Hunger Strikes, Separated Families and Deported US Veterans

Cynthia Diaz holds the sign above a photo of her and her mother together on Day 7 of the White House vigil against deportations

As we see the month of April come to a close, the best estimates are putting the deportation numbers at around two million. While each deportation has it’s own story, there have been particularly egregious stories associated with our broken immigration system: separated families and deported veterans. While Obama understands this system does not benefit anyone but groups like the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group who own the for-profit prisons immigrants are detained in, he has yet to make a significant stand against them and the legislators on their payroll.

With roughly 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the country (around the same population as Ohio), the United States does not have the money, infrastructure or desire to deport them all. Many of these 11.7 million have little to no hope of adjusting their status if they came here without documentation or overstayed a visa: even if someone does everything right for a decade, one single misstep or missed deadline and they may never have an opportunity to gain legal immigration status. Because of this, families with parents, children and siblings all having different immigration statuses are common across the country.

An example this complicated legal environment resulting from a broken system is the Diaz family.

Cynthia Diaz, a U.S. citizen, was 15 when her mother, Maria, was arrested during an ICE raid on her home 3 years ago. Maria had moved to the US when she was 14, and lived here for 18 years. She has since been deported, is detained currently for trying to return to the US and see her family and organized a hunger strike against the abysmal conditions inside detention facilities.

Cynthia was on hunger strike against deportations and to bring attention to her mother’s case outside the White House for 6 days, and Easter marked the 6th day of Hernestina Martinez’ hunger strike at the same vigil. Hernestina has kept the vigil since the last group of hunger strikers, which included Cynthia, left. She is joined by her 13-year-old daughter, who was born in Texas. They are both on vigil for Manuel Martinez, Hernestina’s husband and Melanny’s father, who was deported earlier this month.

While the Diaz and Martinez families are still together with one parent taking care of the children, this is not always the case: once a parent has their citizen child taken from them while they are detained, that child could be in foster care indefinitely as many immigrants wait in detention for years for just a hearing.

If a minor child has one or more parents deported and is left alone, around 50% of the time they will go to a neighbor when they get hungry, and then wind up with Child Protective Services. Once this happens, it is difficult for parents to regain custody when they are not permitted to enter the country to even be present in court to make the case that they should be reunited with their child.

Deported parents then must go through both a foreign and US custody agency, and the process can take years even when successful. This is, of course, assuming that the parent did not lose their window of opportunity (i.e., in California this can be as little as 6 months) to appeal for custody and prove fitness while they are in detention. Currently, there are at least 5,100 children in foster care due to the deportation of one or more parents.

On the other side of the border, these parents join a lot of our U.S. servicemen who were deported after serving their country honorably, such as Hector Barajas.

Hector was a member of the 82nd Airborne and, after being honorably discharged, found himself in trouble with the law. For anyone with citizenship, they would have served 3 years and that would have been it. For Hector, however, he was deported to Mexico a year after his release, and he was not the only one. Once deported, they lose access to the VA and benefits. Considering how many of our veterans are coming back with a lot of needs resulting directly from multiple tours of duty, this is simply unacceptable.

Hector is now living with two other deported veterans in what he calls the “Banished Veterans Support House,” where he helps other deported veterans to apply for their benefits from Mexico. He hopes to one day be able to return and see his daughter in the U.S. again, and perhaps polish the medals he earned in service to our country inside that same country. It is difficult to estimate the number of vets deported, though numbers from advocacy agencies number it in the thousands. While ICE has issued a statement that it rarely deports veterans, it does so relying upon the Morton Memo.

The Morton Memo, however, is something which ICE and DHS has routinely ignored: it calls for the prioritization of deportations of security risks and against the deportations of those who have significant ties in the U.S. Around 2/3 of those deported, however, are typically deported over something minor like a traffic ticket or have no criminal record at all, and Cynthia and Melanny are two of many US citizens still waiting to be reunited with their parent. When closer scrutiny was put to Secure Communities (SCOMM), a program designed to use local police to enforce immigration law, Miami-Dade county in Florida found that 94% of those being detained for immigration were not security risks. They discontinued funding of the program, which was costing the county $12.5 million.

The only ones who benefit from large price tags like that are the for-profit prisons who handle immigrant detentions, pay millions to the DC lobbyist industry and hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-election campaigns on both sides of the aisle like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group. These corporations have both accused of gross human rights violations in their facilities, and make contact with the world outside of detention to share these abhorrent conditions next to impossible. They were even able to lobby for a mandatory bed quota written into law by one of their partially-owned legislators, meaning that 34,000 of their beds, which they get paid to have filled, must have a detained immigrant in them at all times: ICE works hard for the CCA and GEO Group, and they do it with our money, much of which goes to the CCA and GEO.

While it makes sense that people who hate immigrants and have pushed against reform like Louie Gohmert (R-TX) would love this system of putting away immigrants, what is Obama’s excuse? While he has promised to review deportations to make them more humane, what is the most humane way to separate Cynthia from her mother? As the head of US agencies, those two million deportations are ultimately his responsibility, he has the authority to reel in ICE and DHS even without legislation, but he has so far opted not to.