The great Margaret Regan, a longtime Tucson Weekly contributor, is going to chat about her book Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire in the Madison, Wisconsin-based community radio show A Public Affair tomorrow morning.
The show starts at 10 a.m. Tucson time. Call here: (608) 256-2001 to ask questions and give Margaret a shout out. You can listen to the show live, here.
Jim Nintzel did a Q&A with Margaret in March, and the Weekly featured an excerpt of Detained and Deported that same month. Here’s a taste:
Yolanda Fontes sat in her prison scrubs and watched the families gathered all around her. Husbands were reconnecting with wives, sisters with sisters, mothers with children. It was a sunny Sunday in April, and the families had flocked to the Eloy Detention Center, a dreary for-profit immigration prison in rural Arizona, to visit their detained loved ones. A female prisoner sat with her small son on her lap, her arms wrapped tightly around him, as if she were imagining never letting him go. The aunt who had brought the little boy spoke sorrowfully to her sister as the child snuggled in his mother’s embrace. Nearby, an imprisoned father sat across a table from his wife, clutching her hand. They were trying to talk, but their four-year-old daughter, hungry and tired, fussed on the floor below.
An impassive guard presided over these melancholy reunions, keeping a close watch on the mothers and fathers dressed in jailbird scrubs. The visiting room was bleak and windowless, lit by glaring prison lights. It was a beautiful spring day outside, but no rays of sunlight pierced the cinder block walls.
Alone among the detainees in this stark space, Yolanda had no family visiting. She was glad to be out of her prison unit, though, and she was determined to be cheerful. Yet her tale was grim, and she looked at the other detainees’ kids wistfully as she recounted it. During the two years she’d spent locked up in Eloy, she’d seen her two little girls and her little boy only sporadically. The children, all American citizens, lived in a distant suburb northwest of Phoenix. They came to visit their mom only when a relative or friend could spare the time to drive the two-hundred-mile round trip to Eloy. The last time Yolanda had seen them was two months before.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2015.
Oh, how dramatic.
The children are only U.S. citizens due to an antiquated custom of birthright citizenship which every other developed country long ago got rid of for this very reason.
Yolanda could go home today. There is no reason for her to stay in detention unless she is trying to stay in the U.S. after coming here illegally. Her incarceration is her own choice.
Her children could go with her if she chose, since they will have dual citizenship (at least they will if they’re from Mexico, a good bet). Mexico may be relatively poor, but it’s not in a civil war or famine or otherwise in a state where we might feel morally obligated to accept refugees.
This will never stop unless both sides on the issue stand up to big business and say ‘no’ to the cheap labor lobby.
I second everything that was said here,
Oh, how dramatic.
The children are only U.S. citizens due to an antiquated custom of birthright citizenship which every other developed country long ago got rid of for this very reason.
Yolanda could go home today. There is no reason for her to stay in detention unless she is trying to stay in the U.S. after coming here illegally. Her incarceration is her own choice.
Her children could go with her if she chose, since they will have dual citizenship (at least they will if they’re from Mexico, a good bet). Mexico may be relatively poor, but it’s not in a civil war or famine or otherwise in a state where we might feel morally obligated to accept refugees.
This will never stop unless both sides on the issue stand up to big business and say ‘no’ to the cheap labor lobby.
So Az dems will not support Kate’s Law dealing with crimes committed by illegals. Look how desperate they are for votes. Willing to let us be murdered. This is insanity.
They stand with the President. Do you?