Immigrants' Rights are Human Rights

First they came for the immigrants ....

[I’m starting a new blog on Substack! To begin with, I’m importing some pieces I’ve previously posted elsewhere. This was originally posted on LinkedIn on April 27, 2023.]

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[April 27, 2023]: Coming down off the high of the successful Washington DC premiere of Lᴀs Aʙᴏɢᴀᴅᴀs last night, I am reminded of the last time I traveled from New York to Washington, DC.

It was October of 2016, and I took the train from Penn Station to Union Station to participate in a meeting with White House officials. For the previous two years, I had been part of a coalition of nonprofit organizations and law firms that had been meeting—under the able leadership on the advocates’ side of Eleanor Acer and Jenny Rizzo-Choi of Human Rights First—with Obama administration officials tasked with managing the influx of migrant families and unaccompanied minors that had surged to record numbers starting in 2014.

The two sides did not always agree on what was really happening on the ground, and discussions were sometimes tense. But I never doubted the essential good will of the government players in the room.

I tell this story not to toot my own horn about having been invited to the White House. (Our meetings actually took place in the White House Conference Center, not the White House itself.) I tell it to convey what happened next. Typically, at the end of such meetings (which if I recall correctly usually occurred every 2-3 months), we would all agree on a date for the next meeting. This time, however, the administration officials were not ready to pick the next date. “We’ll be busy with the transition, and it’s hard to know what will be on our plates for the next few months,” said one of the White House representatives. “But we’ll touch base with you after Hillary is inaugurated and get these meetings on the agenda again.”

Famous last words.

Nobody in that room could even conceive of the possibility that Donald Trump would win the upcoming election. As we know, the world changed inexorably when that happened. In the world of immigration, the changes came swiftly, with President Trump announcing his infamous “Muslim ban” a mere week after assuming office.

The next four years of travel bans, and the dismantling of the refugee resettlement system, and cruel separations of migrant children from their parents, and inhumane policies that essentially closed the U.S.-Mexico border even to asylum seekers fleeing certain death in their home countries … all of this and more (including the devastating impact on immigration processes wrought by the mishandled COVID-19 pandemic) was left to the next administration to put right again.

So far, the Biden administration has failed to step up.

In a recent blog post prompted by a piece I wrote about Lᴀs Aʙᴏɢᴀᴅᴀs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Hon. Paul Wickham Schmidt wrote that “immigration attorneys are the front line defenders of American democracy.”  

The famous Martin Niemöller quote that begins with the words “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist” could just as well have started with “First they came for the immigrants….”  As Judge Schmidt writes, “As the Trump debacle demonstrated, when immigrants’ rights disappear, all other individual and personal rights in America are in the far-right’s sights! It doesn’t take much imagination (except, perhaps, for some so-called ‘centrist’ Dems) to see how the onslaught of anti-immigrant myths, rhetoric, and legislation by the GOP right has quickly shifted to hate bills targeting gays, transgender, women, Black History, teachers, voters, election officials, rational gun control, heck, even doctors, nurses, and established medical science[.]”

We made Lᴀs Aʙᴏɢᴀᴅᴀs not to get rich and famous, but to get a message out to the world: immigrants’ rights are human rights. The way our government treats immigrants is a touchstone for how it protects—or fails to protect—the rights of everyone. We ignore this fact at our peril.

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If you would like to show Lᴀs Aʙᴏɢᴀᴅᴀs in your community—at a school, library, law firm, nonprofit organization, or faith-based institution—please go to lasabogadasfilm.com and click on “Request a Screening.”