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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Monday, August 31, 2015

These Photos Prove ‘Anchor Babies’ Are A Myth

ThinkProgress
By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee
August 28, 2015

Christian Hervis-Vazquez called his wife Viviana on Thursday afternoon to confirm her worst fear: He was in Mexico. The U.S. federal immigration agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had deported him earlier that day.

Hervis-Vazquez is an undocumented immigrant married to a U.S. citizen. They have three young children who were all born here in the United States.

“The children are taking it very, very bad,” Viviana said in an interview with ThinkProgress, just hours before her husband’s call, breaking into a guttural sob. Of her three children, she said her 5-year-old son has “stopped eating” and her 7-year-old daughter has started to “shut out” conversations since their father left.

Last month, federal immigration agents took Hervis-Vazquez near his home in Las Vegas, Nevada for a DUI conviction from 2010.

The children are taking it very, very bad.

“They came to pick him up on July 14 on his way to work. It was a regular day,” Viviana recalled. “They told him he had a deportation order, which he got in 2012 but we didn’t even know about that. We’ve lived here for three years and we never received anything and don’t even know how he got that. Before we could even start the paperwork [for his green card], he was detained.”

According to the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, Hervis-Vazquez had already completed “all of the necessary courses surrounding his DUI and paying his fines,” so the deportation amounted to a form of double punishment for the Hervis-Vazquez family. Up until his deportation on Thursday, Hervis-Vazquez had been staying inside an immigration detention center in Otero, New Mexico.

Since Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in June with a speech suggesting that Mexican immigrants are rapists, drug dealers, and killers, other Republican candidates have also embraced extreme rhetoric about undocumented immigrants. The most recent trend is to suggest that undocumented immigrants are coming to the U.S. to have so-called “anchor babies” — a slur used to describe U.S.-born children of foreign-born parents, who could sponsor family members for legal status at some point later in life, therefore serving as an “anchor” to help keep their undocumented parents here.

But the recent deportation of Hervis-Vazquez — a man who, according to the Republican candidates, is supposedly moored to the United States because of his familial ties to U.S. citizens — defies that assumption.

He’s not alone. About 9 million individuals in the United States live in mixed-immigration status families, where at least one parent is undocumented and one child was born in the United States.

And many, like Hervis-Vazquez, are at risk of having their family lives torn apart at any moment.

Reyna Montoya, a 24-year-old high school teacher, lives in such a household. Originally from Mexico, Montoya and her younger brother are undocumented immigrants granted temporary work authorization and legal presence in the country through President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Her parents are also undocumented. Her 8-year-old sister, however, is a U.S. citizen.

When Montoya’s father came back from a work trip to Puerto Rico in 2012, he was asked if he was a U.S. citizen. When he told the truth, ICE officials arrested him for illegal re-entry. He spent nine months in immigration detention and was released on bond in 2013. But his case is not closed.

“He has court again next year so we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Montoya told ThinkProgress. “Now we’re just waiting for someone to decide what gets to happen to your family. That person has so much power about what could happen and the implications of our family if my dad gets deported. Going to see my dad wouldn’t be possible unless he’s dying. Is my 8-year-old sister going to visit my dad on her own?”

The DACA program allows undocumented immigrants like Montoya to travel internationally, though through limited circumstances. The program grants some individuals advance parole to leave the country for education or business trips and also to visit dying family members.

Going to see my dad wouldn’t be possible unless he’s dying.

For people like the Hervis-Vazquez and Montoya families, the rhetoric espoused by the 2016 Republican presidential candidates couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re not benefiting from so-called “anchor babies.”

“I just think it’s unfair and uncalled for and disrespectful,” Viviana said, when asked how she felt about the loaded term. “No one should be discriminated against for where they come from.”

Though much of the immigration debate is focused on Latino immigrants, the former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) put a new twist on the term when he said that “anchor babies” is a concept that’s “more related to Asian people.” But mixed-immigration status Asian families aren’t any less shielded from deportation.

Bati is a 21-year-old DACA beneficiary who came to the country from Mongolia with his parents when he was 10 years old. Both of his parents are undocumented and they work various jobs in the construction and restaurant industry. His 11-year-old brother is a U.S. citizen. Neither one of his parents are in deportation proceedings. But they are subjected to long hours and low wages, as are many other undocumented immigrants — and they live much of their lives in fear.

“They’re afraid of going to the hospital and afraid of the police stopping them,” Bati told ThinkProgress. “If they’re deported, it’ll be me and my brother.”

People come to the country to start a family. There’s no external motive.

Bati shrugged off the idea that his younger brother is an “anchor” for his family. “Why would somebody who comes into this country have a kid just to become a citizen in 21 years and even then wait ten years to become a citizen?” he asked. “That argument doesn’t really make sense. People come to the country to start a family. There’s no external motive.”

Many families are caught in an immigration system that indiscriminately targets people with family connections to the United States. A majority of the country’s undocumented population are long-term residents and have have been in the country for about 13 years. But there have been at least 205,000 parents of U.S.-born citizens who have been deported between 2010 and 2012.


“When they talk about ‘anchor babies,’ they’re talking about my sister,” Montoya said. “We left Mexico because we were running away from all the violence, the drugs, the cartels that was happening there. What does an anchor actually mean? It really hits home and seeing my siblings’ faces and knowing that they’re being called these names. This is their country and they’re not any less American than Donald Trump.”

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

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