My Boy Will Die of Sorrow by Efrén C. Olivares

Author:Efrén C. Olivares [C. Olivares, Efrén]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306847288
Publisher: Hachette
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Viviana’s turn of events was unlikely. Every year, thousands of people wishing to apply for asylum face a Credible Fear Interview; the vast majority do it alone, and most of them fail. In the last twenty years, some 45 percent of asylum applicants represented by a lawyer have won their asylum cases. For those facing the process alone, the success rate is barely over 10 percent. It is almost inevitable that, alone, they will fail. Viviana’s case was an anomaly, to say the least. After all she had lived through in Guatemala, traveling more than a thousand miles to get to Texas, and then having Border Patrol agents take Sandro away from her in McAllen, she had ultimately been “fortunate” to have a lawyer represent her at her CFI.

The NWIRP attorney who represented Viviana at her CFI also agreed to handle her bond application, to try to secure her release. Against all odds, the immigration judge (IJ) set a bond, and an anonymous donor came up with $13,000 to pay it. Thirteen thousand dollars. It still escapes me what notion of justice requires a person fleeing death threats and seeking refuge and protection to come up with that amount of money. What was that IJ thinking? Did he set that bond amount thinking that Viviana wouldn’t be able to pay it? If he considered Viviana not to be a flight risk or a threat to the community, why require her to pay any money at all? That bond amount certainly signaled a desire to keep her locked up, or more perversely, an attempt to make money off a widowed, destitute asylum seeker who had been begging to see her son for weeks. But again, the stars and volunteer attorneys and good Samaritans all lined up from McAllen to Seattle, and Viviana was released a few days later.

Most immigrants are not that fortunate. Thousands of Vivianas are deported every year, many to places where they will be harmed or killed, because our immigration system is designed to deport, not to protect. They are deported because every actor in the system—from Washington to McAllen—is doing their part to deport as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Every cog in the bureaucracy, from field agents to IJs, is pushing the deportation conveyor belt along, never mind if they are themselves the descendants of immigrants from another era. If the country’s doors were open when their parents and grandparents arrived in Ellis Island, they have been fiercely shut for the parents and grandparents arriving today at the Rio Grande. It may be different shores, but those showing up at our borders come for the same reasons that people have migrated to this land since before the country’s founding: to seek safety and opportunity. And why are the doors shut to them? It is not really because they come to take others’ jobs or pose a national security risk, as anti-immigrant hardliners would have us believe—those arguments have been made for years, always

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