Another American Caught Up In Immigration Hell

I have made it well known that the basic premise of my book, “The Dishwasher’s Son” is about an American teenager being deported from the US under our extraordinarily lax and dysfunctional Immigration system. In the dedication to that book, I also mentioned this has happened Approximately 20,000 times since 2003. Just today, I read a report from GQ magazine that the

Border Patrol Has Kept a Teenage U.S. Citizen Locked Up for Nearly a Month.

“Customs and Border Protection (CPB) stopped two brothers at a checkpoint in Texas on June 27. The younger one, Marlon Galicia, was born in Mexico and entered the U.S. illegally; the older one, 18-year-old Francisco Erwin Galicia, was born in Dallas. CBP took both brothers into custody.”

Erwin Galicia had a wallet-sized copy of his birth certificate, his Social Security card, and a Texas ID that’s only available to citizens with Social Security numbers, on his person at the time of the arrest.

Now, whenever a specific portion of our society finds it necessary to carry around all of this identification on their person wherever they go, just to keep from being arrested, that should be a red flag for everyone to see. This is America, not a Nazi-occupied country.

No community of Americans should feel the need to carry around this much ID just to prove they are here legally. As many of us already know, if you carry this much identification around with you at all times, there is a good chance you will become the victim of identity theft. If Erwin were to be robbed, someone could not only steal his money, watch, cell phone, car, whatever– they could also open credit cards, buy items online, and many commit many other crimes in his name. This is the whole reason none of us carry around our Social Security numbers, birth certificates around with us. It is just too easy for someone to steal our identity, and then we would be in a form of hell that can take years to clean up. The fact that this American citizen felt the need to do this just to protect his American identification is just too sad to witness if it weren’t for the fact that even carrying all this ID didn’t help him. He still is in custody for something he isn’t capable of committing. a

The Republican party has already shown its true anti-immigration colors after years of rebuffing any and all attempts to repair our broken immigration system, and, most recently, by making asylum claims practically illegal and after yesterdays announcement of making stipulated removal a nationwide procedure, instead of just along a 100 miles of the US/Mexico border. This change also enables low-level officials to decide if someone should be deported and give them the ability to proceed with deportation immediately.

When I think about reading the news about several CBP facebook groups, from the very people our nation has entrusted to carry out our immigration policies, that was full of anti-immigrant messages and photos, and then hearing about the stipulated removal changes and then reading about this incident of an American citizen getting caught up in the anti-immigration hysteria, I had to ask myself,

“is this improving our immigration system, or making it worse?”

One thing is for certain: when the bottom of this garbage can full of ideas comes off, we will be left with a huge mess and Donald Trump will be blaming the Democrats for the problem as well as the lives that will be broken and lost.