Border door of hope might slam shut on immigrant family reunions

By Carl Prine
November 19, 2016
As seen in:
The San Diego Union-Tribune

A shaking Edith Hernandez stood in a doorway separating two countries on Saturday, folding herself into a mother she hadn't hugged in a dozen years, both watering the sand and cement of the Playas de Tijuana with tears.

“El amor no tiene fronteras,” they like to say here inside International Friendship Park.

Love has no borders.  

But nations do, which is why an American helicopter wheeled in the sky above Imperial Beach, and a phalanx of 11 U.S. Border Patrol agents ensured Hernandez, 30, didn’t nudge too far into Mexico and her mom, Maria Plata-Colin, 50, stayed out of the United States. 

"I told her I love her. That's it," said Hernandez, an unauthorized immigrant from Los Angeles who was flanked by her American children, Yvette, 10, and David, 2. 

They met their grandmother for the first time shortly after noon on Saturday, thanks to an event arranged by the San Diego nonprofit Border Angels and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to honor World Children’s Day. 

For a few brief moments, Border Patrol agents on the American side flung up a steel hatch in the metal fence, letting loved ones who can’t legally cross the international divide hold each other.

Border Angels wants to repeat the event next year across the entire 1,933-mile international border, from Imperial Beach to the toe of Texas, but no one can foretell the celebration’s future, here or in other states.

The election of Donald Trump — the Republican firebrand who ran on a populist message of building fortifications separating the United States from Mexico and deporting millions of unauthorized immigrants — might alter everything.

“I don’t know if we can do these events,” said Hernandez. “I don’t know if he can close these events. I wish that he could help us. I wish.”

Trump’s transition team did not return messages seeking comment.

“There are no changes predicted in the near future,” said Border Patrol Agent Eduardo Olmos. “These events could go on as they have for the last four years.”

Although it drew more than 400 people on both sides of the border, quieter versions of Saturday’s ceremony occur nearly every weekend.  

Usually the American side teems with some of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants who could be repatriated if Border Patrol agents checked their paperwork — something they don’t do now because of an informal policy. 

Many of their children were brought here as toddlers and have few ties to the nations where they were born. President Barack Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order — or “DACA” — protects about 728,000 of them from deportation, but it’s a temporary measure that can be overturned in a Trump administration.

They come to Friendship Park to give “pinky kisses” to relatives on the other side, their fingers pressing through the tiny steel slats. 

Enrique Morones, who founded Border Angels three decades ago to save immigrants from dying of thirst as they walked north through San Diego County, called on Congress to reject Trump’s campaign promises and pass “humane immigration reform.”

“We’ve been close to it a couple of times,” Morones said. “We know President Obama tried to do it but they wouldn’t allow him to do it.”

That’s not going to happen, said Joe Guzzardi, a spokesman for the Santa Barbara-based Californians for Population Stabilization, a nonprofit that seeks stiffer border security, increased deportations and other changes to America’s immigration policies.

“Donald Trump campaigned for 18 months on these issues. He might come back and say that instead of a ‘wall’ there will be more fencing, more Border Patrol agents and things like that, but to do nothing? I just can’t see that,” said Guzzardi.

To Guzzardi, the Imperial Beach event shows how complicated border issues can be — especially the mixed citizenship statuses of immigrant families on the American side — but “something has to give on this whole immigration question,” including scrapping DACA.

He suspects Trump will let DACA’s two-year permits to continue until they expire. Then the children of immigrants will be barred from lawful employment or obtaining driver’s licenses in many states. 

To crack down on illegal workers, Guzzardi wants lawmakers to force businesses to use the federal e-Verify system to determine employment eligibility, something that’s currently voluntary.

“This particular problem, and many of the other problems related to immigration, are fully or partially the fault of the Republican-led Congress because they didn’t fight Obama on his executive orders,” Guzzardi said.

Trump has picked U.S. Sen. Jim Sessions, an Alabama Republican, as his attorney general, signaling a get-tough approach to deportations. Other cabinet posts remain unfilled, and Trump hasn’t announced a timetable for revealing his nominees for Senate confirmation.