Up Against the Wall. Peter Laufer
Europe and China. You have to pay a lot of money, but now there’s somebody that’s able to get you here.
Hines and her students visit Texas lockups where undocumented migrants are held during deportation proceedings. They look for prisoners who might benefit from legal representation and they offer their services. It’s a scatter-shot approach to social work, looking for the mostly destitute migrants picked up by the Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies. But it’s better than nothing in a judicial system packed with potential clients where only a few independent lawyers are available to represent them pro bono.
“If people happened to be brought in that day and their luck was good, they would get us as their lawyers,” Hines says about her periodic visits to jails and prisons.
Just by chance we happened to find someone who was on that truck trailer. What was really shocking to me was that it was discovered just after the one in Victoria. The second one was called Operation Pick Axe by investigators. I said to my client, “Didn’t you hear about the truck before? How could you have gotten on this truck?” My client told me one of the smugglers said, “Don’t worry. Here’s a pick axe. If there are any problems, just bang on the cab and I’ll hear you.” That’s why investigators named it Operation Pick Axe.
Hines’s client, intent on finding work north of the border, climbed aboard. “It’s very sobering to me to think about how desperate people are.”
Over her long career Hines has watched as people smuggling along the Mexican border has become big sophisticated business. Much of it used to be informal. An experienced border crosser would help his friends and family cross to El Norte and maybe take some money for his trouble. When others in his village heard of the successful trip, they’d ask for help and offer to pay him a fee. Today, the smuggling is professional and expensive. “All of a sudden it got taken over by the cartels, the gangs,” says Hines.
In Arizona immigrants are being held as hostage between one warring smuggling gang and the other. In the 1980s it was unheard of that that would be going on. It’s like drug wars—trafficking in persons—and it is very, very lucrative. That’s the reason it’s moved into boxcars and trucks. There’s just so much more human smuggling on a much larger scale. There’s just been a really notable shift in the way people come. It used to be you just paid some little smuggler right at the border a couple hundred bucks. But it’s not like that anymore.
Hines worked to get her trailer victim legal status in the United States based on the suffering experienced crossing the border and then being herded into another potential death truck. The U.S. government does allow for sanctuary as a humanitarian gesture when a border crosser suffers extreme trauma en route. License to stay in the United States is also offered when prosecutors feel confident that the migrant can offer valuable testimony against traffickers.
Working with undocumented migrants, teaching law, living along the extended border—all add to Barbara Hines’s conviction that the current immigration laws are a travesty. “Unless we’re going to put up the Berlin Wall,” she said long before Donald Trump’s campaign to do so,
and as long as people are starving and can’t feed their kids and want a better life, people are going to keep coming. All these really, really strict immigration laws do is just create a population of more and more undocumented people. One of the ironic things about 9/11 is that there is a much stronger argument now to say why would you want this entire population that’s underground? Aren’t we supposed to know who’s here so we can be looking for the real terrorists? The policy is a failure. Increased enforcement on the border hasn’t stopped the flow. All it’s done is made the price much higher, because what happens now is immigrants are pushed out into the desert because of the increased enforcement in the urban areas. So there’s a greater risk to life—but it hasn’t stopped people from coming.
Hines believes the United States must at least adopt some sort of temporary worker program to cover the millions of undocumented laborers north of the border.
We make you risk your life to get over here. You may die in the desert. But once you get here, we’d love to have you. That’s what’s so ridiculous about this policy. It’s not that once you get across the desert nobody will hire you. People are dying to hire you. I don’t think there’s any workable solution unless we look at why people immigrate.
Most people come north from Mexico for work and family. Until the 1986 immigration law was passed by Congress it was not against the law to hire undocumented immigrants. But after 1986 employers were subject to fines for failing to determine the legal status of their workers. That policy is a failure. Authorities cannot begin to check all places of employment, and workers are clever about obtaining false documents once they are safely north of the border. Barbara Hines says pressure from industry put a stop to initial attempts to enforce the new law targeting employers.
“There was a lot of political pressure,” Hines says about Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) raids on the meatpacking industry in the Midwest back in the early 1990s. “The meatpacking industry and their senators and representatives put a lot of pressure on the government to stop doing this. They said, ‘We need people. Leave us alone.’ The authorities backed off on employer sanctions.” She says the raids, and the threat of more that exists as long as the employer sanctions law remains on the books, merely developed a new industry. “It spawned an interest in fake documents. You just go to a flea market and, for fifteen dollars you buy your fake Green Card. Employers are not an immigration expert. They can’t know whether this is a fake card or a real card.”
Workplace raids returned with a vengeance during the publicity-seeking Trump administration. These periodic police actions grabbed headlines while traumatizing families, businesses and communities. But such raids are a policy failure: the vast number of undocumented workers fueling the American economy means authorities wear pragmatic blinders.
Any improvement would please Barbara Hines. “I don’t like to have to tell my clients, ‘No, you cannot go to your father’s funeral. No, you cannot go home to see your mother before she dies […]. Well, you can go home—but you can’t get back.’ I’m sure my clients would be willing to have any temporary worker permit that would allow them to cross the border and not have to come back through the desert or the river.”
“Right now, you’re spending all of your resources patrolling the borders for most people who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. Sometimes I feel sorry for this agency,” she says about the Department of Homeland Security and their impossible task of securing the border. “Although I have spent most of my life suing this agency, I kind of feel sorry for them.”
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