From the Crimmigration Blog: Cesar Cuauhtémoc García Hernández & Linus Chan on Trump
Over at the Crimmigration blog, Cesar Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Linus Chan have shared their reflections on how the election of Donald Trump will likely devastate immigrant communities across the country.
Hernandez reflects on how the changes brought by the Administration will shape his approach to teaching and scholarship:
As a teacher, I rededicate myself to training my students in the righteousness of justice. Terrorizing families is not just, even if it happens with due process. Demonizing migrants is not just, even if it turns on the stigma of a conviction meted out by a legal proceeding. When the towering jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,” what he meant was that there is nothing inherently compelling about the law. The law is what the community to which legislators are accountable demand that it be. In short, the law is malleable. It will move in the direction that lawyers, judges, legislators, and activists push it. I will help my students learn the skills they need to push our nation’s moral compass toward an appreciation of our shared humanity.
As a scholar, I take seriously the responsibility to unearth the human consequences of the legal system. I take seriously the need to “look to the bottom,” as Mari Matsuda urged years ago, for guidance about where to direct my intellectual energies. I am fully aware that my position at an institution that supports the production of knowledge means that I am afforded the opportunity to “trade in ideas in their vital bearing on a wider political culture,” to borrow from bell hooks. I know that I am provided the luxury of resources most can’t imagine. This is not new. But in a historical moment when the dark clouds of xenophobia are moving from their perennial perch on the mountaintop and into the valley, I must recommit to scholarship that is engaged with the hard realities of a government ready to unleash its coercive powers.
Chan offers thoughts on concrete ways that concerned individuals can advocate and respond on behalf of immigrants:
1) If you are in a blue state and your state doesn’t yet allow for drivers’ licenses for the undocumented, now is the time to get the state legislature to do it. Unlicensed driving is one of the easiest ways to get put into the removal system.
2) Obviously we need more lawyers for removal hearings. We should push cities to follow the New York City model that provides an appointed counsel system for all migrants in removal proceedings. If we can’t get universal legal coverage, then, as much as I hate drawing lines to exclude noncitizens with criminal records like the people I regularly represent, let’s start with the most sympathetic migrants: push for lawyers for children, the mentally ill, and asylum seekers. We can also look to Alameda County, California and the Bronx Defenders to get public defender organizations to also represent their clients in immigration court hearings.
3) We can create bond funds. Non-detained folks have cases lasting more than two or three years and we may even get that number up over four if the Trump Administration does increase immigration law enforcement. Making bond available and affordable will go a long way to protect migrants’ families from being torn apart and into crisis-even if in the end they cannot stay.
4) We can find more criminal attorneys to take post-conviction cases, especially ones that may seem benign but actually carry serious immigration consequences. Trump has already used the term “criminals” so now is the time to try and find ways to clean your record.
-JKoh