Alabama Law Pushes Parents To Desperate Measures

This is heartbreaking, but understandable.

In the wake of Alabama’s new and strict immigration law, HB56,  we’ve reported about how businesses and schools are being affected. We’ve talked about the immense amount of money that is being lost, about how the state’s employment levels are being affected, how there’s panic in the Latino community and how parents have been keeping their children from school for fear of their being detained and deported.

But those stats and conditions pale in comparison to what some parents have done to protect their families. The Guardian reports:

Lawyers working with Hispanic communities throughout Alabama report a huge surge in recent days in approaches from Hispanic families so desperate about the threat posed by the new law that they are preparing for the worst: sudden separation from their own children. They are drawing up power of attorney letters – documents usually applied to property or business assets, but in Alabama almost exclusively now used for the safe keeping of children.

I can’t imagine that level of desperation.

There’s no empirical way to quantify fear of this type. There’s no way to render it on a graph or enter it to a formula. The only way is to tell personal stories.

Trini, an Hispanic mother who did not want to give her last name, took up power of attorney last week. She has arranged for her her two sons, aged 10 and 13, to be cared for by her niece, who is a US citizen.

“I’m afraid I could disappear without anyone knowing what’s happened to me,” she said. “I don’t speak English well, so maybe the police won’t understand me and who knows what would happen to me in jail.”

So we give it a name. In this case Trini and her son, Jesus, the eldest, who plays the trumpet and makes good grades. And we try to put ourselves in their place; imagine ourselves going to a lawyer’s office to draw up papers to have our children placed in the custody of a cousin if something were to happen to us, because we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. You can’t put a dollar amount on that. You can’t say how that will affect the crops or the restaurants or the businesses.

Erica Suarez, 37, took out a power of attorney three days ago, vesting responsibility for her nine-year-old son should she be rounded up in her uncle, a US citizen. Suarez and her husband moved to Birmingham, Alabama from Argentina in 1998, staying in America after their visa expired. Over the past 13 years they’ve tried many times to acquire citizenship themselves, without success.

“I’m very scared,” Suarez said. “The police can stop me and ask for my status, and if I don’t have a driving licence take me to jail for 30 days. What happens to my son in that time?”

There is no count, that I could find, of how many families have opted for a power of attorney for their kid’s safety, just in case. But this is one of those cases where one was more than enough.