Teresa Leger Fernandez:
Hi there, this is Teresa.
Mary-Charlotte Domandi:
Hey there. Are you in the car?
TLF:
I am in the car. So I am in the car because I am headed down to the border. This is my first congressional delegation. And what a congressional delegation is, is whenever we conduct oversight—so a congressperson has lots of jobs. One of my jobs is to actually pass legislation, one my jobs is to serve my constituencies, helping them out with the federal agencies. But another part of our job is to conduct oversight. So we go down and find out what’s the administration doing? Do we need to push them in any way? Are there any laws that we need to change? So we are headed down to the border to find out what’s happening. We know there is a humanitarian crisis, and that crisis, though, is not a president. Biden’s making that crisis relates to the fact that our immigration system was broken before and then was destroyed as Trump took a sledgehammer and he decided that it’s all right to be inhumane. And that inhumanity was what he wanted to traffic in. And he destroyed the system that could have existed to deal with refugee and asylum cases and people crossing at the border. So we’re going down to see what’s happening. And that’s really important to do right now.
MCD:
There’s so much to talk about with this. One of the things president Biden said in his press conference yesterday, talked about how the increase in the number of migrants coming to our borders is more seasonal than anything else, but there still are thousands of unaccompanied children. Do you have a sense, or is this something that you’re looking to find out tomorrow, to what extent these are refugees, asylum seekers, other kinds of migration?
TLF:
So part of that we’ll find out tomorrow. What we understand is I think about 60% of the children actually have a legal guardian or a parent in the United States. That tells you that somebody has already migrated and they’re headed up here to see them. So that could be that they’re here because they have an asylum case. They could be here because they’ve got a temporary permit because they’re coming from the Northern triangle, from what we know. The cause of the migration is multiple. Some of it that people might be fleeing violence that’s been directed at them. We know that there are gangs that are on the prowl and if you’ve got a son or you’ve got a daughter, you might need a flee because they’re coming for that son or daughter for different reasons. We know that there is a lot of repression against those who raise issues around the environment or around justice and human rights. And then we know that there is a lot of poverty and a lot of fleeing of the disasters. So there’s going to be a lot of reasons that we will find out a little bit about tomorrow.
MCD:
One of the ways that I’ve heard people talk about it is there’s migration to and migration from. So some people are escaping from horrible circumstances and they’re really more focused on that than what they’re going to. And some people, it’s more like economic migration so there it’s not so much what they’re escaping from, but they see the possibility of more opportunity, perhaps, here—although I don’t even know what that looks like right now—but it seems like we tend not to as a society and as sort of a mediascape focus as much on migration from and how bad those circumstances are. But one of the things, and you and I have talked about this briefly in other shows, but I was wondering if you could maybe educate us a little bit about past US policies and historical circumstances that have led us to where we are now that makes situations so bad that people are escaping from them.
TLF:
So you have to almost go back to the 1980s. And I think that’s what you and I were talking about when you and I were both at Yale. There were three things that were happening in the countries where migration and asylum cases and people are fleeing is Nicaragua underwent a revolution. The United States was not successful in its attempts to thwart that revolution. Interestingly, of what they call the Northern triangle, the countries in Central America, those fleeing are generally not from Nicaragua. After the Sandinista revolution, there was huge, literacy campaigns. We knew lots of students who left school in college—you might’ve known them—who went down and participated in these literacy campaigns. So that revolution didn’t provide everything everybody wanted, but it did move that country further along economically. What the United States did in the other countries was really side with very repressive with regimes.
So in Honduras, in El Salvador, and in Guatemala, the United States supported very repressive regimes, and those repressive regimes led to a lot of hardship and there was not as much progress economically and with regards to humanitarian and democratic reform. And it’s those countries where we are seeing the bigger influence, a bigger wave of immigrants coming across. It’s a very complex historical system, but that’s a really shorthand way of saying we have contributed to part of—but what we really need to do and what Biden is talking about doing and what those of us with whom I serve in Congress want to do, is making sure that we invest in those countries so that we can attack the root cause of the migration. Cause until we attack the root causes of migration, we’re going to continue seeing this. Tomorrow is Passover, and some very good friends of mine who are Jewish, always invite me to Seder. Sometimes I attend a Seder with the Sephardim of New Mexico, because I have traced my roots in New Mexico to the expulsion of the Jews and the Sephardim who came to New Mexico.
But tomorrow’s Passover, and we have seen this story before. For the children that the parents are sending—so the only ones that are being let into the country and not being immediately deported back are the unaccompanied children. And we have heard Republicans and we have heard people pressing the president saying, Oh, shouldn’t you have done differently and not listen to the policy of pulling families apart? And he has said, I do not regret stopping the executive orders that were inhumane. I do not regret that. But the issue of a parent sending their child on a perilous journey to safety is not a new one. Moses’s mother put him in a basket on the Nile, hoping he would reach safety, because she knew that the alternative was he would die. So we have seen through the generations parents who will risk everything to make sure that their child reaches safety. And I think we must remember that we are Judeo Christians. We must remember that story. And we must remember that hardship, and that difficulty in that decision. I am prepared tomorrow to have my heart break. I absolutely know I will cry because just to think of the trip that these children have done and what they have endured, and knowing the fear that they must have come through and the worry that their parents have for them. But that was what those parents likely thought is, this is a way of keeping my child safe.
MCD:
There have been instances in the past where congresspeople have not been admitted and not been able to talk with migrants who are being held in detention. Is that cleared? Are you going to be able to really speak to people in their language, one-on-one?
TLF:
The itinerary that I have been provided has us going with border patrol and also has those going to Casa Refugiados. So we will be talking with the children, likely who have come out of the DHS facilities. We must remember what the Biden administration is trying to do. There was actually a law and a decree, the Flores Decree, which says you must move children out of custody into an HHS facility. And from that HHS facility reunite them with their guardian or their parents, or place them with sponsors as quickly as possible. And there’s some specific time limits to doing that. So one of the places that we will be going to tomorrow is one of these organizations that receives the children.
MCD:
If somebody wants to sponsor a young person, can they do so?
TLF:
Yes, I believe there is a way to do that. And if people who are listening to this are moved to try to help these children there are a couple of places that I know about the top of my head: Catholic Charities has always been great. There is the Lutheran humanitarian services, which do a good job, and I will have additional names of organizations that assist with the sponsorship for these children.
MCD:
So on this congressional delegation, there’s nine Congress people, eight Democrats, and one Republican, all but one are women. Women, people of color and Democrats, not so much Republicans, are going down there.
TLF:
Veronica Escobar, Congresswoman Escobar invited everybody, the same way she invited everybody two years ago and a year ago, where she stood on the floor of the house and says, everybody is invited. Come see for yourself. Talk to the organizations. Talk to the advocates. Talk to the people who are on the ground and seeing this. And the Republicans didn’t take her up on that last Congress. And instead this Congress, they went and they met only with the border patrol. They did not meet with any of the organizations who actually have direct knowledge and direct contact with the children. So the Republicans are trying to turn this into a crisis that they want to lay at the foot of Biden, but it is simply a crisis of a broken system that hasn’t been fixed. And they want to turn their attention away from the work that Democrats, the House, the Senate and the president are doing with regards to the American Rescue Plan. They don’t want us to talk about fixing the problems we have because they haven’t participated in the solution. Not a single one of them voted for the AmericanRescue Plan. So they want to use this as a wedge issue. And run on, we should all be afraid of immigrants—instead of saying, let’s go down there. And if there are issues with the administration, like Mr. Biden, your administration needs to move faster to get these children out of border patrol. I’m willing to make that statement. If I see that they’re not moving those children out fast enough, I’m going to say, Mr. President worked a little harder. But I know they’re already improving. They are working on that. But that’s the kind of thing that let’s go down there and be honest, let’s look and see what are the problems we need to go down there and determine whether there are any issues that we need to raise with the administration that they can do better.
And then the other thing we need to do is go down there and determine what does Congress need to do to help address this issue? Because Congress is the only one that can fund the programs in country. Congress is the only one that can say, our asylum process is broken, let’s fix this. Congress is the only one that can pass the American Citizenship Act. The American Citizenship Act, which is the comprehensive immigration bill, has a lot of what we need to fix this system. And that’s what we need to go see is like, does the bill, as we have written now, will it address these issues that we have here? And that’s how we should address all of our work is, what are we learning from this visit? So that can inform our legislative action. And that’s how I’m going there with that kind of perspective.
