The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization. Your immigration status shouldn’t cost you your life.
For Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, it didn’t matter that he was the father of three U.S. citizens, a longtime Houston resident, a decades-long construction worker, or that he wanted to follow the rules and posed no safety threat. Under the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, all that mattered was that Salgado was undocumented and Latino.
For Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, in Maine, maybe all that mattered was that he was Latino. According to immigration rights activists, the 26-year-old father in Maine had a social security number and was authorized to work in the United States. But ICE killed him too.
Two killings in one week are no coincidence.
Mass deportation was never going to happen without violence. And as the past 18 months have made abundantly clear, this was never about targeting “the worst of the worst.”
The only way to ensure that immigration enforcement supports public safety, instead of threatening it, is to fix the problems that have turned many longtime community members who pose no danger to their neighbors into “targets” of immigration enforcement. This means changing the laws and treating most immigration compliance as a civil matter.
For decades Congress has left millions of undocumented people like Salgado — law-abiding members of their communities in every practical sense — vulnerable to arrest and deportation by failing to provide a realistic way for them to comply with immigration law. And the Trump administration has taken advantage of that failure to justify its violent agenda.
People routinely ask why an undocumented person who has lived here for decades and poses no threat did not simply “get legal.” The assumption is that lawful status is available to people like Mr. Salgado, and that he is at fault because he declined to pursue it.
That is a key misunderstanding about how our immigration system works. In an overwhelming majority of cases, there is no option through which a longtime undocumented resident can come forward, comply with penalties for their civil violation and obtain legal status.
Even those who have been here for decades and who have U.S. citizen children cannot “fix their papers” without risking permanent or near-permanent banishment. For nearly all the 13 million people here without status, there is neither a line they can stand in nor an easy path to legal status. There is only a dead end.
Our country nonetheless depends on people like Salgado. They are parents, spouses, neighbors, employees and business owners. They pay billions in taxes — including local, state and federal taxes — build homes, harvest food, clean offices and care for children and older adults. Their families and labor are woven into our communities, but policymakers have left them in the lurch.
They need a meaningful way to get right with the law, and Congress must finally step up and provide one. Lawmakers must address the lack of status that places millions of people within ICE’s reach, no matter their ties to American communities.
Congress should legislate immediate pathways to permanent status so that longtime undocumented residents, who’ve built lives in the United States and do not pose a public safety threat, can get right with the law.
Poll after poll shows that most Americans support this. By a two-to-one margin, the American people say they prefer giving undocumented immigrants a path to legal status over deporting them.
Those opposed call such proposals “amnesty,” but requiring longtime residents to get screened and pay penalties for their old civil immigration violations isn’t “amnesty.” It is an organized set of reasonable consequences that encourage people to come out of the shadows and follow the rules without violence, death and family separation, offering benefits for those who comply and deportation for those who do not. It is how we restore credibility and order to a broken system.
Even if Congress creates some pathways to immediate permanent status, not every undocumented immigrant will qualify. Millions may still be left out, facing no consequences and no path forward. But Congress can still protect people like Salgado by narrowing the number of people who are automatically subject to detention and deportation. Since most immigration violations are civil, not criminal, Congress should create a new agency that enforces the law without roughing up, handcuffing, imprisoning and, as in Houston and Maine, killing. An agency that focuses on bringing immigrants who have lived here for years without serious criminal convictions into compliance with the law.
We must enforce our immigration laws, but Congress can ensure that those who pose no threat are put into a different process at the hands of an agency without authority to detain and deport.
Until lawmakers confront both unchecked immigration enforcement and the absence of pathways to lawful status, Trump’s immigration crackdown will continue making communities less safe. And more deaths like Salgado Araujo’s will be the inevitable outcome.
Originally published in Houston Chronicle.
