Arnoldo Bazan was on his way to school with his dad when federal immigration agents placed Bazan in a chokehold, took his phone and deported his father to Mexico, according to the 16-year-old. His experience, he says, “affects me to this day.” When he sees a law enforcement officer or hears a siren, the teenager says his heart starts racing.
Ana Michelle Ramirez Sanan, 18, said she was grabbed by federal immigration agents after officers smashed the window of her mother’s car and dragged her and her brother out of the car.
Another 18-year-old said he was left to live on his own after his family, including his 10-year-old sister who requires specialized medical care, was deported to Mexico. He said he’s scared that without the medical care his sister needs, she could die.
“You can say all you want about how these awful immigration policies don’t affect U.S. citizens, but that’s a lie,” the teenager, who spoke under the pseudonym Fernando Hernández García due to fear for his safety, told lawmakers, speaking about how the instability has prevented him from attending college.
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“My family was torn apart from me and my future along with them,” he said. “If my parents were still here, they would have pushed me to go to college, to dream big, and they would have helped me make it happen.”
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These are some of the stories shared by six U.S. citizens on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as part of Democrat-run panels focused on President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The Trump administration has repeatedly said the goal of its mass deportation campaign is to target the “worst of the worst” as a means to make America “safe again” for U.S. citizens.
But the reality on the ground, according to the families that spoke about their encounters with federal immigration agents and a Minnesota school superintendent who works in a district whose schools were heavily affected by Operation Metro Surge, is that the aggressive campaign has dramatically changed life in America in ways that will have lasting consequences for more than just the deported immigrants.
“This is the Department of Homeland Security,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who organized the event with Rep. Robert Garcia, said in his opening remarks. “Security, yet they have made kids insecure and unsafe. They have treated them with a cruelty and inhumanity that is unconscionable and intolerable in the greatest country in the history of the world, or anywhere, and we would denounce it if it occurred halfway across the globe, and yet it is tolerable in this country.”
On Monday, ProPublica reported that the parents of more than 11,000 U.S. citizen children have been detained under this Trump administration, a figure cited throughout the panel.
“As much as I would like to also wonder if they don’t know what they’re doing, it’s hard to think they don’t know,” Sen. Alex Padilla said. “It’s all over the news. It’s all over social media. They’ve heard from the public, they’ve heard from us. The question in my mind isn’t do they know, it’s do they care?”
The event was hosted by Democratic lawmakers from both chambers of Congress, as their party makes demands for more guardrails be put on immigration agents in negotiations for a funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security. The department has been shut down for more than a month.
No Republicans attended the forum. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools just outside of Minneapolis, said the effect the immigration enforcement operations had on her students could be felt on three levels: parents and students who were detained, families who were scared to leave their homes and sent their children to schools with neighbors or attended virtually and students who “were not in danger of being detained but lived in constant fear due to the pervasive ICE presence in our community.”
“It became clear to me that these were not operations targeted towards violent criminals,” said Stenvik. “No, their actions consisted of racially profiling Black and brown people who happened to drive by where ICE was staged. It became a daily occurrence to see multiple ICE vehicles driving in front of and behind our schools, especially during arrival and dismissal times.”
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