IT WAS APRIL 2017, just a couple of months into the Trump era, and our family was at our parish’s Easter vigil—a three-hour-plus Saturday night service that begins with a bonfire and includes the baptism and confirmation of those who’ve spent the last year preparing to enter the church. Our parish has one of the largest Hispanic communities in the area, so our Easter vigils are always bilingual.
By the time we distributed communion, it was around 11 p.m., and as I watched the procession of my Catholic neighbors go by, I was struck by the sight of the brown-skinned men, husbands and fathers in their 20s and 30s, coming down the aisle with sleeping babies cradled tenderly in their arms. They were contradictions to the president’s words: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.”
The recent Netflix documentary series Living Undocumented follows eight families through all nine circles of U.S. immigration hell. The immigrants in the series are from Honduras, Mexico, Colombia, Laos, Mauritania, and Israel. But all of them, even the Laotian guy who picked up a drug felony in his troubled youth, are people any sane country would welcome. And our government is doing everything it can to send them away.
The series’ footage ranges from gut-wrenching to enraging. Kids talk about the pressures on their parents. Parents share fears for their kids. And American friends stand by, embarrassed at their government’s actions, and try to be supportive. Only occasionally is the fly-on-the-wall drama of the series interrupted, so we can hear an immigration lawyer explain the relevant regulations, or see Jeff Sessions announce a policy that can be summed up as deterrence-via-cruelty.
I admit that I’ve always found the slogan “Abolish ICE!”—meaning U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement—to be, at best, counterproductive, especially if it implies that the country shouldn’t have border laws of some sort and some agency to enforce them. But I now at least see where the emotion behind the slogan originates. At one point in Living Undocumented, we see a supremely arrogant ICE officer trick a young immigrant into a situation where he could be detained, then physically assault the immigrant’s attorney.
The statistics clearly show that these families are much more representative than the president’s “bad hombres.” Living Undocumented is powerful evidence that our government, on our behalf, is deliberately inflicting torment on people whose greatest crime was to believe in the American dream.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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