The Department of Homeland Security estimates that more than 500,000 people were deported this year.
The public watched as masked federal agents shattered car windows, tackled people to the ground and threw tear gas canisters into crowds as part of the Trump administration’s effort to detain and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible. Some of these migrants were deported to Mexico, despite not being from Mexico; some were deported to other countries that weren’t their home, as far away as Africa, where they have made accusations of torture and abuse.
In an attempt to understand the concept behind these events — deportation itself — filmmaker Alex Rivera decided to go back to the beginning and make a documentary about the first person ever deported in 1893. He was inspired by the work of historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor at UCLA.
Preview clips from the film, “Banishment,” will be screened as part of a live conversation between Rivera and Lytle Hernández at Bread & Salt in San Diego on Dec. 13, a joint presentation of Zócalo Public Square, MacArthur Foundation and Times of San Diego.
The film follows Fong Yue Ting, a laundry worker in New York who took his deportation case to the Supreme Court, challenging the amendment to the Chinese Exclusion Act that mandated his expulsion. Though his lawyers argued that deportation is never mentioned in the Constitution, the Supreme Court voted 5-3 to validate the legality of the deportation system that would later grow into its current form.
Where does deportation come from?
Co-presented by Zócalo Public Square, MacArthur Foundation, Times of San Diego, and Bread & Salt
6 p.m.-8 p.m. Dec. 13
Bread & Salt, 1955 Julian Ave., San Diego
Free. Reserve a spot here.
Rivera says that returning to the 1890s altered his perception of the current moment, as the process of going back in time both confronts widely held beliefs and provides a potential roadmap toward greater justice.
“There was a time when the idea of the government using jail cells, using armed agents, using trains and boats, to expel people — what we call deportation, what we call immigration enforcement today — there was a time when that was an alien idea,” he said.
Lytle Hernández’s work also challenges the belief that border enforcement and deportation are part of the standard responsibilities of a nation. “This idea of having borders and the notion that a country has a sovereign right to exclude people from entering is fairly new,” she said.
Since 1890, the United States has deported people some 8 million times. But in their dissenting opinions in 1893, the three Supreme Court justices who voted against the expulsion of Fong Yue Ting argued that deportation denied immigrants their right to due process, as outlined in the Constitution, and was a cruel and unusual punishment for failing to possess adequate paperwork.
“They said this system is going to cause all kinds of problems and it doesn’t align with our values. … Who should be put in a cage for moving? Who should be handcuffed for deciding they want to live somewhere else?” Rivera said.
Now, Rivera says, the ubiquity of deportations has built a society in which few people question the core idea of expulsion, even if they oppose ICE agents wearing masks or making public arrests.
Through a historical lens, Rivera says, today’s norms are turned on their heads, creating space to imagine an alternate reality. “We’re living in an age of hyper violence on the border, hyper violence on immigrant lives and immigrant dignity — to think about love and justice for immigrants is to enter a sort of speculative realm,” he said.
What many may not see, Rivera says, is an “illuminating and disturbing” reality, that the deportation system was built with the explicit purpose of excluding non-white populations (96% of deportations in the past 140 years have been to non-white majority countries), but also that immigrant communities have been fighting back against deportations for over a century.
Immigration reports
In detention: Migrants face a choice to wait years behind bars or agree to deportation nowSummoned to arrest: Times of San Diego finds migrants summoned to meetings statewideAgriculture workers: Raids add to climate-driven woes in Central Valley fieldsICE arrests U.S. citizens: San Diego woman’s case reveals unclear path forward
Central to the history of the American people, Lytle Hernández explains, is a longheld tradition of subverting immigration enforcement. “From the very first moment you have immigration controls, you have resistance,” Lytle Hernández said. In fact, without that resistance, she says, “most of us wouldn’t be here.”
In the 1890s, Chinese-American civil rights groups joined forces with businesses and lawyers to fund a legal campaign opposing the first deportations. “You start to see a constellation between on-the-ground activists aligned with community interests and business interests, and visionary lawyers working with them. And the most extraordinary thing is they actually almost managed to stop deportation before it began,” Rivera said.
In the early 20th century, Lytle Hernández explains, Japanese activists fought for the right of detained migrants to have a court hearing prior to deportation. Most of the work to disrupt the immigration enforcement system came after 1965, Lytle Hernández says, through individual people figuring out how to take advantage of visa laws prioritizing family members of U.S. citizens. “The fact that we have such a diverse country today is not because Congress put us on this path. It is only because of the resistance of migrants and their advocates,” Lytle Hernández said.
It is these incremental steps forward that reveal a pathway toward a more just future, Lytle Hernández says.
Though her work focuses on history, Lytle Hernández says she hopes returning to the story of the first deportation inspires the public to think far into the future. “It’s not just about what we can win in this administration. It also can be about what we are going to win for seven generations from now.”
Lillian Perlmutter covers immigration for Times of San Diego and NEWSWELL.
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