Should Immigrant Criminals be Deported?

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Christian Lopez

President Donald Trump seems to have a problem with non-Americans. As you may know, Trump has decided to build a wall on the south border. He is deporting immigrants to their countries or origin. His main targets are Muslims and Mexicans. But what if they are in prison? They have committed some crime. Would sending them back be dangerous as we don’t know what they’ll do? Even the immigrant activists are saying that sending immigrant criminals to their home country is a bad idea.

Rosa Alvarado, 66, and an immigrant activist, says “Get rid of the bad ones, I say. Deport the criminals and leave the rest of us alone, the ones who are working who don’t do anything.” Christian Hernandez, 25, and his mother, Lydia Hernandez, 57, said they came to the march against racism as a way to challenge Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Christian is a part of the Obama administration’s immigrant relief program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Christian and his mom have been in the U.S since 1998 and have no criminal records. He says that people who commit violent crimes make him and his fellow immigrants look bad and should be deported. Christian says that “Trump has stirred racism by broadly painting immigrants in the darkest tones. The minute he decided to say we’re all criminals and rapists, it was like a bucket of cold water being thrown at you.”  Christian Hernandez feels that being categorized as a criminal and rapist was insulting. Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, believes all deportations should be suspended until the immigrant system is improved “We’re deporting people without a single penny to their name into abject poverty of homelessness, many of them back to places the haven’t known. These people are products of our society.” Salas is expressing that we’re deporting people without knowing that they will have any place to go.

Jorge Gutierrez of the L.A.-based LGBTQ group Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, said “there will likely be more disagreements over which immigrants to defend if the Trump administration hires thousands more Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcements agents and becomes more aggressive over whom it targets. He hasn’t put the whole infrastructure together. So once he does, it’s going to create more deportations. And in all of that, this narrative, the tension, is going to be more visible.”

Immigrants are coming to America illegally. This is because their living conditions in their former homes are terrible. I don’t believe that we should be able to just send them back to their country, not knowing if they’ll live or die. I believe that we should let them stay. They are doing jobs that we, as Americans, don’t want to do to make our country better. It is with us that the aliens from foreign countries are treated respectfully and equally, as they would treat us fairly if we lived in their country.