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Dolores Clara Fernandez was born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Her father Juan Ferånández, a farm worker and miner by trade, was a union activist who ran for political office and won a seat in the New Mexico legislature in 1938. Dolores spent most of her childhood and early adult life in Stockton, California where she and her two brothers moved with their mother, following her parents’ divorce.
According to Dolores, her mother’s independence and entrepreneurial spirit was one of the primary reasons she became a feminist. Dolores’ mother Alicia was known for her kindness and compassion towards others. She offered rooms at affordable rates in her 70 room hotel, which she acquired after years of hard work. Alicia welcomed low-wage workers in the hotel, and often, waived the fee for them altogether. She was an active participant in community affairs, involved in numerous civic organizations and the church. Alicia encouraged the cultural diversity that was a natural part of Dolores’ upbringing in Stockton. The agricultural community where they lived was made up of Mexican, Filipino, African-American, Japanese and Chinese working families.
Alicia’s community activism was reflected in Dolores’ involvement as a student at Stockton High School. She was active in numerous school clubs, was a majorette, and a dedicated member of the Girl Scouts until the age of 18. Upon graduating Dolores continued her education at the University of Pacific’s Delta College in Stockton earning a provisional teaching credential. During this time she married Ralph Head and had two daughters, Celeste and Lori. While teaching she could no longer bear to see her students come to school with empty stomachs and bare feet, and thus began her lifelong journey of working to correct economic injustice.
Grand Rapids will pay a $190,000 settlement to a Latino American war veteran who was wrongfully detained by federal immigration officials. The City Commission unanimously approved the payment to Jilmar Ramos-Gomez on Tuesday to resolve a Michigan Department of Civil Rights complaint. Ramos-Gomez was detained last December by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials for deportation after he was arrested on trespassing charges, said immigration attorneys. ICE and county officials had confused Ramos-Gomez, 27, with being an immigrant even though he had his U.S. passport and other ID on him at the time of his arrest.
The detention outraged his family and civil rights attorneys who say it's an example of how immigration and county officials have become overzealous in immigration enforcement. They also say it's an example of racial profiling of Latinos by immigration officials, and police.
"I don't feel good about what they did to my son," Maria Gomez-Velaquez, his mother, told the Detroit Free Press during a phone interview. "They were not listening to my son even though he had ID on him. It's not right. My son is from here, he's born here, a United States citizen. He served in the Marines, the military, but they don't care what my son did for his country."
This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided seven Mississippi food processing plants and arrested 680 workers for immigration violations. The moral cost of these raids to our shared humanity is apparent in stories like that of a tearful 13-year-old boy waving goodbye to his mother or an 11-year old girl pleading for her father’s release. But some people might feel differently, believing such scenes are just the cost of enforcing our immigration laws. If that’s you, I urge you to weigh another cost instead: the sheer financial expense of such cruelty.
First, there’s lost income. ICE was created in 2003 to “protect national security and public safety after /11,” but this week’s raids were not about security or safety or terrorism. They targeted immigrants while they worked to support their families and our economy. Many of the arrested individuals now leave behind jobs that won’t be filled and children and spouses who now live without a family member and their associated income. Their communities and local businesses will suffer down the line. And state and local governments will lose the associated tax revenues; undocumented workers pay an estimated $12 billion a year in taxes.
Then there are the costs of enforcement and detention. ICE Acting Director Matt Albence admitted that the raids required a yearlong investigation and 600 agents to execute. The 680 arrested individuals now languish in detention facilities. According to ICE, the average daily cost of detaining one person is $134. Some estimates place the cost at closer to $200 per day. Given this administration’s immigration policies, from family separation to zero tolerance to mass raids, the number of immigrants in detention is rapidly expanding, not retracting. For every person who leaves detention, another replaces them, if not two. Even using ICE’s conservative figure of $134, the cost of keeping one immigrant in detention is almost $50,000 per year. The detention expense alone for the group detained on Wednesday is approximately $100,000 a day, $3 million per month, and $36 million a year. Given that more raids are coming, these costs are only going to go up.
settling into a sense of safety is hard when your life’s catalog of memories teaches you the opposite lesson. Imagine: You fled from a government militia intent on murdering you; swam across a river with the uncertain hope of sanctuary on the far bank; had the dawning realization that you could never return to your village, because it had been torched; and heard pervasive rumors of former neighbors being raped and enslaved. Imagine that, following all this, you then found yourself in New York City, with travel documents that were unreliable at best.
This is the shared narrative of thousands of emigrants from the West African nation of Mauritania. The country is ruled by Arabs, but these refugees were members of a black subpopulation that speaks its own languages. In 1989, in a fit of nationalism, the Mauritanian government came to consider these differences capital offenses. It arrested, tortured, and violently expelled many black citizens. The country forcibly displaced more than 70,000 of them and rescinded their citizenship. Those who remained behind fared no better. Approximately 43,000 black Mauritanians are now enslaved—by percentage, one of the largest enslaved populations in the world.
After years of rootless wandering—through makeshift camps, through the villages and cities of Senegal—some of the Mauritanian emigrants slowly began arriving in the United States in the late 1990s. They were not yet adept in English, and were unworldly in almost every respect. But serendipity—and the prospect of jobs—soon transplanted their community of roughly 3,000 to Columbus, Ohio, where they clustered mostly in neighborhoods near a long boulevard that bore a fateful name: Refugee Road. It commemorated a moment at the start of the 19th century, when Ohio had extended its arms to accept another influx of strangers, providing tracts of land to Canadians who had expressed sympathy for the American Revolution.