Somebody please explain to me why a mother of a nursing baby, whose husband is a U.S. citizen, was snatched from her family and sent back to Cuba.
Or why a mother and her 4-year-old son with Stage 4 metastatic cancer — a U.S. citizen — were sent to Honduras, where the child most likely won’t get the treatment that could possibly save his life. (Trump administration officials said the undocumented mother chose to bring her son with her as she was deported.)
Why is this happening in our America, that once invited “… your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to come here?
Something is wrong. I understand that in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was unlawfully deported by the Trump administration in March to the horrific prison in El Salvador — there was the question of him being a gang member. Yet Abrego Garcia has never been charged with or convicted of being a member of MS-13.
President Donald Trump, in an interview Tuesday with ABC News Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran, acknowledged he can bring back Abrego Garcia, but won’t because he believes he is a gang member.
“You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk,” Moran said to Trump, noting how he could call El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and have Abrego Garcia sent back immediately.
“And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” Trump said. “But he’s not,” according to an ABC News transcript of the interview.
This despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to uphold a lower court order saying the Trump administration must “facilitate” his release from the El Salvador prison.
I don’t know Abrego Garcia. I don’t know if he is a gang member or not. But I do know that something just doesn’t smell right.
So, while authorities in the U.S. and El Salvador weigh whether to release Abrego Garcia, ICE officials in Tampa saw fit to deport Heidy Sánchez, 44, a Hillsborough County resident who came to this country from Cuba in 2019.
She is an undocumented immigrant who is married to a U.S. citizen. They are the parents of a 1-year-old baby girl, whom Sanchez was still nursing when she was deported last week and sent to Cuba. The child was born in the United States and is an American citizen.
These deportation antics remind me of the children who were separated from their immigrant parents during Trump’s first run as president. It was so sad to see how Trump officials handled the migrants back then, taking tiny babies from their mothers and placing small children in shelters that resembled cages.
As a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, those scenes still tug at my heart. I cannot imagine being separated from my babies in such a cruel way. Like many of you, I feel helpless because I don’t know what to do. So, I pray often for these children and their parents.
While it was bad back then, it’s worse now, where people are being picked up and sent back almost immediately, without so much as a goodbye to their loved ones, who in some cases are U.S. citizens. In Sánchez’s case, according to the Herald story by Nora Gámez Torres, she was sent back to Cuba last Thursday morning, after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at her check-in appointment in Tampa on Tuesday of that week. She was one of 82 people returned to Cuba.
There are illegal immigrants living here who are criminals. Sanchez is not one of them. She is just a woman who found love with an American citizen, had a child and was living her dream.
The criminals who have come to this country should be deported. But that isn’t always the case. Tell me — how will this country benefit by deporting nursing mothers? How will it benefit the children and the spouses who are citizens who are left behind?
Deportation is not pretty. But I understand it is sometimes a necessary evil. Still, I believe that more thought should be given to who should and who should not be departed.
American children are being departed along with their undocumented mothers/parents. We need to fix this. American children should not be forced to leave the country because their parents, who are undocumented but law-abiding immigrants, have been deported.
People are living in fear. Many of them have had a taste of the American dream and have built homes and businesses and raised families here. Now, their future has been snatched from under them like a rug.
America, we need to fix this. I wish I knew how.
OPINION by BEA L. HINES
Bea L. Hines in Florida (Miami Herald photo by: Al Diaz)
