F*ck La Migra: Civility in the time of Trump

Recently I was at a conference for immigration lawyers. In those situations, I tend to roll with the more radical crowd. I run a legal services non-profit for immigrants and refugees in the Southwest and a lot of my work has been about combating the Obama and Trump administration policies that make seeking asylum on our Southern border deadly. Many of my closest colleagues and I have witnessed or been adjacent to death and suffering in a way that I am certain none of us anticipated when we went to law school. With that witness comes the attendant trauma of choosing a line of work that confronts the atrocities that our government and society bring to bear on migrant families. This summer, as I joined my colleagues at this conference in Orlando, that trauma was sizzling right on our skins like the Florida heat. A rash of children had just died in Department of Homeland Security custody. During the conference, a drowned migrant baby’s body would wash up on the shore of the Rio Grande.

One of the afternoons I was having lunch with a cohort of colleagues. We were discussing the morning’s events: there had been a border patrol panel and someone from the conference had tweeted a congratulatory message to the CBP officers for being brave enough to face an audience of immigration lawyers. I don’t know if the tweet said LOL, but it was implied. This sort of congenial ribbing of an agency with policies that kill migrant children did not land well with many of the attorneys at the conference. People were called out, apologies made, and at lunch, we were discussing the upcoming panel with ICE. Several of my friends were planning on attending and using the panel as an opportunity to confront the ICE bureaucrats about their actions and policies that impose so much suffering on innocent people who we serve. A person at our table, aligned with the agency throwing the conference and by all accounts a good lawyer, one of the good guys who is outspoken for the rights of migrants, pleaded with us to reconsider. Her reasoning, as I understood it, followed the logic that if we needed ICE to stop killing our clients, our best course of action would be to maintain a professional, congenial relationship so if we needed them to help us down the line then we wouldn’t have burned bridges. Confronting ICE, she explained, and alienating people in power would do nothing to maintain the relationships necessary to broker the backroom deals that could result in fairer policy. Honestly, I may be mischaracterizing the finer points because I was so enraged as we were talking. And I have been thinking about that conversation for the last two months.

The Department of Homeland Security kills migrants. They will tell you they do not. Every time a migrant dies, whether a baby or an adult, a press release goes out with the same line of hogwash quoting the Department’s policy to safeguard the health and safety of everyone in it’s custody. They express vague regret that death happens. They also point out that a migrant, say, crossed the border illegally, or had some criminal incident in their history, as if a DUI or assault charge could possibly justify their death in federal detention. They also blame parents for bringing children on the journey. They subtly suggest that if this person had only been more morally upright, they wouldn’t have had to die. I once represented a woman who miscarried at four months in Federal immigration custody and when she bravely went to the press about it and my name was mentioned as her lawyer, people emailed me to remind me that if she didn’t want that to happen she shouldn’t have asked for asylum. Of course that wasn’t the President emailing me directly but is was people parroting the dehumanizing propaganda he sells so readily so people can breeze over the revulsion they would otherwise feel when innocent and vulnerable humans are functionally tortured in the custody of the American government.

My sincere question to that woman at lunch that day and beyond is, when do we get to abandon civility as a theory of change under the Trump Administration? Is it when another baby dies in CBP custody? Is it when more graphic pictures of children rotting in squalor in cages emerge? Is it after yet another listless democrat debate where phrases like “comprehensive immigration reform”, “kids in cages”, and “families belong together” are uttered as if they are a coherent answer to the death that is occurring on our border? Is it when another shooter, motivated by racist, state sponsored propaganda sprays a public shopping center with bullets to cull a latino invasion? This summer, after a trans woman pled for weeks for medicine that would save her life in Otero County, a detention center my organization serves, the Department paroled her out after they found her unconscious body in her cell and she died outside of DHS custody in an EL Paso hospital. Presumably this was to avoid the investigation that occurs when someone dies in jail. Two times this summer policy NGOs in DC balked at promoting my work because I openly support the abolition of ICE and the detention of immigrants. It is just too controversial, they said, and that they hoped I understood. In what universe is demanding the abolition of a racist law enforcement agency that either willfully or, in the best case scenario, recklessly kills people in it’s custody controversial? The answer: is in the universe where people of influence do not authentically challenge one another lest they shake the foundations of structural oppression that control people who are not in power.

I was in El Paso on August 3rd when 22 people were massacred at Walmart. I was there setting up a legal project with a brilliant friend of mine who later referred to the shooting as a lynching. We had just watched a documentary about Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative and the attention they have paid to memorializing lynchings that occurred all over the Jim-Crow South. There were haunting images in this film of bystanders next to lynched black bodies. To many that image may seem like a sad clip from America’s disgusting racist history but there are too many people living in this country in 2019 who know that this is our present. They understand too well how the State must control brown and black bodies and where our official policies fail to do so, we must rely on lynch mobs, even lynch mobs of one, to carry it out for us while bystanders look on in glee or horror.

And we are bystanders. It does us no good to pretend otherwise. Bystander doesn’t necessarily imply an endorsement, it may simply mean, as it does in the case of almost everyone I love, that we don’t know what to do or how to change so we simply gaze on in pain with a sense of helplessness. We hope that politicians or media will give us a clue about what to do, while fully understanding that politicians and media, social or otherwise, have long since lost any moral authority in this country to teach us how to behave.

My organization has been selling tee shirts for the last month that say “Fuck La Migra”. For those who don’t know who la migra is, it basically refers to all immigration law enforcement. We have raised over 30 thousand dollars selling these shirts and all proceeds go directly to hiring an asylum lawyer to defend the rights of trans migrants. I wear my Fuck La Migra tee with pride. I want to believe that in all the historical incidents of genocide in our history, I would have told the oppressors to go fuck themselves. I know wearing a tee shirt isn’t much but it reminds me that I am not required to be civil as long as my country is killing innocent people for racist, xenophobic motives. It reminds me as a white, CIS gender, straight, privileged citizen of the US, that my job is to disrupt the forces that hunt my neighbors. It is my job to behave in public, in private, and in the spheres of influence that I am increasingly welcomed to, as if my dearest Dreamer friend (she knows who she is) were sitting there with me. Fuck la migra for making such an incredible person be afraid to live in this country.

Yet people still chasten me for daring to use an obscenity. A reasonable and supportive women today on social media sent me a comment reminding me of Michelle Obama’s words: when they go low we go high. I understood what she was trying to say and am certain she is one of the good guys. But it got me thinking: what does going high look like in this situation? Why is uttering the word FUCK in controlled, targeted anger compared to the low of a baby’s dead body on the banks of the Rio? Why would anyone defend the dignity of la migra to not be cursed at when they are rounding up families and separating hundreds and hundreds of parents from their children in Mississippi?

The media and politicians broker in civility. The patriarchy depends on it. White Supremacy depends on it. The powerful need us chastened, polite, and timid. Yet for many of us working close to the border, it feels like we are witnessing a genocide. And civility has no place in genocide. Every day I think about history. I think about the legacy of how each of use behaves in this moment. I believe that most Americans in the future will look back at this time with pure revulsion, as my friend and I did watching the movie about lynching. They will all be certain, looking back, that they would have done something more than stand by and watch it happen in horror. We must talk about what disruption, unrest, and civil disobedience looks like, we must recognize that in this moment people are being killed by state sponsored violence, and we must insist that we be more than just bystanders to the abject misery of our times. And we must do this all today.

Allegra Love is an immigration attorney and the Executive Director of Santa Fe Dreamers Project. If you want a to get a Fuck La Migra Tee and donate to a fund that will help bring representation to trans asylum seekers, click here.