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11/09/2024

Today’s blog, written the day after the election in November of 2024

Lynn Murphy Mark

Acts 9:18

A Black friend reached out via email asking how our racial justice book club members are feeling after the election. I told her we are gobsmacked, and that I would speak only for myself, perhaps echoing what my book buddies are feeling.

We have been reading and discussing books on racism and white supremacy for over four years. Like my buds, I cannot unlearn what I’ve learned in these years. We have read books on white privilege, how to be an anti-racist, the economy of racism, racism in the workplace, and more. Yet, despite years of reading and discussing it, not until Wednesday morning did I really wake up. I hate the term “woke”, but honestly that’s what I really am now. I write this because I believe that the whole theme of this election was created by white supremacists. 

In my immigration workplace, we are talking clients off the ledge that they found themselves on Wednesday morning. The very hard part is that we have no reassuring words for them because we have 70 some days before the new administration lands with both feet. From what I’ve read, the cult intends to hit the ground running, with an anti-immigrant agenda prominently in the front of the line.

My clients are in various stages of the legal process that it takes to gain an immigration benefit. As such, most of them are undocumented. Those folks are enrolled in programs to gain some legal status – but will not get it for some years yet. Some already have their green cards and are applying for citizenship. Those people are also vulnerable because even with a green card, if you commit a crime, you can get deported. I will only imagine how 47’s administration will define “a crime” in order to take the card away and start deportation proceedings. 

Already a federal judge, appointed by 47 when he was 45, has struck down a Biden executive order to create a path to citizenship for people who have been here for years and are married to a US citizen. That path has been eradicated. I think the status of DACA, the dreamer’s program, will meet the same fate.

Here’s what really worries me about immigration work. 47 will write executive orders to the extent that the law allows, and probably beyond that. These orders will try to eradicate pathways to Residency or Citizenship. Attorneys will fight as many of these as they can in our courts. This will create a backlog that I can only imagine, and clients will be held up in limbo until the matters are resolved. 

Clients already spend years waiting for decisions. This October, for example, a client from Iraq who became a US Citizen, started a petition for his three brothers and their families to come to the United States. The waiting line for those visas started in 2005, when he first became a citizen and applied for his siblings in Iraq. Not until 2024 were his three brothers finally granted permission to immigrate to the United States. They are all here now, and are eligible for a green card. That’s 2005 to 2024. Nineteen years.

47 calls this process, “Chain migration”, and has vowed to end the practice. I think of a family from Sierra Leone. I helped one daughter who had come here to study nursing to get her citizenship. We then applied for her mother to get a green card – mom came from Sierra Leone to help my client with her children while she was in nursing school. Now that mom has a green card, we applied for mom’s other three children who are still in Sierra Leone. I started the petition process in 2021 and not until October of 2024 were their petitions approved. Now we begin the process of getting them in line for a visa to come here. It’s a complicated and labor intensive process. I want to get their cases filed with the National Visa Center as quickly as possible hoping to get them safely in line. 47 can undo all this with the stroke of a pen. 

My clients are mostly people of color. These are the people that 47, his sidekick, and his cult will not be welcoming to our country. My only comment is that 47’s wife has benefited from our immigration system, and was able to “chain migrate” her parents into citizenship. Oh, of course, they are white people.

On the day after the election, my weepy Wednesday, something biblical happened to me. It is about the apostle Paul, and the verse in Acts 9:18 happened to me that morning. “And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and received sight forthwith and arose, and was baptized.” I can see clearly now just exactly what our country is becoming. The fight is just beginning.