Professor Holly Cooper on President Obama’s Immigration Initiatives
My very first day in immigration court as a young lawyer, an Indian man in full shackles fell to his knees and begged me to help him. I reviewed his paperwork with an analytical eye and hoped that law school had prepared me to advise him. He had a rare legal remedy available to him, and I explained to him what he needed to tell the judge (he was defending himself in pro se). The next five men I interviewed were not so fortunate and none had any defense to deportation. Chained together, they each spoke in turn to the judge—only one was not deported. I discovered the power of knowledge and that law could be arbitrary in who it assisted and who it condemned.
When Obama’s new executive order was released, one of my friends told me that when he discovered he was covered under the order, he felt as though he had beat stage four cancer. He was too old for the first round of DACA, and had felt the sting of disappointment after the first executive order. Yet now he was finally free. It was the little things like the dignity of being able to drive a woman on a date—to the larger issue of having a legal identity that made him feel an incredible release.
My mind spun in a different direction, and I began thinking of everyone who could have benefited, but who had already been deported. I thought of the wreckage of so many lives that could have been avoided. One of my clients—who had come to the USA as a toddler—told me that after he was deported, he felt like a stateless ghost untethered to his native land of Jamaica. He pined for his children every day across the Caribbean ocean. Like an uncelebrated Odysseus, he crossed the seas multiple times to reunite with his family. He never succeeded—arrested and deported again and again. He told me he would keep trying to reenter the USA until he died. In the USA were his life, his children, and everything that made life worth living.
Just as the executive order is progress, it is also a reminder of our nation’s past. A tribute to the sacrifices immigrants in our nation made to reach this breaking point. The resistance and the swelling of discontent—all brought to its boiling point. It is a time of celebration and mourning. But also a time of hope—hope that the irrepressible voices of immigrants are finally being heard. And above all Obama’s order is a dare—a dare to Congress to retract rather than advance the rights and dignity of immigrants.
Immigration Law Clinic