The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpitude?”
Most Americans likely have no idea that getting a green card requires answering questions such as these. Lending further interest and significance here is that certain politicians who are more associated with an strict anti-immigration policy of some sort would likely not be able to answer that last question truthfully themselves. As for the Communist Party question, not only does it seem woefully outdated, but it has never—at any time—been illegal to belong to the Communist Party. Raising the question: why is it even a question?
The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children. Ethically, that answer was more than questionable. In legal terms, it was a kind of backdoor escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front doors.
Tell Me How It Ends was published in 2017 and the section subtitled “Court” details a time period between the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2015. That is roughly around four years before the draconian child/parent separation policy exploded into one of the series of scandals marking the first two years of the Trump administration. In this section, the author analyzes how the groundwork for front-page scandal revealing children being held in cages was laid long before Trump even came to power. She will eventually place the turning point in immigration policy regarding children that led to the situation finally coming to the attention of mainstream America directly at the door of the White House when it was occupied by another Republican: George W. Bush.
This amendment was Bush’s last gift to American immigration law in his vast legacy of chingaderas, in urban Mexican slang, or nasty-shitty policies, in approximate English translation.
The final act of chingaderas to which the author refers is the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush near the very end of his term in office. This amendment allows children from countries bordering America to be deported even in the absence of any formal court proceeding; a practice which she terms irrational and absurd because it allows any Border Patrol agent to essentially make the decision to deport any underage Mexican immigrant without sufficient evidence that any crime has been committed or the existence of an intent to do so.
Why did you come to the United States? “I don’t know.”
How did you travel here? “A man brought us.”
A coyote? “No, a man.”
And where did you cross the border? “I don’t know.”
Texas? Arizona? “Yes! Texas Arizona.”
The author relates a story that her own young daughter has become almost obsessed with hearing because she wants to know how it ends. It is a story from her time working in the immigration court system. In that job she was charged with asking such questions to young children who could not speak English since she herself is multilingual. The saddest element here is that this exchange is not unique, but merely another day in the immigration system in America. Worst of all: she can't tell her daughter how it actually ends because she really doesn't know.
