Liberty and Justice for All (Unless You’re a Person of Color or Immigrant)
The oppression of minorities through family separation is as American as sweet tea and apple pie.
When my parents told me about our upcoming move to America, my father’s visa denial was presented as an afterthought. Though I felt the flashing tinge of the anxiety of being separated from my father, my parents’ collective excitement for the journey appeased my fear. Raising a young child in the throes of war had accustomed them to modeling composed behavior in a stressful circumstance; raid sirens were my Pavlovian cue for the songs we sang in orchestra to the bombs that dropped beyond our door. A parent’s role, particularly in the critical years of early development, is to create a nurturing environment, and my parents were pros. Bombs meant quality family time and immigration meant adventures to come.
Thus, adventure was our focus in the months leading to our departure. Focus on the family members I would finally meet who until then existed as a lofty cast of characters in my head. On the bounty of gifts I was certain to receive from this family once in America. On the excitement of the journey itself, a journey more epic in distance and scale than any I’d passaged thus far, like the airplanes which transported us to seek visas in U.S. embassies located in Turkey, Syria, and China, but the airplane to America would fly much farther. As the story built in grandeur I forgot that my father would not join us in this journey.
But the delicate shroud of this moth-worn tale eviscerated during our goodbyes in the pre-dawn night. Cloaked in the cautious air, our upstairs neighbor prayed on the Qu’ran over our heads. His elderly wife wept and ran her fingers through prayer beads. My mother clung steadfast to my sleeping one-year-old brother. My father stood numb. Numb and fixed. I looked face to face: confused, bewildered, dazed. These tears and despondent faces seemed an ill-fitting prelude to the adventure I had been promised.
My introduction to America was through the hollow belly of J.F.K. Airport in New York City. We were ushered like cattle through a series of long hallways and abandoned on uncomfortable plastic chairs to await our turn for inspection. As I fidgeted in my seat, my mother urged me to behave myself and delivered a stern warning: after a month’s time spent in Turkey and an 11-hour airplane flight, this interview may be only the beginning of our never-ending journey. The weight of the world compounded on my small shoulders as I pondered what would become of us if we weren’t allowed in the country. Where would we call home? In this instant, I felt more anxiety than I ever had through the entirety of my years in war. My timid heart hammered as we approached the immigration officer whose skin was made an unnatural shade of yellow-green from the fluorescent lights overhead. I sat still next to my mother and grasped onto her arm, my only remaining constant. The man regarded us and jotted notes on his clipboard. He asked my mother a series of questions, his words unfamiliar and alien. I did not yet speak English, but I intuited what my ears could not understand; at six-years-old, I was being judged.
Despite the early trauma and years of on-going microaggression that followed thereafter, my experience is by all accounts the quintessential immigrant success story. We came to America legally with paper work and documentation in hand. Six years later, my father was granted a visa and, though missing the majority of my childhood, was allowed to take residence as a resident alien in the United States. When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, our fear of deportation compelled my family to apply for citizenship, and after a short three-year wait we were provided interview dates and congratulated on becoming naturalized United States citizens.
Immigration is by definition the act of permanent removal: the severe eradication of familiarity when a young flower knows only the world that surrounds her. It is carrying her as gently as possible over unpredictable terrain and hoping the harsh storm does not cause irreparable damage to her tenuous frame. It is placing her tenderly into unfamiliar soil as an onslaught of foreign stimulations accost her. And though she tries to adapt, her environment remains hostile and unforgiving. So she shrinks, regresses, goes deep, deep within herself, hiding her roots, her delicate buds, ashamed to reveal herself, for all her life she is told that her shape and fragrance and color are strange. Trauma is inherent to the process of immigration even when you are granted the privilege to seek refuge legally.
The trauma is even more inherent when you are left choice-less.
It is more so when you are forced to flee. Flee from extreme poverty that induces starvation. Forced to flee from the gun shots and murder threats induced from drug wars and gang violence, or missiles and chemicals peppered on your hometown by your own government.
It is more so when your transportation is not by airplane but an inflatable raft in the middle of the sea. Or by foot over harsh terrain in unrelenting desert heat. Or atop La Bestia traveling 60 miles an hour for days or even weeks. Or in the back of a van in the trust of a coyote.
It is more so when immigration means a high probability of death. From drowning. Or heatstroke and dehydration. Or dismembered on the rails of a track. Or, in the best-case scenario, rape and abduction.
It is more so when you finally arrive to an unfamiliar land and are confronted by blinding flashlights. It is more so when you are pried from your mother’s arms. When you look up and see the look of desperation in her eyes. When you cry but she cannot pick you up. When you watch her placed in handcuffs and whisked away in a van. When you cry and no one listens. When you wail but your abductor jots in his clipboard and sips coffee. When you scream until your throat bleeds and you are placed oh-so-tenderly in a frigid cage. When you bellow and bawl and wail until you can’t breathe, and finally you realize: you are voiceless.
A parent’s ability to protect his or her child is intrinsic in the role of parenthood. The thousands of immigrants who flee with their children and the parents who send their children alone across the U.S.-Mexico border perform the very intuitive action that has facilitated human survival. Pre-historic humans did not wait for paperwork before they fled from a brush fire or predator attack, nor do the thousands of Central Americans and Syrians who run from drug wars, gang violence, and missile attacks. This primitive instinct compelled my parents to immigrate and, though the Bush administration stripped my father of his right to parent, my mother served as my protector. She was my voice when I could not speak English and my continual advocate through the racist and micro-aggressive behaviors I faced as a minority in a predominately white upper-middle class community. She reminded me of my equity in a country where immigrants and people of color are systemically diminished and devalued.
The children who have been separated from their parents and those who await this inevitable fate when their parents are charged with a criminal violation have no such advocate. Abrupt family separation creates trauma, leading to increased symptoms of anxiety and depression. Such trauma can also have lifelong consequences to mental health including post traumatic stress disorder. Though some may be shocked at this unconscionable display of oppression, the act of separating minority children from their parents is as old as America itself: black children were sold into slavery, Irish children were removed for juvenile delinquency programs, Japanese children were placed in Japanese Internment Camps, Native children were placed in boarding schools and later, into foster care and adoption, and millions of black and brown men are separated from their children in the contemporary mass incarceration crisis (this list is not exhaustive).
These atrocities were implemented under the smoke screen of mandated law and federal policy. Weaponizing children as an oppression tactic is as inherent to American history as the Constitution. If we truly want to build a nation where liberty and justice are for all we must afford all people the basic human right to seek refuge to protect and care for their children.