Connections : A Series of Notes

• In the very beginning of the podcast, Bryan Stevenson talks about incarceration and how the court doesn’t much care about justice when it comes to race — they think it’s acceptable to put up all-white juries to represent majority black areas. I found myself thinking of immigration courts, and how kids, most of them unrepresented, have to defend themselves in front of adult judges. Even when it comes to processing adult immigrants, the judges are overwhelmed with cases and due process is too often compromised for the sake of speed. The judges/jury don’t look like or even truly understand the people standing in front of them.
• Stevenson states, “Because we’ve got children born to violent families, living in violent neighborhoods, going to violent schools. When they show up at four or five, they have trauma disorders that we’re not diagnosing or treating. When you’ve got a trauma disorder, what you need to do is make the child feel safe, but we do the opposite. We threaten them… And then we demonize these children” (A Perilous Path, 51). This is what we do to immigrant kids, too. They’re scared, and separated from their families, and often have no idea what is going on. Immigration officials need to make them feel safe and supported every step of the way, but instead they rush them through the court system, and hold them in caged-in facilities without enough food and water—or enough of a sense of safety.
• Stevenson states that when we consider our history of racial violence and lynching, questions about issues like the death penalty are no longer “Do people deserve to die for the crimes they have committed?” “The threshold question” then, he says, is “Do we deserve to kill?” I appreciate this, because it takes the pressure off the penalty itself and puts it back onto the people who created it. It contextualizes it. I’ve been in Ethics 101 classes where we talk about the death penalty with no mention of race or history, and often no case studies at all. The discussion doesn’t work in these classes. I thought this was simply because the question of “do people deserve to die for the crimes they have committed” had no footing to stand on. But I now realize that it is also the fact that this question itself is not the most pertinent one at hand. /// The most pertinent question at hand is: how can we look at our history and how our past injustices transform directly into new injustices (example: lynching to death penalty) without even a day’s rest — and still think that we are responsible, trustworthy, and unbiased enough to play God, to decide who lives and who is killed? There has been no interruption in violent racial injustices since this country began — and that is our real lack of footing to stand on. Without a truly just, accurate, and unbiased trial system, accompanied by a deep examination of our own history, how can we begin to think that we are justified in killing anyone? /// In the same vein, this question when related to immigration, becomes, “Do we deserve to deport?” It’s never “Do they deserve to avoid deportation?” It’s about us. We put these borders here. We made this very flawed, very racist immigration system the way it is. Do we deserve to deport? This question, when posed to a country founded and almost entirely populated by immigrants, sounds ridiculous.
• Immigrants, like black Americans, are linked to drugs, crime, and unrest, and portrayed as leeches on government services. Bryan Stevenson talks about, as a black person, carrying the weight of being perceived as dangerous and criminal. And I want to note that especially in the years since Trump was elected, Latinx (particularly Mexican) immigrants have been portrayed as rapists and dangerous murderers, who bring drugs and crime to the United States. In recent years, undocumented immigrants have begun to be considered criminals for committing the misdemeanor crime (the equivalent to our running a red light) of staying in or entering the U.S. without documentation. The Trump Administration has also implemented a “zero-tolerance” policy, under which the Department of Justice can criminally prosecute all suspected illegal border-crossers for illegal entry.
• Stevenson states, “So many people were lynched just because they wanted to be free… They wanted better pay… Preachers were lynched because they spoke about freedom.” This triggered thoughts about how immigrants come to this country to pursue a “better life” — which often, I think, includes the pursuit of freedom (whatever that means) — and instead encountered the hell that is the process of immigrating to the United States.
• The legal immigration system rewards wealth, education, and family connections. Poor people lose — same as in the incarceration system. “Our criminal justice system treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent” (A Perilous Path, 69). In our immigration system, every step of the process costs money, requires a certain level of literacy to get through, and has hidden loopholes that only people with connections can get through. The same stands, within our criminal justice system.
• Immigration detention centers are, essentially, prisons. They’re under constant surveillance, and have holding cells, barbed wire fences, limited recreation, and solitary confinement, among many other things. The corporations that manage both prisons and detention facilities are the same: GEO Group, Core Civic, and Management and Training Corporation — and they all require the states in which they are located to arrest and imprison a center amount of people in their prison to make a profit.
• The way immigrants are treated like cattle in detention centers connects with both how bodies are shuttled around in the criminal justice system and how bodies were shuttled around during slavery. Particularly, I’m connecting inhumane family separation policies of today’s immigration climate to how families were separated when enslaved members of the family were sold off. Reading about how one of the main parts of Bryan Stevenson’s job is to protect and connect to the humanity inside men on death row — and how his ability to do so often means everything to the death row prisoners — made me realize how much this is lacking in all parts of the immigration process.

Some structural barriers that Latinx immigrants (such as the ones I work with at Canal Alliance) face include:

• The narrative that immigration displaces native workers and exacerbates racial and ethnic conflict. The narrative that immigrants are a drain on resources
• Language issues, which lead to issues finding work and education, and issues just getting around
• Many Latinx immigrants settle in neighborhoods affected by violence and poverty, adding to physical/mental health struggles
• Compounding this is the effects of unsteady, oppressive, and low-paid labor
• Separation from family and discrimination also take their tolls
• Income, food, housing, and healthcare insecurity. Status of documentation and “legality” regulates whether immigrants have access to jobs, food, housing, healthcare. Lack of access to public services and basic legal rights accompany this
• Fear and distrust of the government and institutions of their new country (“hard-to-count” communities of Marin are receipt of this)
• They live in a country in which their very identity is criminalized
• Specific to the Guatemalan ESL students at Canal: I learned that immigration courts often only have translators for the two most common languages they deal with: Spanish and Mandarin. Apparently, in the past five years, however, more and more immigrants have been coming to the U.S. from Central America speaking uncommon languages such as K’iche’, used by Mayan people in Guatemala. Last year it was the 12th most frequent language spoken in immigration court, just behind French. I hadn’t considered this as an extra barrier some Guatemalan immigrants might be dealing with.

But the ESL students I work with have a lot of internal resources already within them to help them deal with all of this stuff.

• I’m thinking particularly about how much all the students help each other out. For example, if Nicole asks one of the students to read a sentence aloud and they can’t do it immediately for whatever reason, someone else will jump in and read it for them. Oftentimes, the student who was originally called on is relieved and will do the same thing for their “savior” next time they need it.
• I didn’t experience this in my schooling, in part because America is a very individualistic, competitive society — and we encourage this in our school culture (fighting over who answers the question first/correctly, letting people who don’t know the answer just stand there and be lost because it makes you look better, etc.). People from other countries, for the most part, didn’t grow up with this mindset, and so I think they’re able to help each other out, share knowledge around, and work as a team better.
• These particular students, though, far beyond their social conditioning, are able to work as a team—to joke around and comfort each other. They’re able to collaborate in a way that serves the learning process very well.
• And Canal Alliance’s curriculum facilitates this, as well. A few weeks ago, our lesson was about different types of intelligence. Through this, we were able to address important things, such as the anxiety one student feels when he’s working the counter at his work (a restaurant, I think?). He talked about how it feels when customers ask questions in English like “How are you today?” and he knows the answer but panics. We each shared stories about dealing with this blanking feeling, even in our native languages, and we came up with some possible things he can try next time that might ease the pressure.
• This is a testament to how education and self-exploration can turn something like this from a structural barrier (a deficit) into a chance for really important transformation of one’s life.