Following his decisive win two days ago, the President Elect has intensified his campaign pledge to conduct a “mass deportation” of the estimated 11 million immigrants who are living in the U.S. without authorization. He promised to do something similar the last time he was in the White House, but he was unable to deliver. The headlines are worrying and suggest that this time could be very different with fewer legal obstacles and a judicial landscape more favorable to his agenda.
Deportation has made the news before. In 1948, a plane chartered by United States Immigration Services crashed in Los Gatos, California, killing all 32 people aboard including 28 Mexican farmworkers. who were being deported to Mexico after working in the Bracero program, a World War II program created to address an agricultural labor shortage in the U.S.
A temporary guest worker program, it brought over 4.5 million Mexican workers to the United States between 1942 and 1964, and although there were protocols in place to protect the workers, the Braceros were nonetheless subjected to harsh conditions, enduring an abusive registration process that included strip searches and exposure to deadly chemicals used to fumigate them for lice. Harvesting the nation’s asparagus, lemons, lettuce, and tomatoes, the Braceros were paid a meager 30 cents an hour and charged for food and lodging. When they attempted to socialize, they often faced discrimination, being refused service in restaurants or segregated from white customers – “no dogs or Mexicans.” The threat of deportation was always there; they were dispensable and it was easy for employers to replace them with new braceros who were willing to work for low wages.
Media stories about the Los Gatos plane crash omitted the names of the 28 Mexican Braceros, referring to them only as deportees. Their remains were buried in a mass grave in Fresno while the bodies of the pilot, flight attendants, and immigration agent—all white—were sent home to be laid to rest by their loved ones.
Deeply affected by the media’s indifference to these workers and their families, singer Woody Guthrie wrote a poem, Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee). It is an unflinching indictment of how Americans can so easily disregard a tragedy of this magnitude when the deceased don’t look like them. By giving the workers symbolic names, Guthrie’s poem provided some measure of dignity for them:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees” . . .Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves . . .
Memorialized in lyrics that are still being sung seven decades later by the likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, the 28 Mexican workers would remain anonymous until Tim Z Hernandez, the son of migrant farmworkers and a professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, embarked on a six-year search to identify the “deportees,” find their families, and chronicle their lives in his book All They Will Call You. Since 2010, he has gathered hundreds of documents, photographs, and remembrances of the Los Gatos accident and continues to locate surviving family members. At the same time, his work recognizes the contributions of immigrants to the United States, since long before and long after the Bracero Program and illustrates the devastating impact of deportation, how it strips immigrants of their dignity and their humanity, separating families, and leaving behind a long trail of trauma.
The passage of Proposition 134 : Secure the Border Act in Arizona this week has renewed fears of deportation among the state’s immigrant community, where 188,000 US citizen children are living in mixed-immigration families. I know some of these families from my time working as a principal in Phoenix. Following Tuesday’s election results, I opened Facebook Messenger to find a message from a former student. Although I haven’t seen her since 2008, I knew immediately why she was reaching out, and it broke my heart.
A DACA recipient, she attended my early college high school when Proposition 300 passed in Arizona, making students who were not US citizens or permanent residents and those lacking legal status ineligible for in-state tuition and federal and state financial aid. The referendum was approved with 72 percent of votes in November 2006, leaving little doubt about where most Arizona voters stood on immigration. That was the tip of the iceberg, with anti-immigrant sentiment reaching its peak in in 2010 with SB1070, the “show me your papers” law that required law enforcement to ask for proof of legal status if they suspected someone was undocumented. Racial profiling by any other name, it also gave police the authority to arrest, without a warrant, those they deemed “deportable.” Later that same year, a law subsequently ruled unconstitutional, banned a Mexican-American ethnic studies program in the Tucson school district.
The Grand Canyon State was becoming “ground zero” in the war on immigration. My students, undocumented with no way of becoming documented that didn’t require them to leave the only home they had ever known, were the collateral damage. They were scared every day that they or someone in their families would be arrested on the way home from school and deported. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigrant policy brought in by Barack Obama, would subsequently offer protections from deportation and legal work permits, but temporarily. Today, DACA is under threat in court, with an ongoing legal challenge led by Texas that has already resulted in a freeze on the granting of DACA initial requests. Trump, who tried to dismantle it during his previous term in the White House, has promised to end the DACA program.
I found out from my student that she has been living her life in two-year increments as required by DACA and from court decision to court decision. Now with another Trump presidency on the horizon, she is exploring her options, one of which was to reach out to her old high school principal to ask about where I live in Mexico and if it’s a nice area. She’s anticipating the worst. It’s understandable. It’s so unfair.
It is with her and other immigrants on mind, that Aliento‘s Founder and CEO, Reyna Montoya, released the following statement on Tuesday night:
President-elect Donald Trump promised one day to invoke the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 to conduct the largest deportation of long-term undocumented Arizonans and their families. Sadly, in Arizona, we don’t have to imagine how mass deportations will occur. During the SB 1070 years and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, we saw police officers conducting immigration checkpoints outside of schools and churches. Nurses and doctors were forced to question patients’ immigration status. Our hearts and minds are with the 250,000 undocumented Arizonans that built lives, homes, and communities in Arizona for decades.
These Arizonans along with millions of undocumented immigrants across the country have US citizens depending on them, households that cannot function without them, and families that are traumatized by the fear of them being swept away—a prospect that may become a reality. Even if President Elect Trump does not follow through on his mass deportation agenda, his rhetoric has stoked fear and anxiety in immigrant communities across the country, especially in places like Arizona. Immigrants who are victims of crime may be less likely to report it to law enforcement, for fear of being deported. They may be less likely to ask social services for the help they need. Children of undocumented students may stop going to school because of the threat of being separated from their families.
Like the vulnerable Braceros before them, they are more than just a number. They have hopes and dreams and people who love them. They matter.
And all we will call them is “deportees.”
