Immigrant Justice is Disability Justice is Worker Justice
A Family Story
Illustration by Caitlin Blunnie
Image Description: Illustration of a diverse crowd in teal and pink tones. A Black woman at center wears a vest reading “Protect People Not Borders,” a tear on her cheek, surrounded by people of varied ages and styles, including someone with a bird on their hat.
Last week, a 56-year-old blind father and refugee who was kidnapped from his family on February 19 was found dead in Buffalo, New York. Nurul Amin Shah Alam was abandoned by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) without any notification to his family of his whereabouts. We are in the midst of a long overdue awakening about the true nature of CBP, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and immigrant detention in the United States. And as Donald Trump unleashes the largest federal police force in history on many who have never before experienced it, many are becoming familiar with a disabling and deadly state violence people of color, disabled, queer, and poor communities in this country have experienced for too long. And yet, too many in our disability community and beyond are unaware of the asymmetrical ways this violence of racial capitalism has shaped us, our families, and communities for years. Nurul should be alive and eating dinner with his family tonight.
I hear too much rhetoric about how protests to abolish ICE and our current system of immigration enforcement and detention should or should not look, so I want to share how these systems violence have shaped my story, to show how Nurul's story is all too familiar to too many of us.
My family of seven came to the United States through tourist visas when I was very young. For the first year and a half, we lived with visas, every six months having to go through the lengthy process of renewing them. When we first arrived, my father worked as a ranch hand and his employers provided us with a place to live. That family expected my mother to clean, cook, and babysit their children without any pay. They kept my siblings and me from attending school and isolated all of us from friends and family. They had our sleeping quarters separate from those of our parents. They attempted to take our personal documents away. They held onto my father’s wages, telling him it was for “safe keeping” since he couldn’t get a bank account. Yet, when he asked for his wages one day, they came up with excuses as to why they would not give him his money and never paid him.
Like many immigrants, my father was a victim of wage theft, the most profitable form of theft in the United States. According to the Economic Policy Institute, employers in this country steal up to $50 billion from employees each year.
This was our first experience in the United States, as de facto indentured servants for this family. With the help of family, we were able to leave this exploitative situation, and then constantly moved around looking for housing and work. During this time, we overstayed our visas. In our last visa appointment, my parents were told that if we planned on staying in the U.S., we should not return to renew our visa again or we would be denied and deported.
There were many reasons my parents decided to stay in the United States, but one of the major factors was that my parents realized that my brother and I, as children with disabilities, would have educational and medical opportunities here that we would be denied in Mexico. From one day to another, we “became” undocumented, and this came at a huge price for all our family involved.
The educational opportunities that we gained came at the cost of deep trauma, family separation, and state violence. I grew up cleaning houses with my sister and my mom on the weekends, one of many odd jobs we worked to make ends meet. Other family members worked in the fields picking vegetables, cleaning stables, working at factories, in construction and so on.
I remember playing by the fields while airplanes sprayed pesticides over our heads, the effect of which we may not know for years to come. Those experiences were woven with ones of exploitation, work injuries, undignified working conditions, low wages, wage theft, you name it.
On top of that, my family had to navigate the potential that at any moment we could be arrested and deported. We constantly held on to this fear for our survival, hyper aware when driving down the road, seeing a police car and praying they did not stop us, as we could have been deported for a simple traffic stop. Hearing the stories of family members who crossed the border on foot. Knowing you are being taken advantage of in situations, but not having a way to speak up, due to lack of documentation, or not believed due to racism.
As we grew up, the experiences didn’t improve. My father, who was a victim of a crime, was investigated by the police as they believed he was involved in criminal activity simply for the way he looked. During this ordeal, the police were brazen and unprovoked in sharing their racist opinions about Mexican men and why they didn’t believe my father. Many of my family members have been constantly stopped by police, thrown on the ground, weapons drawn on them, detained and arrested for being brown, and they have been some of the luckier ones. The constant threat of the police state, with its hypervigilance, detention, arrests, deportation, family separation, and murder, was the real American Dream my family lived day-to-day.
Over a decade ago, one of my siblings and their spouse made one of the toughest decisions of their lives and decided that the crushing weight of racism and xenophobia of life in the United States was no longer something they could accept. With their small children, they crossed the border back to Mexico. They left knowing that they would never get to see or hug many of us ever again; knowing they would never meet their nieces and nephews, that they would miss countless weddings, births, graduations, and deaths. That when my sister hugged my mother goodbye, that could very well be the last time they saw each other.
There is an unquantifiable pain that runs deep in our emotional psyche, one that history has shown us causes deep intergenerational trauma, and it is that of family separation by the hands of the state.
Many Mexicans call the U.S., “la jaula de oro,” this golden cage keeping us from being truly free. We grew up in the ’90s, which meant we didn’t see our family in Mexico via video phone calls. Instead, we communicated by mailing letters and pictures, and placing rare phone calls paid for using expensive calling cards that half of the time scammed you of your minutes to talk with loved ones. Days apart turned into months, months into years, years into decades, and we had no chances to hug our family.
Due to racialized capitalism enforced by the state repression of the border, police, and the migra (ICE), my family has been separated for more than 35 years and some of my siblings have never met. I was away at college when my mother received the phone call that her mother had passed, and still there three months later when her father passed. She was not able to go and say her goodbyes — a pain that sadly, too many immigrants know. This is what we mean when we say, “borders keep families apart.” This is the type of state violence that folks believe is an unintended consequence of borders and immigration policies. But the more I pay attention, the more I realize this is very much an intended consequence in the warfare the state wages — and historically has waged against — brown, Black, Indigenous, disabled, and queer people.
I do not share my personal story for people who do not want to understand. I share my story because I have a deep responsibility to my community to provide my truth, in the face of so many lies told about undocumented immigrants. Many people who have never experienced state terror at the hands of its enforcers such as the police or ICE are somehow the loudest voices right now, creating the narratives, chastising people for resisting state violence, telling us what “appropriate” language to use and actions to take.
I share this because my family is not unique. This is a reality that millions of other people living in the United States are experiencing.
Working in education, I see the fear and anxiety in Latino students and their families. Students are worried for themselves and for their parents. Yet they are showing up to school and doing their best to continue to live the lives they came here for.
I will never forget the story of one family with a blind child I met through my work. They have gone through a lot and moved to get the services they need in education. Someone asked them if the moves have been hard, to which they answered, “No, I walked here with my children all the way from Central America. Everything else in comparison to that is easy.” Parents will do the unimaginable for their children, especially children with disabilities.
Immigration, as all issues are, is a disability justice issue. Immigrants with disabilities will always be the most vulnerable. Now of course, many of our neighbors of all backgrounds are being disabled and killed by the same state violence that my family and so many immigrant families have faced for decades.
Many immigrants gained their disabilities on the journey here, including at the hands of border officials and ICE officers in detention facilities. We are mobilizing and protesting because we will continue to fight for what is right, and also because we have no other choice.
I am part of the first generation of immigrant college students who are unapologetic and will never forget the sacrifice our parents made for us to be where we are today. And because of this, my duty is to resist. Not only to make a better life for myself and my family, but to build a world in which parents don’t have to make such sacrifices, where we’re not measuring our level of resiliency by the level of trauma the state has forced us and our parents to experience.
Despite the pain we have endured, we have likewise experienced great joy, as activists like Yosimar Reyes who created #UndocuJoy reminds us. Disabled joy, likewise, is revolutionary in the face of attacks on our community. Our family has created deep, lasting relationships that have spanned nations and continents. Though my story is filled with trauma and state terror, it is also one of joy, community support, and resistance. This growing organizing and resistance to ICE is part of work we have been doing for many years to protect our communities and love all immigrants as our own. We mourn deeply for Nurul Amin Shah Alam, as we do for all killed by ICE and CPB over so many years. And we continue to fight for the living.
When people ask me, “Do you feel lucky and honored that you are in the United States and you have gotten to where you are, that you have these opportunities?” In the words of the iconic W.E.B. Du Bois, when he was asked if he felt lucky to be the first Black person to earn a doctorate from Harvard University: “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.”
So, I assure you, the honor of having us here is yours.
Edited by Malena Hernandez Legorreta and Meier Galblum Haigh
