"Obama Built the Structures for Trump": A Terrifying Legacy of Mass
Deportation
Sunday, 16 October 2016 00:00 By Alex Shams, Truthout | News Analysis
Jose Juan Moreno sits in the room at the University Church on Chicago's
Southside where he has sought sanctuary from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) since April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
For the last six months, Jose Juan Moreno has been confined to a small room
above the University Church on Chicago's South Side. Safe inside, he cannot
venture more than 50 steps from the corner where he sleeps. If he goes
beyond that, US authorities have promised to deport him from the country.
Although he has lived 17 years in Chicago -- the only home any of his five
American-born children have ever known -- Moreno originally crossed the
border from Mexico without papers. Under US law, that means he is subject to
arrest and deportation at any time, a status he shares with 11 million
people in the United States considered "undocumented."
Earlier this year, Moreno received a deportation order from Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), the authority that carries out the raids and
arrests that represent the strong arm of national immigration policy. He was
told to leave by April 15, otherwise he'd be deported.
In response, Moreno did the only thing he could think of -- he sought
sanctuary in the church, praying that even if the authorities would not
respect his family or his long years of work in the US, at least they might
respect the sanctity of a holy place.
So far, they have. But for how much longer is anybody's guess.
"I came to this country for the same reason everyone does, to work for a
better future for my family," Moreno told Truthout. "We didn't have
opportunities to do so back in Mexico," he explained, noting that he came in
order to support the mother and siblings he left behind in the state of
Zacatecas.
Moreno's case underscores the uncertainty that continues to face
undocumented people across the country today, many of whom live in the
shadows, despite promises by President Obama that he would work to improve
conditions.
Instead, Obama will go down in history as the US president under whom the
highest number of deportations has occurred -- more than under all of the
presidents in the century before him, combined.
Jose Juan Moreno, his wife, and one of his sons sit together in the room at
the University Church on Chicago's Southside where Moreno has sought
sanctuary from ICE since April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
"ICE Is a Rogue Agency"
At this year's Democratic National Convention (DNC), an 11-year-old,
speaking of her fear that her undocumented mother would be deported,
received a standing ovation, and Hillary Clinton called "comprehensive
immigration reform" the "right thing to do." At the same time, however, the
DNC hired a few undocumented immigrants to work on the campaign, but refused
to pay them.
Despite the emotional speeches, specifics were hard to come by. And with all
the Democrats' posturing as the "pro-immigrant" party, the casual viewer
could be forgiven for not realizing that under Obama's watch, immigration
policy has only grown harsher and harsher.
Indeed, while media attention has focused on the fear that a presidential
victory by Republican candidate Donald Trump could almost certainly have
grave consequences for the lives of the undocumented, during Obama's eight
years in office, more than 2 million people have already been deported.
This includes more than 400,000 every year between 2012 and 2014. Numbers
have since fallen, but the rate is still higher than ever before.
Tania Unzueta, an anti-deportation organizer in Chicago, told Truthout that
the scariest thing facing the movement is not the possibility (albeit small)
of a Trump victory, but the reality of a terrifyingly violent present.
Unzueta argued that under Obama, mass deportation has become "normalized,"
giving a façade of legality to the process and convincing the public that it
is possible to "deport people humanely."
"The Obama administration has built the structures for Trump. All of the
programs that Obama has put in place -- the Priority Enforcement Program,
the ways immigration enforcement can enter people's homes, the raids -- that
infrastructure will be passed on to the next president," she said.
This is not how things were supposed to turn out. Obama received strong
Latino support in both the 2008 and 2012 elections, in large part because he
promised to work for immigration reform.
Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that reform needed to happen, but
internal disagreements among Republicans and opposition to Obama prevented a
breakthrough. While some figures have called for mass deportation of all
undocumented people, polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans
favor some kind of legalization and amnesty, a fact recognized by both
parties.
Democratic contender Hillary Clinton has said she will open up a path to
legalization for undocumented immigrants within her first 100 days in
office. But her promises sound eerily familiar to those made by Obama in the
last two rounds of elections, and it is unclear how she would succeed where
he could not.
Bill Hing, a University of San Francisco law professor, traces Obama's
failure to implement a more humane immigration policy to two main causes:
Republican obstinacy and the fact that stopping immigration is increasingly
being seen as a part of the "war on terror."
Early on in his presidency, Obama tried to convince Republicans that
immigration reform would not mean complete amnesty. To do so, he began
ramping up immigration enforcement, particularly through so-called "silent
raids."
Unlike raids under the Bush administration, during which ICE showed up at
workplaces with guns blazing, the silent raids involved behind-the-scenes
threats to employers that ICE would check Social Security Numbers of
employees, prompting them to fire undocumented workers en masse. In terms of
public relations, the raids were a success for Obama. But in terms of
strategy, not so much.
Partially as a result of the rise of the anti-immigrant Tea Party movement,
Republicans sympathetic to reform were unable to convince their party to
meet Obama halfway. As a result, ramped-up enforcement by the administration
failed to yield any dividends.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, larger forces were at play. In the wake of
9/11, immigration police had become subsumed under the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS).
"It changed the mindset of ICE employees," Hing said. "They became more
emboldened, thinking that not only were they protecting the border, they
were now fighting against terrorism."
Although the process began under Bush, it expanded and deepened under Obama.
One example was the Secure Communities program, which enabled local law
enforcement to fingerprint detainees and share that information with the
FBI, the DHS and ICE.
"This resulted in the deportation of thousands of people every year, many of
whom were not dangerous criminals but were stopped because of minor traffic
offenses," Hing said.
Among those deported, for example, were many undocumented women who were
victims of domestic violence. When police arrived on the scene, they
fingerprinted all parties involved, and since these fingerprints were shared
with ICE, the victims became fair game for deportation.
Although Secure Communities was discontinued in 2014, it was replaced by the
Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). Critics say that the new program --
nicknamed "felons, not families" -- continues many of the worst aspects of
Secure Communities without addressing its faults. Furthermore, it has
promoted the idea that the deportations are primarily targeting criminals,
even though a recent investigation found around half of the "holds" placed
by the program are on people with no criminal records.
Olga Tomchin, a lawyer who defends clients fighting deportation, said in an
interview that the strategy groups undocumented people into "good
immigrants" and "bad immigrants" and renders the lives of the latter
"disposable."
"The policy acts as if having a felony conviction renders you outside of
having a family and a community and being valued as a human being," she
said. "Even though there is a growing movement across the country to end
mass incarceration and to reintegrate those leaving prison into society,
none of this applies to non-citizens. They don't get any second chances."
"There is a cognitive dissonance manifested in a totally unforgiving
attitude toward mistakes and a failure to understand racial profiling and
how unfair the system is to people of color to begin with," she added.
Around 5 million children in the United States today are estimated to have a
parent currently in jail, and half of the children have a parent with a
criminal record. Clearly, "felons" do have families.
Moreno is a case in point. He was charged with an aggravated DUI in 2009 for
driving under the influence of alcohol. Because he had no license --
undocumented people were forbidden from acquiring one where he lived -- the
charge was even more serious.
He paid the fine and served three months in prison. But on the day he walked
free, ICE arrived at the prison gate and detained him. They didn't charge
him with anything, but after an initial interrogation, he had to attend
monthly meetings for the following seven years.
Despite maintaining a record of good behavior since, the policy considers
him a "felon," liable to deportation at any time, regardless of the fact
that he has spent the last two decades making a family here.
Tomchin said that his case was far from unique, noting that DUI charges were
extremely common among those she was defending. "It's frustrating, because
if you're a citizen, you'll get a fine, probation, and maybe you'll lose
your license. But if you're not a citizen, a DUI can mean being sent to your
death [through deportation to a violent home country] or being locked up for
years and years."
A sign outside the University Church in the Hyde Park neighborhood of
Chicago's Southside, where Jose Juan Moreno has been in "sanctuary" since
April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
"The Only Secure Community Is an Organized One"
Despite the "felons, not families" reform, other aspects of immigration
policy explicitly target those the government admits are not criminals. In
January, for example, authorities launched an arrest campaign called
"Operation Border Guardian," which explicitly targets women and children who
arrived from Central America seeking asylum but whose cases have been
rejected.
Hundreds have been deported, even as reports are flowing back that a number
of deportees to these same countries have been murdered after arrival.
Since 2014, tens of thousands have crossed into the US fleeing spiraling
rates of violence in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,
many seeking asylum. Gang violence has led to a morbid competition for
"murder capital of the world," and thousands of children have fled
unaccompanied to the United States in order to avoid being press-ganged to
work as child soldiers for the cartels and other forms of violent extortion.
Critics note that the violence in these countries is itself a direct result
of US deportations in the 1990s. Thousands of gang members who were arrested
in the US were deported back to Central America, bringing big-city US gun
violence and destabilizing countries barely recovering from years of civil
war. It was those civil wars of the 1980s -- in which the US funded and
armed right-wing dictatorships linked to death squads -- that were the
original reason for their families' migration to begin with.
The case of Francisco Aguirre, an undocumented immigrant rights activist
that Tomchin is defending, highlights the horrifying human toll of US
policy. A father of three, Aguirre came from El Salvador two decades ago,
but was served with a deportation order in 2014 for reentering the country
illegally after a previous deportation 15 years before. In response, he
sought sanctuary in an Oregon church.
In 2015, his son Moises fled gang violence in their home country in the
hopes of joining his father. He arrived in the US unaccompanied and was
arrested and detained by border police. He was eventually released, but
traumatized by his detention and terrified of being detained again, Moises
begged to go back to El Salvador. A few months after returning, he was
murdered.
Aguirre's deportation order, meanwhile, was dropped earlier this year. Just
weeks after his victory, however, renewed deportation orders were issued,
and as a result, Aguirre has begun his fight anew.
"ICE is a rogue agency, and they don't even follow their own rules or the
law as it is," Tomchin said. "Getting a victory on paper is not the solution
because they're going keep doing what they want."
"The only source of optimism I have is that people are increasingly willing
to fight back and go public," Tomchin said. "Those are the only people who
stand a chance of success. Right now, the only secure community is an
organized one."
Photographs, flowers, and religious icons decorate the table of the room at
University Church where Jose Juan Moreno has been living in "sanctuary"
since April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
A State of Perpetual Uncertainty
While some have argued for comprehensive immigration reform, Tomchin -- who
came to the US from Eastern Europe as a refugee in the 1990s -- says her
work focuses on moral questions, not legal ones.
She argued that under the cover of immigration reform, people were "not just
being excluded from protection, but leaders were affirmatively bargaining
away other people's rights."
But Hing, the law professor, is still confident in the possibility of a more
humane immigration policy. "Americans need to have a better understanding of
why these people are here, and why they are leaving their home countries,"
he said.
He noted that, in addition to fleeing gang and drug violence, many people --
particularly from Mexico -- were fleeing situations of economic deprivation
directly linked to US policies.
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a key example.
After joining a united market with Canada and the US, Mexico could not
compete with a flood of cheap imports buoyed by government subsides in those
countries.
As a result, Mexico lost thousands of jobs, especially in agricultural
regions, spurring mass migration.
Zacatecas, the state that Moreno hails from, was one of the worst hit. Once
heavily dependent on agriculture, some estimate that around half of the
region's population now lives in the US. Moreno moved to the US just a few
years after NAFTA's passage, as he was unable to support his family back
home.
But understanding the larger economic and political equations that got him
to Chicago are little comfort for Moreno, who remains trapped in his small
room above University Church.
ICE said in a statement that they consider him "an immigration fugitive,"
falling within the agency's "enforcement priorities for arrest as an
at-large criminal alien."
They would not give any details on plans to arrest Moreno, and they declined
to answer queries about the moral aspects of deportation. They would only
note that as a result of an internal decision, "enforcement actions do not
occur at nor are focused on sensitive locations such as schools and
churches," adding, however, that "exceptions" do occur.
Stuck in limbo, Moreno and his family count each new day as a blessing. When
asked about the future, Moreno speaks with hesitation and uncertainty.
"It's not a prison, but it feels like one since I can never go outside," he
said. "I still hope that I can stay here in this country with my family,
with the help of those supporting me. I hope, but I don't know when I will
find out."
Awaiting a hold on the deportation order, Moreno and his wife and children
have had to put their lives on hold. Like millions of others, he is stuck in
a state of perpetual uncertainty with no end in sight.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
ALEX SHAMS
Alex Shams is a journalist based in Chicago and a Ph.D. student of
anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has previously published on
Slate, Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera English, among others.
RELATED STORIES
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Support
By Faby Jacome and Hairo Cortes, Truthout | Op-Ed
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in No-Bid Deal
By Sam Knight, The District Sentinel | Report
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"Obama Built the Structures for Trump": A Terrifying Legacy of Mass
Deportation
Sunday, 16 October 2016 00:00 By Alex Shams, Truthout | News Analysis
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reference not valid.
Jose Juan Moreno sits in the room at the University Church on
Chicago's Southside where he has sought sanctuary from Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) since April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
For the last six months, Jose Juan Moreno has been confined to a
small room above the University Church on Chicago's South Side. Safe inside,
he cannot venture more than 50 steps from the corner where he sleeps. If he
goes beyond that, US authorities have promised to deport him from the
country.
Although he has lived 17 years in Chicago -- the only home any of his five
American-born children have ever known -- Moreno originally crossed the
border from Mexico without papers. Under US law, that means he is subject to
arrest and deportation at any time, a status he shares with 11 million
people in the United States considered "undocumented."
Earlier this year, Moreno received a deportation order from Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), the authority that carries out the raids and
arrests that represent the strong arm of national immigration policy. He was
told to leave by April 15, otherwise he'd be deported.
In response, Moreno did the only thing he could think of -- he sought
sanctuary in the church, praying that even if the authorities would not
respect his family or his long years of work in the US, at least they might
respect the sanctity of a holy place.
So far, they have. But for how much longer is anybody's guess.
"I came to this country for the same reason everyone does, to work for a
better future for my family," Moreno told Truthout. "We didn't have
opportunities to do so back in Mexico," he explained, noting that he came in
order to support the mother and siblings he left behind in the state of
Zacatecas.
Moreno's case underscores the uncertainty that continues to face
undocumented people across the country today, many of whom live in the
shadows, despite promises by President Obama that he would work to improve
conditions.
Instead, Obama will go down in history as the US president under whom the
highest number of deportations has occurred -- more than under all of the
presidents in the century before him, combined.
Jose Juan Moreno, his wife, and one of his sons sit together in the room at
the University Church on Chicago's Southside where Moreno has sought
sanctuary from ICE since April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
"ICE Is a Rogue Agency"
At this year's Democratic National Convention (DNC), an 11-year-old,
speaking of her fear that her undocumented mother would be deported,
received a standing ovation, and Hillary Clinton called "comprehensive
immigration reform" the "right thing to do." At the same time, however, the
DNC hired a few undocumented immigrants to work on the campaign, but refused
to pay them.
Despite the emotional speeches, specifics were hard to come by. And with all
the Democrats' posturing as the "pro-immigrant" party, the casual viewer
could be forgiven for not realizing that under Obama's watch, immigration
policy has only grown harsher and harsher.
Indeed, while media attention has focused on the fear that a presidential
victory by Republican candidate Donald Trump could almost certainly have
grave consequences for the lives of the undocumented, during Obama's eight
years in office, more than 2 million people have already been deported.
This includes more than 400,000 every year between 2012 and 2014. Numbers
have since fallen, but the rate is still higher than ever before.
Tania Unzueta, an anti-deportation organizer in Chicago, told Truthout that
the scariest thing facing the movement is not the possibility (albeit small)
of a Trump victory, but the reality of a terrifyingly violent present.
Unzueta argued that under Obama, mass deportation has become "normalized,"
giving a façade of legality to the process and convincing the public that it
is possible to "deport people humanely."
"The Obama administration has built the structures for Trump. All of the
programs that Obama has put in place -- the Priority Enforcement Program,
the ways immigration enforcement can enter people's homes, the raids -- that
infrastructure will be passed on to the next president," she said.
This is not how things were supposed to turn out. Obama received strong
Latino support in both the 2008 and 2012 elections, in large part because he
promised to work for immigration reform.
Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that reform needed to happen, but
internal disagreements among Republicans and opposition to Obama prevented a
breakthrough. While some figures have called for mass deportation of all
undocumented people, polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans
favor some kind of legalization and amnesty, a fact recognized by both
parties.
Democratic contender Hillary Clinton has said she will open up a path to
legalization for undocumented immigrants within her first 100 days in
office. But her promises sound eerily familiar to those made by Obama in the
last two rounds of elections, and it is unclear how she would succeed where
he could not.
Bill Hing, a University of San Francisco law professor, traces Obama's
failure to implement a more humane immigration policy to two main causes:
Republican obstinacy and the fact that stopping immigration is increasingly
being seen as a part of the "war on terror."
Early on in his presidency, Obama tried to convince Republicans that
immigration reform would not mean complete amnesty. To do so, he began
ramping up immigration enforcement, particularly through so-called "silent
raids."
Unlike raids under the Bush administration, during which ICE showed up at
workplaces with guns blazing, the silent raids involved behind-the-scenes
threats to employers that ICE would check Social Security Numbers of
employees, prompting them to fire undocumented workers en masse. In terms of
public relations, the raids were a success for Obama. But in terms of
strategy, not so much.
Partially as a result of the rise of the anti-immigrant Tea Party movement,
Republicans sympathetic to reform were unable to convince their party to
meet Obama halfway. As a result, ramped-up enforcement by the administration
failed to yield any dividends.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, larger forces were at play. In the wake of
9/11, immigration police had become subsumed under the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS).
"It changed the mindset of ICE employees," Hing said. "They became more
emboldened, thinking that not only were they protecting the border, they
were now fighting against terrorism."
Although the process began under Bush, it expanded and deepened under Obama.
One example was the Secure Communities program, which enabled local law
enforcement to fingerprint detainees and share that information with the
FBI, the DHS and ICE.
"This resulted in the deportation of thousands of people every year, many of
whom were not dangerous criminals but were stopped because of minor traffic
offenses," Hing said.
Among those deported, for example, were many undocumented women who were
victims of domestic violence. When police arrived on the scene, they
fingerprinted all parties involved, and since these fingerprints were shared
with ICE, the victims became fair game for deportation.
Although Secure Communities was discontinued in 2014, it was replaced by the
Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). Critics say that the new program --
nicknamed "felons, not families" -- continues many of the worst aspects of
Secure Communities without addressing its faults. Furthermore, it has
promoted the idea that the deportations are primarily targeting criminals,
even though a recent investigation found around half of the "holds" placed
by the program are on people with no criminal records.
Olga Tomchin, a lawyer who defends clients fighting deportation, said in an
interview that the strategy groups undocumented people into "good
immigrants" and "bad immigrants" and renders the lives of the latter
"disposable."
"The policy acts as if having a felony conviction renders you outside of
having a family and a community and being valued as a human being," she
said. "Even though there is a growing movement across the country to end
mass incarceration and to reintegrate those leaving prison into society,
none of this applies to non-citizens. They don't get any second chances."
"There is a cognitive dissonance manifested in a totally unforgiving
attitude toward mistakes and a failure to understand racial profiling and
how unfair the system is to people of color to begin with," she added.
Around 5 million children in the United States today are estimated to have a
parent currently in jail, and half of the children have a parent with a
criminal record. Clearly, "felons" do have families.
Moreno is a case in point. He was charged with an aggravated DUI in 2009 for
driving under the influence of alcohol. Because he had no license --
undocumented people were forbidden from acquiring one where he lived -- the
charge was even more serious.
He paid the fine and served three months in prison. But on the day he walked
free, ICE arrived at the prison gate and detained him. They didn't charge
him with anything, but after an initial interrogation, he had to attend
monthly meetings for the following seven years.
Despite maintaining a record of good behavior since, the policy considers
him a "felon," liable to deportation at any time, regardless of the fact
that he has spent the last two decades making a family here.
Tomchin said that his case was far from unique, noting that DUI charges were
extremely common among those she was defending. "It's frustrating, because
if you're a citizen, you'll get a fine, probation, and maybe you'll lose
your license. But if you're not a citizen, a DUI can mean being sent to your
death [through deportation to a violent home country] or being locked up for
years and years."
A sign outside the University Church in the Hyde Park neighborhood of
Chicago's Southside, where Jose Juan Moreno has been in "sanctuary" since
April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
"The Only Secure Community Is an Organized One"
Despite the "felons, not families" reform, other aspects of immigration
policy explicitly target those the government admits are not criminals. In
January, for example, authorities launched an arrest campaign called
"Operation Border Guardian," which explicitly targets women and children who
arrived from Central America seeking asylum but whose cases have been
rejected.
Hundreds have been deported, even as reports are flowing back that a number
of deportees to these same countries have been murdered after arrival.
Since 2014, tens of thousands have crossed into the US fleeing spiraling
rates of violence in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,
many seeking asylum. Gang violence has led to a morbid competition for
"murder capital of the world," and thousands of children have fled
unaccompanied to the United States in order to avoid being press-ganged to
work as child soldiers for the cartels and other forms of violent extortion.
Critics note that the violence in these countries is itself a direct result
of US deportations in the 1990s. Thousands of gang members who were arrested
in the US were deported back to Central America, bringing big-city US gun
violence and destabilizing countries barely recovering from years of civil
war. It was those civil wars of the 1980s -- in which the US funded and
armed right-wing dictatorships linked to death squads -- that were the
original reason for their families' migration to begin with.
The case of Francisco Aguirre, an undocumented immigrant rights activist
that Tomchin is defending, highlights the horrifying human toll of US
policy. A father of three, Aguirre came from El Salvador two decades ago,
but was served with a deportation order in 2014 for reentering the country
illegally after a previous deportation 15 years before. In response, he
sought sanctuary in an Oregon church.
In 2015, his son Moises fled gang violence in their home country in the
hopes of joining his father. He arrived in the US unaccompanied and was
arrested and detained by border police. He was eventually released, but
traumatized by his detention and terrified of being detained again, Moises
begged to go back to El Salvador. A few months after returning, he was
murdered.
Aguirre's deportation order, meanwhile, was dropped earlier this year. Just
weeks after his victory, however, renewed deportation orders were issued,
and as a result, Aguirre has begun his fight anew.
"ICE is a rogue agency, and they don't even follow their own rules or the
law as it is," Tomchin said. "Getting a victory on paper is not the solution
because they're going keep doing what they want."
"The only source of optimism I have is that people are increasingly willing
to fight back and go public," Tomchin said. "Those are the only people who
stand a chance of success. Right now, the only secure community is an
organized one."
Photographs, flowers, and religious icons decorate the table of the room at
University Church where Jose Juan Moreno has been living in "sanctuary"
since April. (Photo: Hoda Katebi)
A State of Perpetual Uncertainty
While some have argued for comprehensive immigration reform, Tomchin -- who
came to the US from Eastern Europe as a refugee in the 1990s -- says her
work focuses on moral questions, not legal ones.
She argued that under the cover of immigration reform, people were "not just
being excluded from protection, but leaders were affirmatively bargaining
away other people's rights."
But Hing, the law professor, is still confident in the possibility of a more
humane immigration policy. "Americans need to have a better understanding of
why these people are here, and why they are leaving their home countries,"
he said.
He noted that, in addition to fleeing gang and drug violence, many people --
particularly from Mexico -- were fleeing situations of economic deprivation
directly linked to US policies.
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a key example.
After joining a united market with Canada and the US, Mexico could not
compete with a flood of cheap imports buoyed by government subsides in those
countries.
As a result, Mexico lost thousands of jobs, especially in agricultural
regions, spurring mass migration.
Zacatecas, the state that Moreno hails from, was one of the worst hit. Once
heavily dependent on agriculture, some estimate that around half of the
region's population now lives in the US. Moreno moved to the US just a few
years after NAFTA's passage, as he was unable to support his family back
home.
But understanding the larger economic and political equations that got him
to Chicago are little comfort for Moreno, who remains trapped in his small
room above University Church.
ICE said in a statement that they consider him "an immigration fugitive,"
falling within the agency's "enforcement priorities for arrest as an
at-large criminal alien."
They would not give any details on plans to arrest Moreno, and they declined
to answer queries about the moral aspects of deportation. They would only
note that as a result of an internal decision, "enforcement actions do not
occur at nor are focused on sensitive locations such as schools and
churches," adding, however, that "exceptions" do occur.
Stuck in limbo, Moreno and his family count each new day as a blessing. When
asked about the future, Moreno speaks with hesitation and uncertainty.
"It's not a prison, but it feels like one since I can never go outside," he
said. "I still hope that I can stay here in this country with my family,
with the help of those supporting me. I hope, but I don't know when I will
find out."
Awaiting a hold on the deportation order, Moreno and his wife and children
have had to put their lives on hold. Like millions of others, he is stuck in
a state of perpetual uncertainty with no end in sight.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Alex Shams
Alex Shams is a journalist based in Chicago and a Ph.D. student of
anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has previously published on
Slate, Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera English, among others.
Related Stories
"Deporter-in-Chief" to Reach 2 Million Mark
By Sarah Rosenblatt, Truthout | Graphic JournalismImmigrant Youth to
Presidential Candidates: Promises Will Not Win Our Support
By Faby Jacome and Hairo Cortes, Truthout | Op-EdImmigrant Family Detention
Center Made For-Profit Prison Company $1 Billion in No-Bid Deal
By Sam Knight, The District Sentinel | Report
Show Comments
