The failure of Congress to reform U.S. immigration laws last summer was disappointing on many levels. Most troubling was the consequence of that failure for a vulnerable population: the 5 million children of illegal immigrants. People like the Diaz children of Windsor Mills - Edwin, 13, and Cynthia, 8.
As The Sun's Kelly Brewington reported recently, their mom was taken from home by immigration officers and deported to El Salvador, leaving her husband, a legal resident, to care for their children. It is hard to see how anyone gains from the government's action in this case, and easy to imagine the losses.
The nation's increasing emphasis on immigration enforcement lacks a strategy to cope with the moral consequences of that policy. Comprehensive immigration reform is dead for now, but simple changes in the law could at least give immigration judges greater flexibility to consider the effects on children when making deportation rulings.
Immigration enforcement is on the rise, especially workplace raids, which account for a small but rapidly increasing proportion of immigration arrests, according to a study for the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute. It found that, on average, the arrest of 100 illegal immigrants in a workplace raid will affect 50 children - many of whom may be U.S. citizens.
Those children can be traumatized, impoverished, even physically abandoned when parents disappear. The vast majority of them will grow up in the U.S.
As Randy Capps of the Urban Institute points out, "The law, as written, leads to family separation," even as it does very little to deter illegal immigration. The situation was better before changes in the law greatly tied immigration judges' hands. Now, only an illegal immigrant who has been in the country at least 10 years and can prove "extreme" hardship to a child under 18 has any chance of avoiding deportation. That standard is too tough, and it offers no hope to those facing automatic removal orders; they never get to see a judge at all.
Maryland has the 11th-highest total of illegal immigrants: 225,000 to 275,000, according to a 2006 estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center. The need to deal sensibly and compassionately with them is one reason this page supported last year's immigration compromise.
We still hope for a wide-ranging solution to this vexing issue that goes far beyond the scattershot, punitive approach of many bills pending in the Maryland General Assembly. Absent that, Congress should restore judicial discretion in deportation hearings, if not out of compassion for illegal immigrants, then at least for the children's sake.