Immigration Laws and Reform

A neighbor driving by stopped to comment on how beautiful my forsythia had been this spring; it did give an amazing display, but I had nothing to do with it. My once colorful gardens have mostly fallen into disarray since my friend, Audrius Kazenas, was taken by ICE and I voiced my frustrations to her. She told me how her husband, a retired surgeon, had recently investigated some medicare fraud locally and had sent a letter to alert the authorities. He never heard back. She pointed out that the government doesn’t seem to be in the business of enforcing the law these days and if I expected to get them to I was wasting my time.

I’ve been trying to get them to do exactly that, if they did Audrius would be out now, but their only response has been to cover the tracks of the injustice that has been done to date and try even harder to get rid of Audrius as Audrius has turned into evidence - no evidence, no problem, right? And yet still I persist, only now more deliberately, now I keep records. Where before I sent out letters to one and sundry trusting that someone, somewhere would pick up on the information, look into it, and do the right thing, now I send letters by certified mail with a return receipt. I note the letter sent, date sent, to whom it was sent and the response or lack thereof so that there is a record of who is doing (or not doing) what. If I can not get justice, I can at least catalog the injustice and inaction for someone at a later date as I still firmly believe that at some point something will have to be done about the mess that is immigration enforcement today and when that does happen there will be an opportunity to hold those who abused their position of power accountable.

As my neighbor related her husband’s inability to find anyone interested in enforcing the law on medicare fraud I began to wonder: Is there some kind of law enforcement lottery that we don’t know about? I mean; if there’s something being done that is against the law - as in a felony, not just a civil code violation, is there some kind of lottery we are supposed to enter and if our number comes up we get some investigation, some justice; if it doesn’t, we’re left to fend for ourselves as best we can? Is that what our system of justice has turned into - you buy a number and hope it gets drawn?

But that can’t be - Audrius has just been caught in a broken system, everyone knows that, right? What we need is Comprehensive Immigration Reform, we need Congress to act - till then nothing can be done to fix this.

Are you sure? Have you looked at the law that is claimed to be broken, that the folks in D.C. claim is the cause of all of the horrors the immigrant community is living with now? Yeah, there are some quirks that could be smoothed out here and there, the law needs some tweaking, but the various solutions that have been proposed to fix what we have now looks to me like it is designed to take away even more of our rights and freedoms and the fixes seem to be mostly short-term - kinda takes us from the frying pan into the fire. And are the problems that so many of us are grappling with a problem of the law or of how that law is being enforced? - which is in many cases, illegally. How much of an improvement would there be if immigration enforcement were handled legally?

What would happen if people who have been here beyond 10 years who show that they are of good moral character were given an adjustment of status as allowed by the current law? That would cover a lot of Dreamers and they wouldn’t even have to face military service.

What would happen if family members were granted the hardship waivers (loosing a family member is most always a hardship) that are already allowable under the current law? There would be a lot fewer broken families crying themselves to sleep each night because one or more loved ones have been ripped away.

What would happen if ICE chose to accept the decisions of their own judges in matters of granting relief from deportation under the Convention Against Torture instead of continuing to relentlessly pursue the deportation of those people? There is nothing within the current law that mandates they prosecute torture cases to their last breath.

What would happen if we ran our detention units the way they are supposed to be run? By law, detention is not punishment and yet our detention units do not even come up to the legal standards for housing and caring for criminals who are most definitely being punished. What if detainees were dealt with in a way that really was not punishment, what if that law was actually followed?

Basically, what would happen if our government were to enforce the law without malice, if they were to follow the current law as it is written now? There is nothing in that current law that dictates this present draconian enforcement - nothing at all - so why is it being done? Are those who are claiming that nothing can be done to right these incredible civil and human rights injustices until Congress acts perhaps using CIR as a Trojan Horse to sneak in a few bits of liberty-crushing legislation that the American people would not accept otherwise? If not, why not just fix the part that is broken and start actually following the part that is not.

An end to the creative interpretations of immigration law on the part of DHS/ICE, an action that has created an ever increasing ability of the federal government to hound immigrants who have been living and working here for years while presenting no threat to this country, could go a long way to fixing this problem, and making a federal government agency obey and enforce the law without malicious intent is not the job of Congress. That lays squarely on the shoulders of whoever is sitting in the White House at the time. He claims he will not use his executive authority to ease the pain of the most innocent and vulnerable of victims of this system because “We are a nation of laws.” Maybe it is time to hold him and his administration to the letter of the law and demand that the law be obeyed by our own law enforcement agencies and upheld in good faith instead of causing as much pain and expense to the American people as possible relentlessly pursuing our least dangerous immigrants. If we can not get even that . . . Well, what sort of government is that?!