Introduction Illegal Aliens: A Problem of Law and History

I 2001  U S Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered Rosario Hernandez of Garland, Texas, deported to his native Mexico. Hernandez, a 39-year-old construction worker, had immigrated to Texas from Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was a teenager. His removal was ordered on grounds that he had been convicted three times for driving while intoxicated—twice nearly twenty years ago and once ten years later. After the third conviction Hernandez served five weekends in jail, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and gave up drinking. However, according to laws passed by Congress in 1996 the multiple convictions amounted to an “aggravated felony” and made his removal mandatory, not subject to review by a judge. Hernandez considered the deportation unfair: “I already paid for my mistakes,” he said, “How can they punish somebody two times for the same thing?” Hernandez is married to a U.S. citizen and has two children, who are also American citizens. His wife Renee said, “I respect him for admitting to his mistakes and changing his life. What people don’t realize is that this was a surprise attack on my life, as well. We have a baby here whose whole person is forming. He changes every day, and you want both parents to be a part of that.” Hernandez’s older son, Adrian, asks, “Where is my daddy going to be?” When I read Hernandez’s story I was struck by its resemblance to another story that I had come across while researching this book. In the early 1930s the INS ordered Mrs. Lillian Joann Flake, a longtime resident of Chicago, deported to her native Canada. Like Hernandez, Flake was married to an American citizen and had a daughter, also a citizen. She had a record of theft and shoplifting, which the INS considered “crimes of moral turpitude.” Flake’s deportation was canceled by an act of grace by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. The 1996 laws, however, explicitly deny administrative relief in cases like Hernandez’s. Then, as now, legal reformers and immigrant advocates publicized deportation stories like these in order to call attention to what they believed was a problem in American immigration policy. Reformers argued that the nation’s sovereign right to determine the conditions under which foreigners enter and remain in the country runs into trouble when the government expels people who have acquired families and property in the United States. They found cases like Hernandez’s and Flake’s compelling because embedded in © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.