ThinkProgress (Virginia)
By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee
April 7, 2016
When
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) sat down as a dinner guest on Monday night, his
hosts had a clear agenda beyond sharing a meal together.
Beyer’s
companions were the Pintos, a Latino family of five with varying
immigration statuses who live in suburban Virginia. Borrowing an
immigrant advocate’s house on this night, the family
passed around various take-out platter with fajita ingredients around
the table of six, no cell phones in sight, eager and nervous to dine
with Beyer. They wanted to make clear to him that their lives could be
upended by a knock on the door from federal immigration
authorities.
Palpable
tension hung over the meal as the family explained that their youngest
son, 8-year-old Christian, is the only family member with U.S. citizenship. Christian could be the only one
left in the country if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
agency officials came to the Pinto home with final deportation orders.
The
conversation broke into natural laughter with Christian leading many of
the jokes about hoverboards, video games, planets — all topics on which
he was an expert. But even he stopped smiling
and began pushing around the food on his plate when his father, Jerry
Pinto Sr., told the congressman about his journey across the southern
U.S. border in 2004 in search of better economic opportunities for his
family. Now he’s a construction worker — but
he lives his life cautiously, afraid of getting pulled over by local
law enforcement who may choose to turn him over to the federal
immigration agency. His wife is in a similar boat, living in fear of
being reported to immigration officials.
“It’s
gotta be hard for you because you’re hiding all the time,” Beyer said
after the family shared their story. “That’s a long time for you to be
in legal limbo.”
Since
they arrived a decade ago, the Pintos have had more opportunities in
the United States. Twenty-two-year-old Ambar was able to pay for a
college education after she was granted temporary
legal presence under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which allows some qualified undocumented
immigrants like herself to receive temporary work authorization and
deportation reprieve. Her brother, 15-year-old Jerry
Jr., will soon follow suit once he qualifies for the initiative next
year.
The
dinner, sponsored by the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights,
allowed the Pinto family to highlight how they could contribute more to
American society if the president’s executive
action on immigration formally announced in November 2014 were allowed
to take place.
That
two-part plan — including an update to DACA and the implementation of a
similar initiative known as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Residents (DAPA) — was Obama’s
signature executive action on immigration during a time of
congressional inaction on a permanent immigration reform bill.
But
soon after Obama announced the DAPA initiative, a group of
Republican-led states filed suit to challenge the president’s authority
to take this action, halting plans for people like the
Pinto family to live in the country without the constant fear of
deportation. A Texas judge issued an injunction last year, blocking the
government from implementing DAPA and DACA, and the case made its way to
the country’s highest court. Oral arguments in
U.S. vs. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court case that could impact millions
of families like the Pintos, are set for later this month.
The
Pinto family is hoping that the Supreme Court will uphold the executive
actions, ensuring that their family can stay together.
“If
my parents were in deportation proceedings, my family would completely
break apart,” Ambar told ThinkProgress, her eyes welling up with tears.
“If it was my dad, I would be the one responsible
to sustain my family because my mom doesn’t have access to a driver’s
license and she works from time to time. I don’t know what would happen
to my brothers. It’s important that we have DAPA so that my parents
won’t be deported for at least two years.”
The
Pintos are also wary of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump,
who has built his campaign on anti-immigrant rhetoric and has called
for the deportation of the country’s entire
undocumented population.
“If
Donald Trump wins, I’m glad I have a passport,” Christian told the
congressman, explaining that he would have to visit his parents in Latin
America after they got deported.
Like
Christian, an estimated 4.5 million U.S. citizens have at least one
undocumented parent. Those family connections aren’t enough to keep them
together. More than a half-million immigrant
parents of U.S. citizen children were deported between 2009 and 2013,
an Urban Institute study found. Studies show that the deportation of at
least one parent can inflict lasting trauma on children. Children also
often go hungry when they lose their parents.
Although
Beyer is supportive of immigration reform, and the Pintos didn’t need
to change his mind on the subject, the congressman does hope that the
dinner could model a way forward for other
politicians who support mass deportation. He thinks anti-immigrant
politicians should follow in his footsteps and spend some time with
immigrant families.
“I
would say that they just don’t understand the problem,” Beyer told
ThinkProgress after the dinner. “It shows no compassion at all. As with
this family, the youngest is a U.S. citizen born
here. Another one has deferred action status. The parents have no
papers. And yet we don’t want to break them into three or four different
pieces, or even two pieces.”
Beyer
added that the young undocumented immigrants that he’s met in his
district are “indistinguishable from my children, my nieces and nephews
who were born in this country.”
“We
make this false differentiation that because they weren’t born here,
their parents weren’t born here, that they’re not as American as you and
I,” Beyer said.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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