DEPORTED AMERICANS

A former Los Angeles public defender offers a deeply informed
appeal to create more humane practices for noncitizens facing criminal
deportation.

As a criminal defense attorney who, from 2005 to 2009,
represented noncitizens in their fight against deportation after criminal
convictions, Caldwell (Legal Analysis, Writing, and Skills/Southwestern Law
School) came away with the sense that the American legal process does not
adequately address the challenges faced by these noncitizens. Subsequent
research on a Fulbright Garcia-Robles grant in Mexico in 2009 allowed the
author to interview many of the deported people who had grown up in America and
who largely considered themselves American: They had been raised there as
children and spoke non-accented English; they had sworn allegiance to the
American flag in public school; they had assumed all the traditional American
customs and holidays. As Caldwell writes, she was influenced in her research by
her own “mixed-status family”; she is married to a Mexican man whose family has
members struggling with various immigration issues. In this eloquent book, she
shares the specific stories and examples of people for whom the sentence of deportation
was a form of “violent dismemberment.” The American legal system has long
embraced an “exclusionary framework” regarding “aliens,” from the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1990, which “created an
out-of-court administrative removal process for those convicted of aggravated
felonies, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for many years.” This streamlined
approach did not take into account the deep American roots of many immigrants
as well as the dependence of their spouses and their children. Caldwell looks
systematically at the effects of deportation to Mexico on the spouses and
children especially (drug abuse, depression, suicide, attractions to gangs) and
how this inhumane banishment should be amended.

A compelling, rigorously researched legal argument against the
demonization of deportees.