Cleveland Heights – Following is a statement from Lynn Tramonte, Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, at the convergence of Juneteenth and World Refugee Day.
This year we officially commemorate Juneteenth and World Refugee Day on the same day, and that feels right. Both historical markers share a common core. They honor the inherent human dignity of all people: people who are not only deserving of freedom and searching for it, but—we hope—finding it.
Juneteenth and World Refugee Day have another thing in common. They highlight how much work we need to do, as a nation, to become the “land of the free” for everyone.
The Biden administration is starting to address systemic racism in the U.S. legal system, but so much more needs to be done. And, it has failed to even acknowledge how systemic racism shows up in immigration law, policy, civil law enforcement, and the courts. Instead, the administration is deporting Haitian people en masse, and locking up 25,000 people facing deportation due to racism in U.S. immigration courts, the criminal legal system, and the laws themselves.
In honor of Juneteenth, we’d like to talk about racism in immigration enforcement. Following are just a few from a limitless number of examples.
Being present in the U.S. without immigration status is not a crime. But in 1929, Congress criminalized unauthorized entry/re-entry into the United States in a compromise between Nativists—who did not want people from Mexico to dilute “the racial purity” of the United States—and farmers, who wanted people from Mexico to work here but not have rights. The new law was a win-win for everyone but immigrants. It gave the government a sharper tool to use against them, and employers more power to control workers by threatening to report them to the government.
So-called Immigration Judges are actually employees of the Department of Justice, not independent jurists. Their work is directed by political appointees, yet appeals courts give significant deference to their decisions. Immigration Judges are empowered to decide a person’s “credibility” with no understanding of how people from diverse cultures, languages, religions, and other backgrounds exhibit trauma, use dates to mark time (or don’t), and define family—to name a few examples. Cases can hinge on Judges’ “credibility determinations” that are based on ignorance and stereotypes.
Judges’ written rulings and courtroom comments provide further evidence of racism and misogyny. For example, Cleveland’s Judge Owens denied asylum to a woman from Cameroon because, in his opinion, she was not raped by soldiers due to her status as an English-speaking minority—a group under attack—but because she was a “pretty virgin.” The implication and its outcome are not just insensitive, but blatantly offensive.
Immigration Judges rely on a racist trope included in Judge Wallace’s 1980 dissent in Villena v. Immigration Naturalization Serv, urging denial of motions to reopen immigration cases to potentially prevent someone’s deportation. Wallace wrote: “granting such motions too freely will permit endless delay of deportation by aliens creative and fertile enough to continuously produce new and material facts sufficient to establish a prima facie case,” (622 F.2d 1352 (9th Cir. 1980)).
The “fertile aliens” he’s referring to are, of course, immigrants who become parents. The “new and material facts” are U.S. citizen children. This sentence reflects stereotypes of immigrant men as over-sexualized con artists who simply can’t be trusted, and is cited in Immigration Court decisions to this day.
Add to these examples the fact that 1) immigrants are not entitled to a publicly-funded attorney if they cannot afford to hire their own; 2) court interpreters may not speak the immigrant’s actual dialect; and 3) racist community policing and laws targeting BIPOC feed the deportation dragnet. Detained immigrants are not even allowed to be in court, but have to make their cases dressed in jail jumpsuits through a grainy video feed. This is how the Immigration Court system was designed to fail people, while offering the illusion of “justice.”
Combating racism in the United States is a shared responsibility between the government and people—white people—but the administration has broad power. President Biden designated Juneteenth a federal holiday for good reason. Acknowledging our country’s history is step one, but we also need to work toward an anti-racist present and future. That anti-racist future will never exist until we include immigration policy reform in the work.
For more, see testimony from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship for the hearing “For the Rule of Law, An Independent Immigration Court.”
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