‘The Impact That It Had on People Was Not Really Covered’

Janine Jackson interviewed Cristina Jiménez about the Supreme Court’s immigration ruling for the July 15, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Cristina Jimenez:

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Janine Jackson: Coming amid a number of other high-profile decisions, the Supreme Court’s 4-to-4 deadlock blocking Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration may not have gotten the attention it deserved. The measures would have expanded eligibility for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, as well as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program, programs that shield people from deportation, at least temporarily. Who is affected by the ruling, and where does it fit on the bigger road to truly humane immigration policy?

Cristina Jiménez is co-founder and managing director of the United We Dream Network, the country’s largest immigrant youth–led organization. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Cristina Jiménez.

Christina Jiménez: Thanks for having me.

JJ: United We Dream organizes and advocates for the dignity and fair treatment of immigrant youth and families, regardless of immigration status. That seems so important in a context in which, although there’s been some success in getting media to stop calling human beings illegal, there still is this overwhelming focus on dividing people, rhetorically, based on status. But, as this court ruling brings to light, people and families just don’t separate into those boxes, do they?

CJ: It’s not as black and white. We have millions of families across the country who live in mixed immigration-status families. For example, my own family: I came at the age of 13 with my parents and my brother in 1998 from Ecuador, and we came here seeking a better life. My parents wanted to make sure that I could go to school, and that they could have jobs to feed us and raise my brother and me.

And in my family alone, you have three different immigration statuses. Both of my parents continue to be undocumented, although we’ve lived here for the past 17 years, and I have, after 16 years, a green card, a permanent resident card, and my brother is a beneficiary of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which is a temporary protection from deportation. And other families across the country have either similar situations, or even have US citizen children or US citizen family members, at the same time that they are undocumented family members, which is why the decision of the Supreme Court for millions of people was just so important.

And even though the Court had a split outcome and basically made no decision of the case, it meant that close to 5 million people, including families like my own, will not be able to get protection from deportation. Unfortunately, it’s something that communities and families have been looking forward to with much hope. So it was a very, very difficult day, the day that the decision came out, and many families and millions of people were impacted by it.

JJ: It sounds as though the Court didn’t exactly talk about the merits of the programs themselves. What was the contention; was it really just about the executive action not being legal? I mean, it seemed to be a kind of procedural thing.

CJ: The legal debate on the Court, I mean, it’s—we know that this lawsuit was filed by Republicans, led by Governor Abbott from the state of Texas, and then joined by another 20 Republicans from across the country, who challenged the case on two bases. One, raising the question whether the president had the constitutional presidential power to do this, and the second argument that they raised is how programs like this could raise burdens for states across the country.

And we know very well that many presidents, including Republican presidents in the past, have taken similar actions, and all of the legal analysis supports the fact that this program was within the constitutional power of the president. It seems to us, from the analysis, that the question of the burden on the states was a question for debate of the Court, and clearly the Court was not able to end up making a decision, and ended up in a 4-to-4 outcome, which was also impacted by the fact that there’s no full Supreme Court at the moment, and a vacancy after Justice Scalia passed has not been filled because Republicans are blocking it.

JJ: The media stories that I saw pretty much pivot directly to the presidential election. In response to the Supreme Court ruling, immigrants rights groups are going to turn out the vote, is the story. I’m not saying that that’s untrue, but I guess I wish there’d been more attention to the human impact of the ruling, and maybe bigger questions about immigration and what kind of society we want to live in. I wonder, is there’s anything that you would like to see more of or less of in news media when they approach immigration reform?

CJ: We know that there were very big decisions that the Court was making on several fronts, on choice, on immigration, on affirmative action. And so, understandably, there was media coverage of all of those decisions, including immigration. But what was really unfortunate, and I think it really hurt the conversation around immigration, if we’re trying to have a debate across the country about this, is that the stories and the impact that it had on people were not really covered. And, as you said, it became a political conversation about whether Latino voters or immigrant voters will turn out to vote, and what will be the impact on the election.

And that is one very valid point, which is true; there is a very important connection between how the community feels about the impact of the decision and how it will impact in November, and how they turn out to vote. But in addition to that, there are the stories and the families like my own that were impacted by this; that was not necessarily an angle that the media focused on. And so in thinking about what would — what I would have wanted to see more of in the conversation would have been coverage of immigrant families and immigrant communities that would have been directly impacted by this, in addition to really talking about what matters, in terms of what’s at stake in the election. Right?

So for Democrats and Republicans, the stake is the vote, and they are both in the battle to keep power or to gain power, but for communities like the ones United We Dream works with, which we work largely with Latino and immigrant communities in over 25 states, what is at stake is really an existential threat for us. Because candidates like Donald Trump have committed publicly, multiple times, to basically wipe out the country from people like myself and my parents, and 11 million people who are here who are immigrants, and this is a huge deal for Latino voters, for Asian-American voters, and for largely immigrant communities across the country. And that has not necessarily been an angle that the media have focused on, but rather has really paid attention a lot to what this means in terms of votes, when in reality what we’re talking about is the wave of hate and public promises of blocking migration from Muslim countries, and wiping the country out of people like myself and millions of families.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Cristina Jiménez of the United We Dream Network. Cristina, how can folks find your work online and possibly get involved?

CJ: We are online and also are very active in social media platforms. If you go to UnitedWeDream.org, that is our website; you can find us there. And you can find us on Facebook on United We Dream, as well as our Twitter account, which is @UnitedWeDream. And those are ways in which the community and your listeners can know about our work, and can engage in the different states where we are active.

JJ: All right then. Thank you very much, Cristina Jiménez from United We Dream, for joining us today on CounterSpin.

CJ: Thank you.