When most people say the word monster, they usually do so as a synonym for “ugly” and “evil.” But if you have glanced upon the drawings I have put on the World Wide Web, you have probably noticed that I don’t share that perspective. I draw monsters because they are beautiful and good. And yet this time I did decide to draw a phenomenon I consider to be ugly and evil.
The specific image of “being burned at the stake” is metaphorical, but — in the greater abstract — government-inflicted violence toward undocumented immigrants is something happens literally. Governmental decree is ultimately enforced at gunpoint, and that applies to deportations. Deportations are carried out by armed federal agents; this is armed force just as when a mugger sticks you up.
Between 2010 and 2016 the U.S. Border Patrol agents fired bullets into 33 would-be immigrants, ending their lives. In 2014, James Tomsheck, the chief of internal affairs at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was fired by the agency for having investigated 28 of those deaths and ascertaining that at least seven of them were likely under circumstances where deadly force on the Border Patrol’a part was unjustified. That trend continued into the Trump administration. On May 23, 2018, Claudia Patricia Gómez González — a 19-year-old Guatemalan — got into an altercation with a border agent in Rio Bravo, Texas, and was shot dead as well.
And, once the immigrant has been deported, the violence does not end for him or her. In too many deportation cases, border agents are knowingly sending immigrants back to environments dominated by gang warfare and high murder rates. Steven Sacco writes,
One study found that between January 2014 and September 2015 eighty-three deportees who were sent back to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were murdered after their return. They were people fleeing the killers who eventually took their lives. People like José Marvin Martínez, who fled violence in Honduras and made it to the U.S. when he was 16, but was deported and four months after his forcible return was shot to death. Or Juan Francisco Diaz, also deported back to Honduras, where he too was murdered a few months later. Or Giovanni Miranda, who, after spending most of his life in the U.S., was deported to El Salvador to be murdered in front of his wife and son in June 2015. Or Edgar Chocoy, 16, who ran away from a gang to the U.S. only to be murdered by that same gang seventeen days after he was deported back to Guatemala in 2004. Or an unnamed teenager who was shot to death hours after being deported back to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Moises, 19, was murdered after he was deported to El Salvador. And there are too many more names we’ll never know.
What’s more, the number of deportees delivered directly to their killers does not include those who survive attempted murder or other violence because of their deportation — a number no one knows. Isais Sosa, who was 19 when the Los Angeles Times covered his story in 2014, survived being shot by a gang days after his deportation. The 19 year old daughter of Dora Lina Meza fled to the U.S. from the same gang that, after she was deported back home, raped her at gun point. After Juan Ines Alanis was deported he was kidnapped and held for ransom while his fingers were smashed with a hammer.
Governmental action, as it is backed by violent threats, is justified when it is in retaliation against some party having initiated the use of force against a person or her private property. But most undocumented immigrants are peaceful, having violated no laws unrelated to their having arrived into the USA without a license (and such licenses, visas, are ridiculously difficult to come by, involving even more red tape than what small businesses have to face). These undocumented immigrants are individuals who must be judged on an individual basis. As observed by the family of murder victim Mollie Tibbetts, to paint undocumented immigrants in general as violent is demagoguery and scapegoating; that is the witch hunt.
It is for this reason that I don’t say “Politicians are the real monsters.” That would be employing monster as a pejorative and a reproach, which I am not about to do. Monsters, such as the one created by Victor Frankenstein and the titular Beast from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, are weird outcasts — and that is how undocumented immigrants are still too often treated. Now, as before, someone must stand up for the weird outcast.
