FROM THE EDITOR: Trumpian Fear of the Other Comes to the Fredericksburg Region
Trump said he's fighting for "hardworking" Americans. He's forgotten that includes immigrants. We shouldn't make the same mistake.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Local politics matter because most of the time they have more impact on people’s day-to-day lives than politics at the state or national level. Further, citizens can have considerably more impact on their local politics than at the higher levels.
There are, however, exceptions to every rule.
On Wednesday evening Donald Trump delivered a factually- and grammatically-challenged address to the nation rife with animosity for the other. He blamed immigrants for the surging costs of rental properties, stealing jobs, and stressing hospital emergency rooms while living high on the taxpayer’s dime getting free health care and education.
These prevarications and canards are so routine that it’s easy to become inured to the untruths behind them and the damage these words do.
Until it hits home.
Yesterday, the Advance was first to report ICE’s detention of Mirna Benitez.
Told to report to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in North Chesterfield on Sunday, December 7, Benitez did what she has dutifully done since coming to the United States — following the rules and reporting when asked to do so by government officials.
She has worked for a decade for a contracted company at the same local school. She pays her taxes. She owns a home and cars. And she has been working toward citizenship. And save for paying a $30 fine in 2016 for failing to obey a highway sign, Benitez had no run-ins with law enforcement.
She is no anomaly. According to the CATO Institute — a libertarian think-tank in Washington, D.C. — Immigrants:
are less likely to be incarcerated in prisons, convicted of crimes, or arrested than native-born Americans.
don’t take American jobs, lower wages, or push the poor out of the labor market.
use significantly less welfare than native-born Americans.
have about a net zero effect on government budgets — they pay about as much in taxes as they consume in benefits.
While hard numbers are difficult to come by, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are roughly 360,000 undocumented people in Virginia. They work jobs like Benitez’s.
They also work in construction, retail trade, and professional jobs.
They are, in fact, the backbones of our local communities.
The worry now is that Benitez represents the first of a surge of ICE arrests and deportations. On Thursday, fear swept through Spotsylvania as there were worries that ICE was active at the Spotsylvania Mall.
As of this writing, it’s not clear precisely what was happening.
Major Delbert Myrick of the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Office told the Advance by phone that there was a task force operation carried out by the Virginia State Police and the FBI Thursday morning, but that activity was totally unrelated to any immigration activity.
There are also concerns that there were ICE arrests made at the entrance to the Bragg Hill Community on Tuesday. The Advance has not confirmed this with federal agencies or with Fredericksburg City Police as of this writing.
Regardless what happened at the mall and at Bragg Hill, there is no denying the terror this news has caused the immigrant community in our region.
Even before these events, many of our immigrant neighbors have been living in fear. That was the finding of Eric Bonds, who along with Aaliyah Anderson and Tabitha Van Doren, interviewed five people from three families of mixed immigration statuses, meaning that some members of these families have citizenship, while others do not.
Bonds wrote:
As U.S. citizens, we’ve paid attention to aspects of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy as it’s been reported in the national news, typically in coverage of dramatic immigration raids in major cities like DC, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This, we realized, left us with a false sense of comfort, the feeling that “at least it’s not happening here.”
After having conversations with undocumented persons in our own community, we realize how wrong that attitude is. Families are suffering in the Fredericksburg region because of federal policies on mass deportation.
Those fears were greatly amplified on Thursday as social media pages lit up with the police activity, and posters writing in English and Spanish were warning people to steer clear of the activity for fear that they could be taken and deported.
Benitez’s experience explains why people have reason to fear. Elizabeth Jones, a family friend, told the Advance that “[Benitez] was put on a plane—she said the plane was unsanitary and pretty terrifying, so much so that the pilot, as soon as they landed in Texas, he ran off the plane. … Mirna told her daughter and best friend that her things were covered in urine. She’s since been transferred to Louisiana, which is also not great. The facilities are unsanitary and she got an infection.”
For the near future, we are stuck with a president determined to continue stoking fear, spreading prevarications and canards about immigrants, and treating hardworking people like Benitez as less than human.
Benitez’s stories and others in her situation should force all of us to sit back and take stock of the kind of community we want to live in.
The ugliest repercussions of Trump’s obsession with hatred for the other is landing with full force in our region, but we don’t have to succumb to the inhumanity that drives it. For now, we can show more compassion for those who live in fear of having family members snatched from them — or finding themselves on an unsanitary plane to Texas.
We can support organizations that are standing and fighting for immigrants’ rights and helping those who are working toward citizenship to realize that goal.
Most important, we can vote at every level for politicians who reject the debasement of people simply because of where they came from.
The American immigration system has been broken for at least 40 years. That’s not the fault of the immigrants, and it certainly isn’t right to punish them for our collective failure.
It’s past time to demand that politicians fix the system they have allowed to break and find a way to treat those who are here without proper documentation with respect and humanity.
On Wednesday night, Trump declared:
you have a president who fights for the law-abiding, hardworking people of our country. The ones who make this nation run, who make this nation work.
Those law-abiding, hardworking people, the ones who make this nation work include the immigrants who have come here to find a better future for their families.
Trump has forgotten that.
Patriots and defenders of the best that America represents have not, and must not.
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