Niemoller Redux: An Essay

1. First it was my neighbor
Last Memorial Day, my neighbor came across the street early in the morning and pounded on my door. She had never done that before. I was still in my pajamas. I thought she was going to complain about my barking dogs. No. She knew I was an immigration attorney, and she was coming to tell me her husband had been arrested. They had come to the house the night before and taken him away. They had two girls, one an infant, the other a hefty child named Angel who loved to ride her bike up and down the sidewalk. Mom, a U.S. citizen, worked as a receptionist in a medical clinic, where they loved her because she was bilingual. Dad, a Mexican, was a welder and brought home $16 an hour. They were making it.
Before they married, Dad had been a gangbanging teenager in California. He had a consensual sexual relationship with an underage girl, and when it turned sour, her mother called the police. He was convicted and sentenced to probation. Later he met his wife, moved to Michigan, and became a law-abiding, loving family man. I enjoyed watching them from my house, but we didn’t interact much. I remember once he tried to help find work for a Cuban client of mine, whom I had helped release from detention and who was renting a room from me. That must have been how the family knew I was a lawyer.
Of course, there was nothing I could do except explain to Mom how she could visit him in jail and where she could take his suitcase. He was an aggravated felon. He had no relief coming. Mom and the kids could move to Mexico, but he was not coming back.
Stories like these are a daily occurrence in my work. Unfortunately one becomes inured to the pain, or at least shuts it off as irrelevant and unhelpful. How many times I have said to my colleagues, give me a convicted felon in jail any time, over a sobbing wife (girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter) on the phone.
A neighbor, it turns out, is different, even a neighbor I hardly knew. For several weeks thereafter, I woke up every night about 3 a.m. thinking, the government came into my neighborhood while I was sleeping and took away a neighbor. Okay, I know he had an old (albeit hardly heinous) crime. Okay, I know it’s the law.
And yet I couldn’t help having a Martin Niemoller thought: I didn’t speak up, I didn’t speak up, I didn’t speak up. Who will speak up for me? Lynne Stewart? If she’s out of prison?
2. Then it was Sirak
During one of those 3 am’s, I also remembered an Ethiopian woman spitting out these words to me after her friend had been removed to Addis Ababa: “You Americans don’t care what’s happening to us. You don’t care because it’s not happening to you. And you won’t care until it does.” I doubt she even knew whose words she was channeling. Her friend, by the way, had never committed any crime; he had simply overstayed his visa. He had spent months and months in immigration detention while the government worked to secure him a travel document.
Sirak, for such was his Old Testament name, told me one day while I was visiting him in jail that another detainee, while exercising in the concrete yard which allowed sight of the sky straight above, but nothing else, had received a magnificent gift. A green leaf, out of nowhere, had blown down in front of him. Sirak said the man gingerly cupped the green leaf and dashed into the dayroom, where he went from table to table, letting everyone admire his treasure. Oh, Sirak said, the need to see something green became overwhelming! Then he let me in on his secret. If, while waiting to be allowed into the visiting room, you stood on your tiptoes and craned your head to the left as far as possible when the door was opened, you could catch a glimpse of a small tree out the lobby window.
When I left the jail that day, I made sure to find that tree, which I passed without noticing twice each visit. I found a scrawny little generic tree, stuck as an afterthought into a patch of cement.
How can you not think of the Gulags? And this is an ordinary county jail, not a Super Max facility bent on minimizing sensory stimulation. We keep overstays here, and asylum seekers, and border-crossers looking for work.
3. Not Quite Parallels
The whiffs of paranoia get stronger.
Jean Hatzfeld has written a book called Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, in which he lets a gang of genocidaires speak, from prison, about how they went out every day to their new job of human butchery. Hatzfeld does not interrupt their voices too often, but when he does, he tries to put the story into some historical perspective. For example, he compares the slaughter of the Hutus with the slaughter of the Jews, Roma, and other undesirables in the Holocaust. He cites Holocaust historians, particularly Raul Hilberg and his Destruction of the European Jews, who divide that event into four phases: humiliation and loss of rights; designation and marking; deportation and concentration; complete elimination. (The Rwandan genocide skipped directly from the first to the last stage).
No, of course I do not believe this country is out to eliminate, as in gas, cut, or starve, illegal immigrants. Of course, I do not believe that a genocide is being planned; my paranoia has not progressed that far. I do, however, believe this country is out to humiliate, designate and mark, deport and concentrate immigrants. I am not even sure this is arguable. Ask Lou Dobbs or Newt Gingrich. Theirs is a proud position.
An Investigations Officer from the Office of Inspector General told me several years ago that the government had planned a detention center in Arizona to house Iraqis, should they have expressed dissent following our invasion to topple Sadaam. He shook his head in wonderment that the government would have come such a short way from the Japanese internment camps.
I have no way to know whether what he told me is correct, but I believe him.
Where is the moral voice, saying how unconscionable are our parallels with the march toward Nazism? How we miss those reverberating tones of Dr. King, excoriating the “appalling silence of the good people” as much as the “hateful words and actions of the bad people.”
4. What can we do?
Besides the obvious. (Sanctuary churches, of course. Sanctuary cities.)
It wouldn’t take much, using perfectly legal means, to bring the system to a standstill. If you’ve ever been to immigration court on a Master Calendar day, you know what I mean. Master Calendars are for scheduling purposes and typically last only a few minutes. But if every person on the docket that day brought a significant number of people, say fifty US citizen volunteers, with them to observe, wordlessly, identification in hand, who didn’t mind, when the courtroom got filled, waiting in the waiting room, still quiet……..the Court would be seriously unnerved. If every person, even if totally without a remedy, were able to find an attorney who would file a Motion to Terminate Proceedings based on, let’s say, several of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Rights. Or the illegitimacy of the Immigration Court, bastard child of the DOJ. Or a combination thereof: Right #8, Right to remedy by competent tribunal. Or ask the judge to recuse her/himself if they were employed first by the Office of District Counsel, which many of them were. And so forth.
Of course, some will recoil in horror. What about the backlash? Well, so what? It can’t get much worse, legally speaking, for most of the people we serve. And this way, at least people will lose knowing they had fought the system in creative ways and helped expose its evils. And advocates could stop feeling powerless before the advancing juggernaut.
5. Unlikely allies?
Six or seven Spanish-speaking detainees are crammed into a small room in the jail, all having their initial Master Calendar hearing together, in front of a judge appearing via video. The deputy supervising them, unused to such an assignment, comes rushing out of the room after only a few minutes. “That’s not right what’s going on in there! That’s not right! They have no idea what’s happening to them!”
I smile sympathetically. “You’re watching due process at work.”
“That is not due process,” he snaps, missing my sarcasm.
The Border Patrol agent, quietly working at a computer processing the detainees he had just delivered to the jail, glanced up as the deputy continued to rail against the Court. “Well,” he mused, “that’s not really a judge in there, you know.”
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Originally published in the Guild Practitioner