Dain Birkley: Many were right to distrust our government’s promises on immigration

When the memoranda creating Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the later deportation deferral memo for parents of DACA recipients (aka DAPA) were issued, I managed a law firm with exclusively Spanish-speaking clients mostly seeking shelter from deportation. We were puzzled at how few of the thousands of students and young adults eligible for DACA applied. When quizzed, the stated reason was almost always that signing up for DACA informed ICE where they lived, which put their undocumented parents, undocumented siblings and undocumented relatives at risk of being swept up and summarily deported.

Our response was “that will never happen.” We believed our government would never be so deceitful.

Mexican immigrants do not trust government. Mexican history is replete with authoritarian leaders who lied to the citizenry and manipulated the “democratic” process. In hindsight, it is remarkable how naïve, the lawyers, all Mexican Americans were; how blind to the fact that the same America, which had provided them abundant opportunity, could, with the stroke of the presidential pen, sweep up, deport and destroy Mexican families because DACA had exposed them.

Using DACA registration as a deportation tool would be a shameless betrayal of trust.

This story was originally published February 27, 2017 at 1:58 PM with the headline "Dain Birkley: Many were right to distrust our government’s promises on immigration."