If you weren’t moved by our June 28 story about a woman named Socorro, perhaps you have a hole in your soul. Until a few days ago, Socorro and her family had lived and worked in the United States for 11 years. Happily, peacefully, and productively. But orders from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ended all that. Though Socorro’s oldest children have grown up here and her youngest are U.S. citizens, all of them are now in Mexico — a foreign country to her kids, who struggle to even understand the language.
Socorro and her husband had sought asylum in the U.S. because rampant kidnappings and death threats in Mexico had made life dangerous and unbearable. We agreed to not disclose her full name to help protect her family’s safety. “I have worked, I didn’t have tickets, I didn’t have problems,” she told our reporters. “We wanted to do things legally.” But ICE doesn’t care — they have quotas to meet.
The Escalating Enforcement and Quota System
The White House is demanding that ICE’s agents — who routinely wear masks, show no ID, and have no warrants — round up 3,000 people a day as if they were cattle. That’s up from their 1,000-a-day target, which was ramped up after a recent rant by Stephen Miller, the administration official who’s considered the architect of President Donald Trump’s stark immigration agenda.
Whether you have any compassion for people like Socorro, or take seriously the welcome to immigrants that’s on the Statue of Liberty, it should be obvious that as a practical matter, Trump’s policy is absurdly futile. Hunting down immigrants, disregarding their dignity and their legal rights, and then hurling them out of the country — perhaps to a dangerous place that isn’t even their country of origin — is no solution.
Financial and Moral Implications
Adding billions of dollars to our federal budget deficit to hire more agents and build pointlessly punitive detention centers, like Florida’s ghoulish “Alligator Alcatraz,” is not a sustainable solution. And that laughable “big, beautiful wall” that Mexico was supposedly going to pay for isn’t exactly panning out, either.
The sorry truth is that coming up with fair and achievable national immigration standards has just been too much for anybody in Congress or the White House for the past few generations. No one wants to risk losing votes by proposing or supporting anything of substance. As a result, immigration policy has been shaped by default — reactively, haphazardly, and inadvertently.
The Call for Legislative Action
Now someone — the president — has crashed in like a bull in a china closet, and whether anyone in Congress agrees with his direction or not, they have no realistic alternatives to offer. Suddenly we’re off on a heartless wild goose chase. It’s long past time for members of Congress (yes, we’re looking at you, Dan Newhouse) whose districts are bearing the harshest consequences of this runaway immigration enforcement caper to stand up straight. Get to work finding consensus on some coherent policies that offer safe, sane pathways to citizenship.
The rest of us can help by not assuming that all immigrants are terrorists, rapists, thieves, or gang members. Accepting that our businesses sorely need immigrants, who help our community by being customers as well as employees. Above all, back up the promise of that “American Dream” we all love to invoke.
Preserving the American Dream
When even the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship is on the line, there’s no telling how far afield this administration will pull us. By mercilessly chasing off hardworking neighbors like Socorro and her family, we don’t just trash the values that have guided this country for 249 years now, we weaken our own communities — economically, culturally, morally. Nobody with an intact soul wants to be part of an America like that.
Yakima Herald-Republic opinion section glossary: Editorials reflect the opinion of the newspaper’s editorial board and are meant to offer perspective, raise questions, or advocate for change. Though grounded in fact, editorials express opinions and are intended to spark thought and discussion. Opinion columns represent the personal views of the writer, not the position of the newspaper. While news articles aim to present facts without bias, opinion columns offer fact-based individual perspectives.
