The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

ask him why he omitted all mentions of Trump in the speech. “I didn’t want to mention that guy,” he says. “I wanted to make them feel safe.”

The first responders were firemen and EMT workers. The second responders were undocumented immigrants.

ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia.

The Secure Communities program would require local police to share information with Homeland Security. Immigration detention centers began to be managed by private prison groups.

“Yes, we were heroes, but the dangers of the job were hidden from us so that we could work. If they had put up a sign at the site listing what we could come to face, we wouldn’t have gone in.”

As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram.

One of the bogeymen of the right, in this country or any Western country, is the image of the sick immigrant—the supposed strain on the healthcare system, the burden on emergency rooms and taxpayers. I cannot overstate how little interest I have in changing the minds of people who might believe this—I’d honestly rather swallow a razor blade than be expected to change the mind of a xenophobe. But I’m curious about the bogeyman so I thought to explore it.

Stories in the news often end at the deportation, at the airport scene. But each deportation means a shattered family, a marriage ending, a custody battle, children who overnight go from being raised by two parents to one parent with a single income, children who become orphans in foster care.

But as an undocumented immigrant, everything we do is technically against the law. We’re illegal. Many of us are indigenous in part or whole and do not believe borders should exist at all. I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an “unjust law” as being “out of harmony with the moral law.” And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?

Americans treat their pets better than they treat immigrants,

This all changed recently, when reports began circulating that ICE was arresting undocumented parents and spouses of American citizens when they petitioned for green cards. Immigration lawyers began advising children, husbands, and wives against petitioning for them at all.