two days later! They were compacted into a trailer that could not sustain them. They were taken to a local hospital and kept overnight for dehydration.
Washington Post reporters Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan noted that in the same week as the trailer tragedy, at least eleven other people died trying to cross the border—died without the headlines accorded to the trailer deaths because the eleven others were part of the now-routine tally of loss of life on the frontier. Sullivan and Jordan recorded drownings in the Rio Grande and heat exhaustion in the deserts of Texas and Arizona, deaths that occurred one or two at a time, quietly, without much notice.3
Sheriff Ratcliff expresses no patience with the standard anti-immigrant lines.
The borders are being screened for drugs and weapons. Certainly I want our country rid of drugs and weapons. But look at what is going on, adverse to what our nation is all about. To me, optimum consideration should be given to the presence of human beings in those very cargo vehicles that travel our nation daily. When we lose sight of that, we lose sight of a lot of very important matters. I thought about it several times that day in our command center. I think the intensity of what is perceived as a threat really doesn’t exist.
He says it is an illusion that Mexicans take jobs from Americans. He is disgusted with the argument that immigrants abuse the social services available in the United States. “And who wouldn’t want to? That’s my answer. Who wouldn’t want to come to the most wonderful country in the world? Can you blame them?”
Change the laws, insists the sheriff, to encourage migrants to pay taxes. Of course, migrants without papers already pay plenty of taxes. They pay sales tax. They pay indirect property tax when they pay rent. Those who use fake Social Security numbers lose salary to money withheld that they can never collect, money that helps fund the overall Social Security System from which legal residents profit. It’s difficult for the undocumented to use Medicare and other services both because of the registration process and because of their fear of the discovery of their illegal status.
Opportunity is what America is all about, says the sheriff, again invoking the memory of the lost 5-year-old boy.
What would he have done in our country? Who could he have become? These people came to our country looking for opportunity. You can talk about the Statue of Liberty and what it represents all day long, or you can say that it’s a hill of beans. But it’s true! These people come into our country looking for opportunity. One word. Opportunity.
The law needs to be changed, says the sheriff, to reflect reality. “Use history. Approach the current day with what America lives upon and should: its own history. Examine what we have done in the past. Look at and give weight to the open arms of the east coast,” he says about the welcome offered to migrants from Europe. “Carry the Statue of Liberty to the borders of Mexico and Canada and create laws that identify with what the French gave to America. You can’t open the doors to a country by etching in stone alone the words that welcome you. You have to create law that represents what’s etched in stone.”
And Mexico, he says, shares the responsibility.
We need to eliminate human cargo. We need to insure this does not happen again. [Former] President Fox needs to educate his folks as to what is legal. These people come to our country not knowing what is appropriate and what is not. And they pay $2,000 for a ride in a conveyance that cattle wouldn’t be carried in. Because they don’t know any better. If we welcome people to our country, let’s do so legally and let’s make sure they can be educated on how to get to our country legally. Two thousand dollars would have bought somebody a Green Card all the way in. But they don’t know that.
As the case against the Victoria smugglers developed, Texas-based immigration lawyer Barbara Hines was surprised to find herself representing one of the migrants who was packed into the truck trailer Sheriff Ratcliff was disgusted to learn headed north with a load of human cargo just the day after the Victoria disaster. Hines went to law school specifically motivated to work for social justice. After passing the bar in the mid-1970s, she expected to join the cadre of lawyers inspired by the women’s movement and engage women’s rights issues. She remembers drifting into immigration law by chance.
“I showed up at a legal aid office in 1975 and someone said, ‘Do you speak Spanish?’ and they handed me twenty immigration cases. At that time, there were no immigration courses. There were very few people practicing immigration law and people used to say, ‘You’re a what kind of lawyer? What in the world do immigration lawyers do?’”
It turns out that immigration lawyers fall into two basic categories: those who help people coming to the United States legally and those who help people already in the United States who are facing problems with the authorities. It’s the latter type of law that Barbara Hines practices, a specialty known as family-based immigration and deportation law. Her clients are trying to legalize their status in the United States. They’re seeking work permits, temporary visas or the precious Green Card—the ticket that denotes a legal permanent resident, and is a first step toward U.S. citizenship. Often she deals with crises. She represents Green Card holders facing deportation for a crime or a bureaucratic misstep. And she works with asylum seekers, those who escape to the United States fearing persecution at home.
Over her long years of practice, she sees increased enforcement of increasingly restrictive immigration laws. “In an ironic way, it’s decreased our work because there’s so little we can do for people.”
In addition to her private immigration law practice, Barbara Hines teaches law at the University of Texas in Austin where she founded the Immigration Clinic. The clinic represents clients without funds and otherwise without access to legal representation. Work at the clinic is particularly focused on the needs of immigrants facing deportation and those seeking political asylum. Clients include battered immigrant women.
“I think it’s really all about the haves and the have nots,” she says about migration into the United States.
I even had an immigration judge come to my class and say, “You know, if I were in the same situation as most of these people, I’d come too.” If you’re starving or even if you’re in search of a better life, why wouldn’t you move? Everybody moves. It’s the historical phenomenon of migration. Why do people migrate? They migrate because they want something better. People don’t voluntarily leave their home surroundings unless there is some push factor.
Airplanes and the Internet only make the global population more mobile. “Twenty years ago,” Hines said in the early 2000s,
the only people that could get to the United States were the Mexicans and the stowaways and the people that could get tourist visas, because how were you going get to the United States from China? Now, because of more sophisticated smugglers, people from China can get on the boat and then they can beach the boat in Mexico and they can come up the exact same way that the Mexicans have come for years. People are more aware that it’s a possibility that you might be able to get here from Eastern Europe and China. You have to pay a lot of money, but now there’s somebody that’s able to get you here.
Hines and her students visit Texas lockups where undocumented migrants are held during deportation proceedings. They look for prisoners who might benefit from legal representation and they offer their services. It’s a scatter-shot approach to social work, looking for the
