Recently, a friend, writing colleague, and member of The Scribblers, a local writing group, slipped two sheets of paper to me. They were pages from the magazine The Last Word. The featured article was titled, “The Deported Americans.” I took the pages to read at home.
The article was an adaptation of a piece by Brooke Jarvis from California Sunday Magazine. Its title intrigued and haunted me. The opening sentence said, “About 600,000 American-born children are enrolled in Mexico’s schools.” The number staggered me.
These are American-born children of illegal migrants. Their parents took the children with them in their deportation to prevent the break-up of their families. Birthright citizenship excluded them from the ranks of “Dreamers.”
Stunned and incensed, I paused. Six hundred thousand of my fellow U.S. citizens, innocent, helpless children, suffer for the sins of their fathers, while our current administration rushes to inflict cruelty, and transform tragedies into atrocities.
The story goes on to reveal numerous difficulties and challenges that plague the young “deportees.” According to Brooke Jarvis, many schools in Mexico are of lesser quality than schools in the United States. They lack resources and tend to fail their students educationally.
The deported children suffer from a lack of belonging, and a lack of acceptance in their new communities. Often they feel rejected, referred to as “American Mexicans.” Being called “Los Invisibles” implies they have no status. Receiving no support from the land of their birth implies they’re inconsequential.
I empathize with the plight of the young expatriates. In September of 1944, at age 11, near the end of World War II, I was a refugee in Germany from the Russian front. In Thilringen, Germany’s heartland, I was mandated to attend a German school. On my first day at school, I was bullied, beaten up, and called “Ein Untermensch” (A subhuman, a lowlife). I found no acceptance or belonging in that German school.
In their formative years, these displaced U.S. citizens are trapped in a legal, constitutional limbo, as they search for their identity and heritage. Living in poverty, deported by the U.S. government, and uncertain of their status in Mexico, they have no one advocating for them. Even the moralists of the American Civil Liberties Union have been silent.
To round up and deport masses of illegal migrants, ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) agents started raids on Sunday, July 14. Fear spread through the Hispanic communities in sanctuary cities, including Chicago. More American-born children are at risk of deportation with their parents.
Among the questions that come to mind are: Could the ICE raids signal an incendiary genesis of ethnic cleansing in America? What is to become of the young exiles? What age must they reach to repatriate and seek domicile in the country of their birth? And then, after all they have gone through, would they even want to? They have already been stung by the peril of America’s minorities, which is that citizenship does not guarantee acceptance.
Fred Natkevi is a longtime Oak Parker and a longtime U.S. citizen.
