The brutal seizure and arrest of Perla Morales-Luna this week, by Customs and Border Protection agents in National City, a suburb of San Diego, has prompted a thoughtful response from The Southern Poverty Law Center, which contends that the United States has no moral authority to deport indigenous Americans across an artificial national border that post-dates by centuries their ancestors’ citizenship in a nation that was here for thousands of years before Caucasian interlopers arrived to sketch lines on a map.
But they first recap the arrest, which was captured in this chilling video:
The SPLC next indicts the Trump administration for their actions just over the past few weeks in this powerful paragraph:
“Last month alone saw President Trump comparing immigrants to snakes, Chief of Staff John Kelly dismissing DREAMers as “too lazy to get off their asses,” and the House Immigration Subcommittee entertaining testimony from the representative of an anti-immigrant hate group.”
Continuing to the subject of The CBP’s jurisdiction over Morales-Luna they link to a piece by Betty Lyons for The Guardian titled “Dreamers must be protected – as Indigenous Peoples were not.”
“As we approach the 5 March date for expiration of the legal immigration status of so-called Dreamers – those who came to the US as children and now fall under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, or Daca – we as citizens of the original Indigenous Nations of this continent have been watching closely.
We have dealt with these issues ever since the first Europeans crossed the Atlantic and “discovered” lands you call the Americas, known to us for millennia as the Great Turtle Island or Abya Yala. Since the United States was founded on our lands in 1776, these policies and practices have had a devastating impact on the territories and rights of the Original Nations and our relatives from both north and the south of US borders.
For us, Daca is not an immigration crisis. It is a human rights crisis. And human rights cannot be deferred. Every day approximately 122 people lose Daca protection. This cruel policy immorally punishes and traumatizes innocent young people and their families.
As Indigenous Peoples, we know our history and we know our relatives. Many so-called “undocumented” people are in fact Indigenous Peoples, children of Original Nations with a millennial history of travel across the continent to trade and engage in ceremonial obligations at sacred sites of their traditional territories before the US existed.”
But even outside the issue of whether the treatment of Morales-Luna, who has lived in the United States since she was 15 years old and whose three daughters are United States citizens by birthright, was merited, her arrest and deportation is very problematic.
In my first link above you can read that the arresting agents were not displaying badges at the time that they seized her, and though CBP has accused her of being entangled in a human trafficking ring, no charges or indictments have been levied against her and her deportation is being handled administratively and not as a criminal matter.
Her lawyer has questions…
“It’s not right that she’s been separated from her family as a result of simply being here illegally,” Moreno said. CBP claims they tried working with Morales-Luna about the case, but she reportedly refuse to cooperate. Moreno says her legal status is a civil case, not a criminal one. Blending the two together to defend their actions is one thing Moreno cannot get behind.
“To go from no criminal history to she’s part of this elaborate scheme, and then process her as a non-criminal alien … that’s what’s wrong,” Moreno said. Where’s the proof of the allegation? Where’s the criminal charges? Where’s the indictment? We don’t have any of that,” Moreno added “If she’s a criminal, why is she being processed administratively?”
And local human rights activist Mark Lane charges that CBP is smearing Morales-Luna to cover a botched arrest.
But beyond the merits of this particular arrest, THE SPLC and Ms. Lyons pose the more pertinent question.
Does white America and it’s institutions and enforcers have a right to interfere with the movements of indigenous Americans within a landscape that generations of their ancestors cultivated, built cities upon and lived and died in for thousands of years before Jamestown and Plymouth were illegally founded?
I agree with Lyons and the SPLC.
We do not.