Last week’s arrest of Arturo Hernandez Garcia in Denver sent an awful and chilling message across the land. We hope members of Congress are listening.
Hernandez Garcia is well-known in Colorado as the first person in the country illegally to seek sanctuary in a church. After an immigration judge ordered his deportation, he lived from October 2014 through July 2015 at the First Unitarian Society of Denver. Though the business owner and family man had gotten into an altercation at a job site in 2010, charges against him were dropped. When he exited the sanctuary, he did so with a letter from federal officials saying he was not an immigration enforcement priority. Since overstaying his visa years ago, he has applied many times for some kind of legal status or discretion in his immigration case. As it does for so many here illegally during years of lax enforcement, deporting Hernandez Garcia now means breaking up a family that includes an American-born child and one with deferred action status.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked up Hernandez Garcia last week, the official explanation was that he was seized because of his immigration violations and the 2014 order for his deportation already mentioned.
For enforcement hardliners, ICE’s explanation will make perfect sense. “Hernandez Garcia has overstayed his original, six-month visa by nearly 14 years,” ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said in a statement.
Fair enough, but also in play last week were President Donald Trump’s race to put points on the 100-day scorecard, and the celebration by immigrant advocates over Time magazine’s listing another Denver sanctuary seeker, Jeanette Vizguerra, as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
The timing, even if coincidental, of the arrest of a well-known figure who also sought sanctuary and whose only crime is being in the country without permission, sends a convenient message of indifferent intolerance to everyone here without proper documentation. The arrest, given its impact on the lives of millions of families here, represents a kind of gratuitous and hateful overreach that defies understanding.
Already law enforcement in places like Colorado is struggling to assure otherwise law-abiding immigrants that they need not hide in fear and keep crimes against them secret. We don’t envy officials trying to make that argument now.
Trump can easily say he lived up to his promises on immigration out of the gate. He’s taken bids for a border wall, expanded enforcement hiring and threatened budget cuts for cities his administration considers light on enforcement. Immigration arrests have risen nearly 33 percent. The stepped-up enforcement includes a doubling of arrests for those who have no criminal records.
We would hope that this administration takes stock, now that this self-imposed deadline is behind the president, and refocuses attention on the truly dangerous criminals who exist within the larger immigrant community.
Either way, we hope Congress starts treating immigration reform seriously. We’ve long decried the status quo, which allows for exploitation of workers and creates broad civic unrest.
The problem in our country isn’t hard-working men and women like Hernandez Garcia and Vizguerra, it’s the broken system that has for too long looked the other way.
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