Bernard Kleina

Elvira Arellano met with Felipe Calderon in his salon. These household names from Michoacán, Mexico followed starkly different paths to celebrity: the latter, a
Harvard graduate, had just taken the Mexican presidency with only a .58-percent margin of victory and amidst fervent dissent; the former, a cleaning lady, had just been deported from the United States after taking sanctuary to evade immigration laws.

Elvira came to Felipe seeking a diplomatic visa to return to the U.S. legally. Already praised as a peace ambassador and the “Rosita Parks” of immigrant rights, she believed she could help these two nations work out a deal on migrants, just as they had with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the drug wars. Perhaps uneasy with people who question authority, or concerned that turning a deportee into a government officer would upset the markets, Felipe politely declined. Elvira left the salon disappointed and criticized her new president to the leading newspaper, La Jornada: “He is very weak.”

Her assessment was not without basis. Elvira knew something about risk and vulnerability. A single mother, once deported and having twice crossed the border, she used to clean airplanes at O’Hare International Airport. Just before Christmas 2002, a federal sweep of 500 workers pushed her off the payroll and into the criminal courts. After three appearances before a federal judge, she pleaded guilty to document fraud (she bought fake papers to be able to work) and got three years probation. Elvira now belonged to a category almost universally condemned as “doubly illegal.” As a New York Times journalist once editorialized, “The country is polarized between those who want a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and those who want to deport them. But just about everyone agrees that the doubly illegal, immigrants with no documents and who have committed crimes, are not welcome.”

Elvira was positioned to bridge the chasm between everyday survival and collective efforts for change.

Elvira disagreed. She was in fact outraged that the criminal courts would judge her so severely and that the immigration courts would not judge her at all. Contrary to popular belief, Elvira never had an immigration hearing. Deportation was the outcome of a civil process run entirely by Homeland Security.

My colleague Subhash Kateel, a veteran organizer, once told a disbelieving congressman, “Deportation is the cruelest civil proceeding in America. Is there any other where you can be incarcerated the whole time and never get a hearing?” If there is a single feature that distinguishes today’s immigration system from the past, it is prison. Two years after NAFTA deregulated economic borders, then–President Clinton signed domestic immigration laws that made deportation and detention mandatory minimums within our physical borders.

Elvira—unlike most of the workers picked up in the airport raids, and unlike most of the 2 million deported in the last decade—was not locked up physically. Nor spiritually. Where most would be afraid or ashamed, she insisted, “God is not embarrassed when one speaks for truth.” In advocates’ press conferences, she soon became the human face on the broken system.

While bearing witness, Elvira met Emma Lozano, an old-timer in Chicago politics who is as revered as she is controversial. Emma approached this young woman, raw with passion, and asked: “Do you have a job? A lawyer? A place to stay?” Emma invited her to live in a church. Elvira was cleaning homes and selling buttons about her struggle to skim by. Free housing was a godsend. And so began a relationship that pulled Elvira into a politicized community. Regular people resist political disenfranchisement daily—crossing the border, working off the books, saving money under mattresses. The standard nonprofit organization—structured to provide services or lobby people with power–is not built to seize on the power of regular people. Maria Jimenez, another veteran organizer, explains: “You see so much second- and third-floor organizing that assumes we have a first floor…the first floor is busy working and saving money.”