It is impossible to imagine the pain. But we should all share the shame.
On Christmas night, a Salt Lake City woman and her four children boarded an airplane on their way to Guatemala. It is the land of Maria Santiago Garcia’s birth. A land of violence and death that she fled 15 years ago. A place her four children — native-born American citizens — have never seen.
Because Santiago Garcia came to the United States without permission and without papers all those years ago, because she was convicted of using a false Social Security number to get a job at a fast-food joint, the government of the United States — the one that all the rest of us elect and pay for — was forcing her to go back.
And because, to her credit, she did not want to break up her family, she took her four children, ages 3 to 11, with her. Even though they are — by the letter of the Constitution and the spirit of everything this country is supposed to stand for — American citizens with the right to remain.
Activists and family friends who had tried to the last to get the increasingly heartless management of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to relent were properly saddened. The rest of us should be appalled.
Santiago Garcia asked nothing but the chance to earn a living and make a life for her children. Which is sort of what America has always been all about.
Using someone else’s Social Security number is, and should be, a crime. But a lot of people commit a lot of crimes and the humanity in our system, often enough, measures out its judgment in ways that don’t totally disrupt five lives, maybe forever, in ways that make the whole community poorer.
There are more appropriate punishments for such non-violent crimes. Fines. Community service. A demerit that will lead to a longer wait to gain legal residency or citizenship.
Even when it is done peacefully — and, as was with the case of Santiago Garcia’s family, sort of willingly — uprooting people, especially young people, from the only home they have ever known and sending them to a strange place where poverty and violence are rampant amounts to an act of violence committed by our government.
Enforcing this law in this blunt way also makes it that much more difficult for other agencies to enforce all of our other laws. These actions can do nothing other than spread fear throughout the immigrant community, making the very idea of reporting crime or otherwise cooperating with any arm of government a risk not worth taking.
Santiago Garcia did something she shouldn’t have done. But she doesn’t work for us. ICE does, and it should start doing its job differently.