Trump rips a father from his family because he can. Shame on America for letting him.
Rochelle Riley, USA TODAY
The word isn’t deported. The word is exiled. No, the word is sentenced.
Jorge Garcia came to America as a child. He has lived in America for three decades, has worked and paid taxes and spent more than $125,000 trying to become a citizen like his wife and children. But America, the land of the free and home of the brave, the country that has welcomed immigrants since its inception, told him that he must go to Mexico — the land of his birth, but not the land of his life.
He stood at Detroit Metro Airport on the holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., watched over by Immigration and Customs Enforcement guards and angry supporters, and said goodbye as his 15-year-old daughter sobbed on his shoulder and his wife cried out his name. His son had few words. Jorge Garcia wasn't going home. He was being sentenced to prison in a foreign country away from family and friends. I couldn’t read Niraj Warikoo’s story about him without shedding tears.
Who could?
We know who could: the unfeeling elected officials who are in haste to make America their America: a place where Norwegians are welcome but Haitians aren’t, a place that tears children from their parents’ arms and parents from their crying children.
Jorge Garcia had never even had a traffic ticket. But Donald Trump has convinced Americans — you know, the ones who think they’re perfect, who think their children are perfect and whose idea of perfection doesn’t include diversity — that foreigners are bad for our country. So people like Jorge Garcia become victims.
Trump, who said last week that America should want immigrants from places like Norway rather than Haiti, has made his bigotry against immigrants known. And no case makes the heartbreaking truth clearer than this one.
Garcia, a 39-year-old landscaper who hasn’t lived in Mexico since he was 10, was brought to this country by an undocumented relative. He was deported simply because he was a target of bigoted policies hastily drawn. Now, his family will suffer while some people will cheer.
Garcia may be barred from entering the U.S. for at least 10 years, his wife told the Free Press.
That is the same as a prison sentence. And Jorge Garcia was Trumped to make a point.
Shame on us.
Shame on an America that would allow what the Republican Party and its leader are doing to the very fabric of our country.
How was Garcia able to remain in America so long? He had faced numerous court orders of removal since 2009, but President Barack Obama’s administration granted stays. The Obama administration knew the difference between a hardworking landscaper and a rapist or thug, a label Trump draped on most undocumented immigrants.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown acknowledges no such difference, treating hardworking family men like criminals. Oh, and who’s stepping in to take the landscaping job Garcia had, the one that some will claim belongs to someone Trump prefers? Perhaps a Norwegian who isn’t a professor or writer? I want to see the line for that job.
There have been many victims of the GOP’s bigoted push to make America look and be more like most of them: white, male, with money:
Poor people without health care.
Immigrants from countries that aren’t Norway.
Women.
Shame on us for allowing it to continue.
On the day America celebrated King, whose fight for people of all colors and economic levels got him killed, Trump kicked a family man out of his country to prove a point. And the GOP stood by and watched, or, in some cases, applauded.
They took a man from his family, his children, his American life, so they could say they did.
Diego Bonesatti, legal services director for Michigan United, one of the many agencies that is fighting to bring Garcia back home, said it best: "This is his home. This is the place he knows.”
Jorge Garcia just received a prison sentence, plain and simple, from people who should be ashamed, but who know no shame, from some who may go to prison themselves if there is any justice left in America by the time Trump tears it to shreds.
And as the fight to bring Jorge Garcia back home continues, America should weep.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by RBP
)
