The first time I learned about Garcia was a through a National Public Radio report on his family. The report inspired me to write a comprehensive post on the New Bedford Raid. I’m going to transcribe the NPR report below but keep in mind this was filed long before Garcia died. Claudio Sanchez reports:
Claudio Sanchez: A three story apartment building at the end of a
narrow steep spiral stairway, a middle-aged woman no taller than
4’10”, black hair pulled tight in a bun, answers the door of a small
apartment. A little boy clings to the woman’s dress, he groans.
“He doesn’t speak,” she says, “but he was born in this country”. As if
that somehow made up for her son’s disability. We sit at a tiny table
against the kitchen wall. It’s really dark. She’s $200 behind on the
electric bill so she’s trying to use as little electricity as
possible…
Juana in Spanish: “The problem that I’m dealing with right now…I am traumatized by the sadness of my husband…”
Claudio Sanchez: Her little boy, though, isn’t eating well. Today,
he’s upset about something. He thinks his father is coming home any
day, now.
Juana in Spanish: “He looked for him and showed me his clothes. He showed me his
clothes and then looked towards the window, because he always looked
that way when he was coming home from work. Once he saw him he would
wait for him at the door.”
Claudio Sanchez: He points to his father’s clothes in the closet and
stands by the window every afternoon waiting for him to arrive from
work.
Everything about this story points to love. A lawyer describes Garcia’s determination:
[Ondine Galvez Sniffin] noted that Mr. Garcia had a different
attitude than many of the Bianco detainees who were tired and ready to
go back to their home country.
“This man wasn’t giving up,” she said. “He was willing to stay as long as necessary to get reunited with his wife and child.”
Anti-migrant advocates and the media will paint this as a story of
enforcement, as a story of abuse. But this is a story about epic love
and devotion. It is about the lengths one man went to in order to be
reunited with his family. Most of all it is about the autistic son that he left behind. Ricardo Gomez Garcia paid with his life out of love for his son.
I wish people understood what it means to take the long and dangerous journey from Guatemala to the United States. You think Garcia wanted to do that? You think he wanted to leave everything he knew in Guatemala to provide for his family? If Garcia could have given his life to provide for his family in Guatemala, where he could be a person instead of an “illegal”, I’m sure he would of. But his life will fall on the deaf ears of the U.S. anti-migrant machine. Crisis after crisis will continue to occur in a nation that has completely lost its soul.
I’m sure people will dig up dirt on Garcia as I advertise this post. They’ll darken his name after he is no longer able to defend himself. But I’m not writing this post for Garcia, I’m writing this post for the autistic son that he had so much love for. He is innocent of the sins we are all guilty of. He is innocent of the sins of this world. Also, he’s a U.S. citizen, maybe that will make people care about him. O wait, he’s Latino, I forgot.
One young child gets left behind for every two people that are deported. The majority
of those children are U.S. citizens. I dare anti-migrant advocates to
look those children in the face and tell them this is all their “criminal” parent’s fault. It is a parents’ love that forces situations like
these. Unjust laws interfere with moral law. I cannot think of laws
that are more unjust than those that interfere with the love of spouses and their children.
In a generation, these children will be able to speak for themselves and
it will be on our collective conscience that we did not do more to change what America has become.
Garcia’s son cannot speak for himself, though. He is autistic, and his
surviving mother is in the country illegally. An anti-migrant advocate
that would have this autistic child’s mother sent home, and smirks at
the death of his father, is a monster. Guatemala has very few
services for autism, and certainly not for a poor family. When I lived
in Guatemala I worked in what is one of the only places, ANINI, that provides for abandoned children with problems like autism. If U.S. citizens only knew…
I wish I could say march on the streets, call your congressional representatives, burn your passports, even, but it’s wrong to use an individual story like this to argue for my own notions of what should be done. It is for that reason that I encourage people to write checks to Father Marc Fallon of Catholic Social Services who has been instrumental in showing these New Bedford families compassion, when a nation wouldn’t. The family is looking to raise $4,000 to send Garcia’s body home. Here is the information:
Catholic Social Services
Diocese of Fall River
238 Bonney Street
New Bedford, MA 02744
T: 508-997-7337
F: 508-984-7337
elizabeth@cssdioc.org
If people want to use Citizen Orange’s donate form I will get all of the money to the Garcia family, and report the donations publicly on this blog. Use the Citizen Orange’s contact form if you want to figure out what else you can do.
Edit your title! You broke BMG with the long title…no URL links, please.
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Thanks!
Editors beat me to it. đŸ™‚ But you might want to change the blank title to something useful, still.
My bad with the title. I didn’t mean to do that. I’ll be more careful next time.
What a sad story!
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I wonder, did Garcia consider seeking relief through a private immigration bills? These are laws that Congress passes typically to confer permanent residency status on people who are ineligible for it under the general law. One of the grounds that often persuades Congress to pass such a bill is “extreme hardship to a United States citizen spouse, parent or child (emphasis mine).” Of course, these private bills are extraordinary, and it may be that by illegally reentering the country after deportation, which is a felony, Garcia foreclosed this option.
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Also, as with some of your previous posts involving illegal aliens who died, there is no evidence in the material you have provided to suggest that Garcia’s death was related to any shortcoming in the immigration laws. For all we know, Garcia might have met the same fate if he had never been deported in the first place. If he hadn’t died, what would you make of the case? An illegal alien is deported, then pays a smuggler to get him back into the country, which is quite clearly criminal (and not a mere violation of the immigration law, as in the visa overstay case you like to cite). What would be a just result in that case? Or suppose he had never been deported but had fallen sick and died? What then?
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TedF
You’re always taking my emotion down to practicality and I appreciate it.
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Like I said I wrote it more for the autistic son than anything else. I don’t see this as a legal case so much as it is an epic story, as I’ve put it.
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It reminds me of a Greek tragicomedy or something.
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You know as much as I know about the Garcia case, but I know if I were Garcia, I wouldn’t wait around for congress to pass a special bill, I would have hightailed it back myself too.
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Not to pay a coyote to get back is the equivalent of suicide. A few years ago the stats were something like 2,000 people leave for the U.S. everyday and only 200 make it. I’ll be anything that of those 200 at least 180 pay a coyote, despite the extreme hardship that causes.
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A just result is one where the pursuit of happiness is not criminal and an autistic child can be taken care of by both of his parents. You’re probably better at figuring out how that can be achieved practically TedF, but that’s where I stand.
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I have tended to ignore Kyledeb’s posts, but want to note a few things.
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It is far from clear what theme Kyledeb has in this post. There are a number of issues raised. The fact that this was the third attempt for Mr. Garcia to illegally enter the US? So? Three times the charm? Quite frankly, it is a crime to enter the US illegally, and he’s fortunate that he wasn’t incarcerated after the second time.
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The fact that Mr. Garcia left a wife and child behind in the US after he was for the second time deported? So? He could have requested that they be sent to Guatemala after he was deported. If the wife and child were citizens or legal immigrants, the ICE could not have deported them, but that was an option for him. Illegal immigration into the US was not an option for him.
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The facts that Mr. Garcia died shortly after his last arrival, and the wife believes that he was mistreated (or insufficiently treated) while in US custody? I’m sorry, but the wife’s belief is not evidence.
I know you’ve grown sick of my posts, raj, but I hope you can respect how much of an issue this is for me. I spent 18 years of my life in Guatemala, the country I was born in, as dual U.S. citizen. Close to a million people that were born on the same piece of land I was born on have to suffer in this country just because they didn’t have the privilege of U.S. citizenship at birth, like I did.
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I’m not asking you to think of Mr. Garcia. I’m asking you to think of his autistic son. His child can’t live in Guatemala, the country just doesn’t have the services for autism.
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Either way, I appreciate your comments raj, and I’m glad you gave me the time of day this time.
Some things, as with Haleigh Poutre’s case are so sad, and so wrong, that energy is released, and it is not always clear what the results will be. In this case, at any event, I will light a vigil candle, and keep an eye on what is being done for the autistic son. This is beyond sad. It is tragic. And that is true outside, and beyond, a discussion of the laws of men.
read your words Amberpaw.
…I actually do read your posts. Although I do find them oftentimes rambling and ill-focussed, such as this one.
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There are several things that you might want to consider, instead of presenting a “tearing at your heartstrings” post. It has not been unusual for immigrants, particularly males, to be torn asunder from their families, even in past decades. If Mr. Garcia wanted to risk a third attempt at illegal immigration into the US, that was his risk.
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Two, as I mentioned, the only indication that Mr. Garcia might have died as a result of maltreatment by US authorities was from his wife. Why could it not have been from his experience in his third attempt at illegal immigration?
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Three, I don’t know whether you’ve read any of my comments regarding illegal immigration, but if you had, you would know that I am actually quite sympathetic to your cause. The US is dumping US government-subsidized agricultural products into Mexico and at least parts of Central America, destroying indigenous small farm agriculture. And, as a result the farmers are emigrating to the US. The US has only itself to blame for the illegal immigration. I could go on and on–the US support for the Contras (who were based in Guatemala), the US support for the death squads, the US resistance to land reform, etc.
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What I would be interested in reading from you is, less the heart-rending posts, but an analysis, as lengthy as need be, of the effects of US policy vis-a-vis Mexico and Central America in relation to illegal immigration into the US.
I think you’re probably right, I could contribute a lot in the area of how U.S. foreign policy is contributing instead of taking away from the problems associated with migration.
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Unfortunately, the online climate is much to hostile, and millions of migrants are going through too many everyday crises for me to engage in intellectual masturbation.
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Progressives have been fighting the u.s immigration debate assuming that the opponent is rational, but the opponent is fighting an all out culture war. And it is an all out war, just in Massachusetts there’s a crisis after migrant crisis.
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It is the heart, not the brain that will win the culture war.
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While you may not like it the above post is very focused, it is about how a father did this for love of his son and spouse.
I'm sympathetic to kyledeb's cause as well, but I am also strongly sympathetic to the US labor movement, which is in serious need of support to regain some sense of populist economic solutions here in the US.
I would love to see a raj-style contribution that offers ideas to bring these two camps together in a practical and meaningful way.
Of possible interest to the point of the post is an op-ed piece from this morning’s Globe. The hidden costs of free trade. I’m not going to copy the entire article, but here’s a teaser:
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There’s much more at the link. And that was exactly what the Wall Street Journal told me what would happen over a decade ago. And it has come to fruition.
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I think you’re probably right, I could contribute a lot in the area of how U.S. foreign policy is contributing instead of taking away from the problems associated with migration.
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And that is my challenge to you. I can’t do it, because I do not have first hand knowledge of how US economic policy has devastated Central America. You do. (And, if I’m not mistaken, you have a “.edu” domain name, which means “college.”) That is what I am looking for: what, in your view, and from your experience, has the US done to decimate the Mexican and Central American economies–leading to illegal immigration into the US–and what can the US do to repair the injuries that it has done. I doubt very seriously that people from Mexico, Belize, Nicaragua or Guatemala really want to leave their homes to come to the US if they had an alternative at home. But, as far as I can tell, they don’t have much of an alternative, and that is the problem.
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That’s the end of my rant. But I’ll just let you know that it should be obvious that I have no problem with the “spanification” of the “Amerikanische Sprache.” I don’t understand what problem some people have with that, but one reason that American “English” is so rich is that it has adopted so many words from so many other cultures.
When I get the time to do so. I do have to tackle this, but as long as crises like these continue to happen I will continue to write on them. Things seem to have calmed down a little so I might have a little bit of time. I’m currently working on a piece on the Guatemalan elections.