Government

Cage-Free Kids

Criminal defense attorney Toni Messina says if she were an immigrant with an open deportation order, or an undocumented alien, having been duly warned, she'd have been laying low over the weekend. 

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(Photo by Katherine McCaffrey, via Toni Messina)

It wasn’t exactly a carnival — there was only one mic, an accordion, and a hand-held drum. But the gathering of over 300 people along a lonely stretch of road beneath the Turnpike Friday night outside the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark, New Jersey, was something to celebrate.

These people (me among them), ranging in age from teenagers to geriatrics (one grey-haired woman passed out copies of “CHALLENGE,” the “revolutionary communist paper” of progressive labor), chanted verses in call and response, sang songs from the 60s, and held aloft battery-powered candles as part of a nationwide vigil to protest ICE raids and the separation of immigrant children from their families.

People carried signs like “Cage-Free Children,” “Families Belong Together,” “Welcome Immigrants,” “No Hate, No Fear,” and “And We Vote.”  Speakers told stories of their border crossings.  Many excoriated the Trump administration.  Some blamed ICE and called for it to be abolished.  One man, who crossed the Rio Grande at age 14, blamed liberals for not being leftist enough.

At one point, a detainee inside the prison made a phone call out to us, which was held up to the mic. He’d been detained at Essex Correctional for 10 months and was fighting deportation.  He said he’d do whatever he could to help us — the guy inside, helping us outside — we who have jobs, homes, and are united with our families.

It was a hodge-podge of ideas and voices, and even though no media covered the gathering, it felt good just to be there and cheer as the 18-wheelers moseyed by, honking in solidarity.

We were doing something, no matter how fleeting, to counter the Trump administration’s objectification of immigrants as “the other,” as criminals, as undermining the “American” way of life.

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Over the week, in anticipation of the much-threatened ICE raids that were supposed to target 10 cities, I received updates from immigration organizations — “ICE Kits” — equipping attorneys and communities to know what to do should ICE show up at the door.

Chief among the tips was “Don’t open the door.”   If ICE can’t get in, they can’t arrest without a court-ordered warrant.

Another tip — pay no attention to the “ruses,” a term of art used in ICE manuals to tell agents it’s okay to make up stories, pretend you’re someone else, like city police, looking for information, just wanting to have a photo identified, or check for a burglar.  Once the door opens, even a bit, ICE comes in.  They’ll search the home, ask everyone for identification, and if they find anyone undocumented, can detain them.

The tactics aren’t new.  They were being employed during the Obama years and before, just not with all the hoopla that President Trump used to roll out his plan.  He’s kicked hate and fear into high gear, most recently even attacking sitting congresswomen of color, telling them to “go back” and fix the “crime infested places” they “originally came from.”  (How to win friends and influence people.)

If I were an immigrant with an open deportation order, or an undocumented alien, having been duly warned, I’d have been laying low over the weekend.  And many were.  Reports said that open-air markets where immigrants usually shop in places like Queens, New York, and Passaic, New Jersey, were empty. “Ni siquiera una mosca (not even a fly),” one vendor said.

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The anti-ICE raid campaign worked. According to initial reports, fewer houses were invaded and people arrested than anticipated. So maybe Trump’s bloviating served a good purpose — coalescing the opposition.

The reality is the U.S. has been on a roll, deporting non-citizens since the founding of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 just after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Since its formation, DHS has deported over five million people – almost twice as many people than in the previous 100 years combined.  According to the Immigrant Defense Project:

The effective merger of the “homeland security state” and the prison industrial complex over the past 15 years has led to the normalization of mass deportation, one which relies heavily on the criminalization of immigrants. As a result, DHS — its underlying logic, the profound human suffering it has caused, its relationship with other agencies, and the political interests it serves —has not until recently received the kind of public scrutiny an institution of such magnitude and influence deserves.

That public scrutiny is coming now.

Insult, scare, and threaten enough people, and even those who never paid much attention to immigration are going to start watching.

If you really want to fix the system, Mr. President, tone down the rhetoric and figure out the cause of the tremendous influx of migrants crossing our borders.  They ain’t all murderers and rapists.

If the Trump administration did less arresting, criminalizing, and threatening, there might be more time to support the “crime-infested places” that people are running from.

Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.

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