Jayne Glaser is helping a family that sounds remarkably like mine.
The 35-year-old family law attorney with the Clayton firm met the family at a workshop designed to help immigrants — documented or not — with legal issues.
The family has a grown son, 27, currently deployed with the Marine Corps.
They have two younger children, 13 and 14.
The children, like mine, are all citizens of the United States. But Mom and Dad are not. Like millions of others in this country, they overstayed their visas, unable to either afford or otherwise navigate an immigration system still processing some visa applications from 20 years ago.
Now, like many people in their position since the election of President Donald Trump, they’re scared.
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They see stories of people like themselves all over the country, people who have been taxpayers and business owners, who aren’t criminals, all of a sudden targets in the new Trump-ordered crackdown on immigrants who lack proper documentation.
There was of Seattle, a student with a work permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, who was arrested when immigration officials came for his father. Medina, who has a 3-year-old child himself, has no criminal record. There was , a 35-year-old Arizona mother of two, deported after a regular check-in with immigration authorities, something she had been doing for years under the administration of then-President Barack Obama.
“These people are terrified,†Glaser said of families such as the one she described to me.
Glaser started working with immigrant families after she received a call from Amy Diemer, the managing attorney for in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. The ministry is the only legal assistance group in the region that will work with immigrants without asking for their documentation to determine citizenship status.
Like lawyers who work in this field all over the country, Diemer was finding fear of deportation was affecting all sorts of decisions. Wives and girlfriends, for instance, weren’t reporting domestic assault, for fear their children would be deported. Witnesses to crimes have become hesitant to tell police what they see.
“The thing that is really worrisome is that it is making people withdraw from community life,†Glaser says. “Immigrant families are increasingly distrustful of the system.â€
Mostly, they are afraid of being separated from their children, many of whom are American citizens.
So a group of organizations are working together in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region to help educate immigrant communities about how they can protect their children, or at least maintain control over what happens to them.
Glaser has teamed up with Catholic legal assistance, the , and , to provide legal workshops all over the ºüÀêÊÓƵ area.
First, they provide a “know your rights†workshop, and then they come back and help parents sign over “power of attorney†rights to another close relative or friend in case they face separation from their children due to legal action or deportation.
More than 50 families were served at a recent seminar in ºüÀêÊÓƵ, Glaser said. Most of the workshops are held at Catholic churches, because immigrants have less fear of being harassed or picked up by immigration agents there.
The problem is not just in the city.
About 75 families attended a “know your rights†hearing in St. Charles County earlier this month. A power of attorney workshop is planned April 2 at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church. A similar seminar is planned in west ºüÀêÊÓƵ County, at St. Joseph Parish in Manchester.
Glaser turns to her own Catholic faith as part of the inspiration for doing this work.
A graduate of Nerinx Hall and , she sees immigrant communities — documented or not — as families. Keeping them together is just the right thing to do.
“To me, it’s antithetical to my Christian/Catholic upbringing that I would not help people in need,†Glaser says.
Of course, in the Age of Trump, not everybody agrees. In fact, Glaser’s state senator, Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-Manchester, has filed a bill that would change Missouri’s longstanding power-of-attorney laws so that a parent could not execute such a document on a child without both state and federal fingerprint checks being done first. Ironically called the “Supporting and Strengthening Families Act,†, were it to become law, would do the exact opposite, making it easier to split apart families in which a broken immigration system has led to this reality: Children are citizens, and their parents sometimes are not.
Glaser hopes that before they pass such a bill, lawmakers do what she has done. Meet with undocumented families, people who, in so many ways, want all the same things the rest of us want: jobs, homes, security and family.
“These kids are U.S. citizens,†she says. “If there is nowhere for them to go, they are going to end up in a foster care program that is already overtaxed.â€