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Symposium addresses U.S. immigration policies

Opal Singleton, president and CEO of Million Kids, describes the multiple ways human traffickers recruit members April 7 at the College of Law campus in Ontario. She cited the statistics on entrapment by MS 13, a gang known for sex trafficking in the United States. Along with Catherine Carlisle, professor of law at UC Irvine, Singleton was part of one of the panels at the Law Review Symposium named “Law and The Border: Defining Our Nation,” sponsored by the College of Law. / photo by Janelle Kluz
Opal Singleton, president and CEO of Million Kids, describes the multiple ways human traffickers recruit members April 7 at the College of Law campus in Ontario. She cited the statistics on entrapment by MS 13, a gang known for sex trafficking in the United States. Along with Catherine Carlisle, professor of law at UC Irvine, Singleton was part of one of the panels at the Law Review Symposium named “Law and The Border: Defining Our Nation,” sponsored by the College of Law. / photo by Janelle Kluz

Aryn Plax
Metro Editor

University of La Verne’s College of Law hosted a Law Review Symposium “Law And The Border: Defining Our Nation” with guest speaker Victor Viramontes April 7.

The symposium addressed America’s current immigration policy and how it compares to previous ones, and its impacts in relation to other nations.

“If you go back to the country’s founding more than 200 years ago, the borders have shifted multiple times over the course of United States history,” Viramontes said. “Up until maybe about 100 years ago, the border existed on a map and nowhere else.”

Viramontes served as an immigrants’ rights litigator at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund for 11 years. He talked about America’s immigration policy that historically allowed unregulated immigration from Northern and Western European countries and severely restricted immigration from other countries.

Those policies were rescinded and replaced with new ones that judged a potential immigrant’s waiting time by the number of immigrants from their country that are already in the United States.

“If you happen to be from a country with a significant number of immigrants in the United States, like Mexico or the Philippines, the lines for you to wait in this legal path to citizenship can be upwards of 10 to 20 years,” Viramontes said.

He said that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned on immigration reform, and that as president, he oversaw an increase in immigration enforcement. However, according to Viramontes, President Donald Trump wants to toughen immigration laws.

“Our new president said he wants to make the entire United States where you can be subject to immigration enforcement,” Viramontes said. “This administration has gone to great pains to make sure that immigrants understand that there is no circumstance under which you are safe, or under which you will be exempt from immigration enforcement.”

Viramontes talked about the Los Angeles Police Department’s refusal to ask about immigration status, claiming that immigrants are less likely to report a crime if they think that an encounter with the police means facing the risk of deportation.

He compared the Trump administration’s stance on immigration to SB 1070, a 2010 Arizona policy that allowed state law enforcers to ask for a person’s documentation upon “reasonable suspicion” that the person was an illegal immigrant. Its opponents argued that it creates an avenue for racial profiling.

Viramontes said that states that had previously passed anti-immigrant legislation rejected DACA – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – which he defined as a “federal review of a person’s application that gives them work authorization and permission to live in the U.S.”

“Not only do you have this attempt at heightened immigration enforcement, you have this meta-level where they were taking federal immigration decisions and saying ‘You know what, we don’t like them. We are still going to act as if and treat tens of thousands of people as if they’re undocumented, even if the federal government says they’re not,’” Viramontes said.

Diane Uchimiya, professor of law and director of Immigration and Justice Clinic, compared Arizona’s immigration policy to California’s, highlighting the differences that existed despite them both being states on the border.

“It’s different because in the restrictive context, SB 1070 in Arizona, it’s really the state saying ‘the federal government is falling down on its job of actually enforcing immigration laws, so we as a state will essentially enact our own laws that supplement the federal immigration laws,’” Uchimiya said.

“Which is different from California basically saying ‘we will not enforce federal immigration laws,’ and that the state has constitutional rights, 10th Amendment rights, and that the federal government cannot interfere with those states rights.”

Opal Singleton, president and CEO of Million Kids, works to educate the public about human sex trafficking, particularly in regard to the exploitation of Latin American immigrants.

Million Kids is an organization that rescues child victims of sex trafficking, provides resources, and helps them adjust to a normal life. The organization serves on the Riverside County Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force.

Having worked with government officials, Singleton said she disagreed with Viramontes’ assessment on their efforts regarding immigration.

“He was saying that there isn’t an effort by the government officials, that their whole effort is about deportation, and… I’ve never seen that within the teams I work with,” Singleton said.
“In fact, just the opposite, they go to them to get them U-visas, T-visas, do everything they can to assist them, and we’ve never deported anybody,” she said.

Aryn Plax can be reached at aryn.plax@laverne.edu.

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