Before there were wailing children in fenced-in pens in a Texas immigration center, wondering if they will ever see their parents again, there was Marie Gonzalez.
Before as inhumane the current policy of President Donald Trump and his administration to separate children from families of immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, there was Carlos Moser Bail Encarnacion.
Those two Missouri children of immigrants — one from Costa Rica, the other from Guatemala — are threads in America’s long tattered tapestry of a broken immigration policy that unravels the bond of families.
That she was a young woman, recently graduated from Helias High School in Jefferson City when she was separated from her parents, makes Gonzalez’s story no less tragic.
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She was brought to the U.S. at the age of 5 in 1991. By 2002, She couldn’t get a driver’s license. She wasn’t a citizen. For the first time, she realized her parents were undocumented immigrants. Then the feds came knocking. Dad had worked for the governor as a courier. Mom taught at a Catholic school. But they had overstayed their visas. An attorney couldn’t get them caught up in the backed-up system. In 2005, Gonzalez’s parents were deported. She was allowed to stay while she was in college. She became the still-not-passed federal legislation with bipartisan support that would protect the children of immigrants who grow up as American as their neighbors and find out too late that the federal government doesn’t think they belong here.
I last spoke to Gonzalez in 2012, when then-President Barack Obama tried to do what Congress wouldn’t, instituting an administrative policy allowing Dreamers to stay in the U.S., continue their educations and contribute to society, getting jobs, paying taxes, raising families.
Gonzalez got married in 2009. She and her husband flew to Costa Rica to have a ceremony in front of her parents. Her father, Marvin, died before the ceremony.
About a year later, Encarnacion Bail Romero was at the Missouri Supreme Court fighting for her son.
He had been three years earlier, when he was 1. Romero worked at a chicken plant in southwestern Missouri that was raided by federal authorities. She didn’t speak English and was an undocumented immigrant. There was a custody battle, and Romero and her child were separated. The boy was adopted by an area couple, and the court was trying to decide what was better for the child — to be reunited with her mother after a three-year separation or stay with the Carthage couple who had adopted him.
During argument before the court, I sat behind Francisco Villagran de Leon, who was Guatemala’s ambassador to the United States. His words more than a decade ago ring true today.
“It’s very troubling to see a mother lose her child because she’s taken into custody for violation of immigration laws,†Villagran de Leon said. “We are deeply concerned that there is prejudice against foreigners.â€
There was then. There is now.
Trump, as president, has tapped into the deep resentment among a sliver of white Americans who would rather turn the country into a walled fortress than fix the broken immigration system that still, despite its flaws, serves for some as a beacon of hope on the shining city on the hill. The president’s supporters are so desperate to defend the indefensible, the ripping of children from parents and holding them in facilities that recall the country’s dark days of World War II Japanese internment camps, that they are citing an out-of-context Bible verse to allege that their despicable acts somehow mirror the best of the Christian tradition.
As the Missouri Supreme Court issued a split decision in 2011 that eventually kept young Carlos with adoptive parents as his mother was sent away, it was Judge Michael Wolff in a dissent.
“Does the principal opinion remand this case to the circuit court with the hope that the court somehow will resolve this case with the wisdom of Solomon?†wrote Wolff, who wanted young Carlos reunited with his mother. “At least Solomon had the option to decree that the child be cut in half. All we lesser judges have is the law, and it is our duty to make sure that the law is obeyed. Not in 90 more days or 900 more days, but now.â€
What’s happening now in the Age of Trump is cruel, but it’s not necessarily unusual, not in the context of recent American history.
Our nation has long had the capacity to separate children from their parents among classes of people that our politicians, for a period of time, at least, consider “animals†unequal to those who had the benefit of being born between different borders.
The wisdom of Solomon escapes us, still.