggest that anyone who wanted to report on #Occupy Boise ought to be very clear on their involvement in it—both to themselves and to the public.

Jose Antonio Vargas, the undocumented reporter who is reporting on immigration through his own new organization, Define American, has done just that, and he comes off as extremely credible. Vargas, borrowing from journalism prof Jay Rosen, calls this style of journalism “The View from Somewhere“—the idea that our experiences and biases and power of ideas make our journalism more interesting and useful. But Vargas, while clearly advocating for justice in his own case and in the case of millions of immigrants stuck in what a large majority of Americans believe is a “broken” system (in whatever way they feel it may be broken), has made the clear distinction that he is a reporter first. He is taking on the role of investigator, critic, chronicler and working in the realm of ideas first and foremost. It is a great feeling of liberation—a graduation of sorts—to move from the he said/she said, transcriptionary, third person, “fair and balanced” approach that young reporters are still taught at newspapers across the country to realizing that the reporter has thoughts and feelings and a mind as well and that his or her thoughts and feelings matter.

I worked as an immigration reporter in the mainstream system for about six years, first at the Idaho Press-Tribune, a small town paper in Idaho’s second largest city, just west of Boise. It was my first real job and the place that I learned how to be a newspaper reporter. And I quickly realized, perhaps because I had moved to Idaho from the East Coast, that there was a large population of Latinos who were excluded from the community in many ways, including in the pages of the newspaper. So I created my own beat: the Latino beat and started writing about farmworker labor issues, offering farmworker perspectives, publishing short A&E (Arts and Entertainment) pieces in Spanish and English on cultural events and music in the Latino community and looking into bilingual education in the schools.

But my first inkling that I was not going to make it as a straight up newspaper reporter came when I witnessed an act of blatant racism at a city event before the annual rodeo—the biggest show in town. The story was supposed to be something like “City Council Excited for 75th Annual Rodeo” or something like that. But I returned to the newsroom with a much better story: “City Councilman Pans Black Rodeo Clown with Fried Chicken and Watermelon Jokes.” The newsroom was not equipped for such a story questioning the town’s most sacred traditions. There was literally no newspaper mechanism to get that information on the front page the next day—I, the reporter, was the only witness who was talking. But to their credit, my editors let me write an op-ed about the experience for the weekend paper, after the rodeo was over, if I recall, and it generated record numbers of letters to the editor, some urging me to go back to where I came from and others thanking me for pointing out the overt yet unspoken racism in the community.

That’s just one example of how the view from somewhere ought to work; the op-ed, or whatever we called it, should have run on the front page the next day.

In Vargas’ call to action for reporters to take a new line on immigration, he refers to the nefarious role that FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies have played in media coverage of immigration for the last decade or more. The groups, part of the Tanton Network, espouse what I consider to be an anti-immigrant or racist position but masquerade as think tanks or mainstream policy groups and get quoted all the time.

Vargas cites a Republican source:

FAIR, CIS and Numbers USA have “played an outsized role in speaking for conservatives. They’ve had an outsized role in this debate. They’ve framed the debate in their terms and that’s been really unfortunate,” Robert Gittelson, a Republican businessman, told me.

I have quoted them and I knew at the time that it was an intellectually dishonest thing to do, but my editors wanted to know what the antis had to say so I had to make the call. In 2005, I wrote a story for the Contra Costa Times, where I was the Immigration and Demographics reporter, about a woman whose husband was undocumented and had gotten stuck in Mexico after tending to his sick mother. It was a great story and one of the early inspirations for Amor and Exile. But I was forced to add these two lines to the story:

But for advocates of stricter immigration enforcement, having a family is no excuse for breaking the law.

“The illegals need to either get on the path to get their citizenship squared away, or they shouldn’t be here in the first place,” said Rick Oltman, western field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

In those two sentences, my only chance to frame Oltman’s comments were in my definition of his camp: strict enforcement. At least the tone of Oltman’s comment speaks for itself and he is not the focus of the story in any way. Vargas generously refers to the Tanton network groups as the “anti-immigration reform community.”

Despite my discomfort with these mainstream journalistic habits of framing stories in terms of conflict and stripping the pyramid of any personality, they are difficult habits to unlearn. It’s taken me several years as a freelancer and at an alternative weekly to come out of my shell and it’s still hard for me to write lengthy, self-referential blog posts like this one. But I’ll give one more example of how it can be done before getting back to #Occupy.

I went into coverage of the Tea Party phenomenon in 2009 with the same (kind of boring) questions that are being asked of #Occupy today: What’s this all about? And I wrote about it with some degree of personality (snark) at first and then with an all-out opinion formed from spending the time talking to people at many Tea Party rallies in Boise in this post entitled Tea Party Inspired by Racial Fears. My point is that I was neither for nor against the Tea Party or the Tea Partiers. I was acting and writing as an informed observer, staking out an informed position and offering readers a viewpoint that they could make use of. Many of my friends showed up to protest the protestors, but my form of activism has almost always been through the media. I suspect that is the way Jose Antonio Vargas views his activism—an informed observer with a lot to say about immigration in the United States. Though his coverage may well serve to rally the public—as good journalism should—it is journalism first, not preaching or protest.

So my advice to my friends at Radio Boise was this: you can have opinions and stances on #OccupyBoise and present them as news reporting if they are well developed and fair. You can let the marchers and occupiers speak for themselves on the air and call it news reporting. You can do any number of creative audio reports from the rallies and marches and call it news reporting. But you can’t claim to be part of #OccupyBoise and still call it news reporting (even if the movement is leaderless and tries to embrace “99 percent” of America), because that’s called public relations or propaganda and it’s not fair to news consumers and it’s boring.

It remains to be seen if we will break in the news department at Radio Boise with a story on #Occupy, but one thing we all learned is that despite the democratization of the media through the internet, journalism is still hard in two ways: it’s a daily applied ethics debate and it’s damn hard work.

October 20, 2011October 20, 2011

Writing in real time

One of the most difficult things about writing my part of Amor and Exile is that I live it every day.

Before I joined this project with Nathaniel, I primarily wrote in my journal about my experience of living with my husband in the U.S. when he was an undocumented immigrant there, or the aftermath of moving with him here to Mexico. For ten years, I wrote in my black covered notebooks, profusely but randomly—when events led me to need to record what was happening. Now that we’re collaborating, even though we don’t have a strict schedule, we have an endpoint in sight. As far as the book is concerned, that requires staying on top of regular writing, toward the eventual finish line of completing our manuscript. As far as my life is concerned, that is a more open-ended proposition.

Currently, I have only two days—Tuesdays and Thursdays—to get in the right frame of mind for writing my chapters. Those are the days that my husband has agreed to stay home with our daughter while I think and type. The precious hours available to me are whittled down by everything else that I do in order to get ready to write. Scan the news online, write in my journal, meditate. Then there’s responsibilities like nursing my daughter, eating, using the bathroom. Or the dreaded procrastination, a.k.a. social media networks. All of this is no big news to anyone who writes. It’s part of the game, and you either figure out a way to deal with it or get a different job. In reality, none of this is really that big of a deal to me either. Modern professionals learn to multi-task and juggle activities.

But one of the things that most gets in the way of my writing for this book is the very relationship I am writing about. Ha, ha. Yes, my relationship with my husband. Hey—I’m not ashamed to say things aren’t always perfectly harmonious. On any given day we are prone to bicker about something, but if that happens on the day I am supposed to write about my life for this book, it poses somewhat of a challenge of objectivity to me.

I know damn well that even though my husband and I have our differences that it doesn’t mean we don’t love each other, or that I shouldn’t write this book. We’re new parents, we’re a bicultural and binational partnership (read: culture gap to bridge), and we’re both severely underemployed. Which is to say we have strains on our moods. Just that sometimes it can be a little distracting to argue right before I’m supposed to perfect, for example, a section of a chapter about how we met. If I were writing a book about the Berries of North America (perhaps my next book topic), I really doubt that whether or not Margo interrupted me 7 times in the preceeding 7 hours would affect my portrayal of the geographic distribution of the cloudberry. So I have to try really hard to almost dissociate myself from my own relationship while writing about my relationship. That can be an exercise in absurdity.

Last month I read a few of the posts by fellow exile bloggers that Nate put up on our blogroll. In reading The Real Housewife of Ciudad Juárez blog by Emily Cruz, I became aware of some nasty comments that had been made about American women who marry foreigners, in response to an article entitled “American-born wives married to U.S. deported or banned spouses band together via online networks,” in which Cruz was quoted. One of the commenters stooped low enough to say that women could love anything, including a ham sandwich. As a response, Cruz responded with a post entitled, “25 Things I Love About My Ham Sandwich,” a sweet homage to her partner.

If I had been personally targeted, I probably would have been fuming. In fact, I might have even cried. But I am not sure if I would have responded in the same way. Don’t get me wrong: in the book I do talk about all the reasons why I fell in love with my husband—if I didn’t, our story wouldn’t be complete. But I feel very uncomfortable about the idea that I need to somehow prove the value of my relationship with my husband, just because he was at one time undocumented. No one, under any circumstances, should be forced to explain why they love their partner. That’s a dehumanizing situation. I’m concerned that if I respond in that way to attackers, I’ll validate their claims.

I’m writing this post because writing as candidly as possible about our story is something I’ve struggled with since deciding to go public with it. I had second thoughts about what some might consider “airing my dirty laundry.” I’ve done battle with the illusion that, in order to qualify as a worthy subject, our relationship ought to be flawless. But I’m realizing the folly in that viewpoint. I want to be as clear as possible about the pressures our relationship has endured over the years as a result of the legal situation he found himself in, and I found myself in by association. It’s not that we had a perfect relationship and illegal immigration destroyed it. It’s that we have a loving marriage with perfectly normal ups and downs, and immigration law as it’s currently written has strained it to a point that is liable to break up any family. Relationships are hard enough to keep together without having to stretch them indefinitely across international borders and pelt them with the callous comments of haters who have no idea what it’s like.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my husband just made lunch, and the tortillas might get cold. And then I’ve got a chapter to get back to.