Author’s Note: In a Tucson, Arizona, courtroom, a dozen students and two advisers from Gonzaga University witnessed Operation Streamline – a controversial system of justice for migrants accused of entering the U.S. illegally. In less than three hours, we would see 72 individuals processed. Seventy-two times we would hear the judge repeat the same questions to people who did not speak English as a first language (some did not even understand the Spanish translation), and all but a few times, individuals were sentenced to time served and deported back to their homelands. Hearing the legal questioning and the confused answers became the cornerstone of my entire experience learning about the U.S. immigration and deportation system.
How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?
Yes.
An attorney sat with arms outstretched behind him on the bench, arrogance wafting off his puffed up chest. “I volunteer,” he says. Well so does the elderly woman in red — she knows the names of every person on the docket and what their conviction is and what might be done to help them when the attorneys and judges have gone home.
Inside the courtroom, a young girl’s age is argued by people who don’t know her in a language she doesn’t speak. She shrinks away in the presence of the two bulky white marshals who take her back to a stark room where they return her to shackles, and – who knows – maybe strip-search her for the third time that day.
How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?
Yes.
We visit a Border Patrol facility where an armed, green “guardian of the borders, America’s frontline” talks of “bad guys” – “unwanted visitors” – “a bunch a creeps” – “a pregnant chick” and the “community crap” his agency does.
Lizbet crossed the border at age 15. Sixteen years and two American-born children later, she is deported. Stuck. Separated from her sons who remain in Delaware while she sits in a cold 4th-floor room in a concrete building, spilling her heart to a bunch of Americans who aren’t sure what to do with her story.
Bullcrap. That’s what Nayelli did with her life in the States. She shoveled bullcrap. Took a job no U.S. citizen wanted – 12-hour days, 6-day weeks doing the disgusting jobs white people couldn’t handle, making more in one day than she’d make in a month back home. Having returned to Mexico voluntarily to care for a dying grandmother, she’s unable to get back to the States where her two young daughters wait.
How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?
Yes.
Getting to the states legally is a mound of paperwork, money, too many people in power, money, so much at stake, so much ambiguity. But not for me. I can walk across the border on a drizzling gray morning without fear, then get in a car and have a great lunch at a taco truck and go on about my day.
Inside a warehouse stuffed with clothing and shoes and diapers and bandages, we pretend to be real people in that maze of immigration. A border patrol officer on a power kick. A twisted attorney. An employer looking for workers to make him money. A desperate mom, a fumbling dad, people offering their fate to others.
How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?
Yes.
A fence of steel, rising up the hills and back down again. Space between slats where life in a community buzzes. It’s recess and children chase one another in a school yard while the late-morning shadows chase them, too. Unaware – perhaps – of what that metal monstrosity represents.
The wall – 654 miles of steel. A hearty person with a dream can go around or over or under, but only at great risk: being caught drug smugglers, turned in by citizen militia, or detained by Border Patrol, resulting in weeks to months in jail, and the stamp of “ILLEGAL.”
How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?
Yes.
More to come at wordsncoffee.com as well as blogs from the students at gonzaga.edu.
wordsncoffee 
The problem is; we are compassionate beings, but if we are to ever fix the immigration problem, we need to keep emotions and politics out of the dialogue. Drug smugglers and terrorist don’t have compassion nor do those who deal in child/human trafficing. We are a country of laws and those who want to come over the borders know it. All they have to do is tell their story to a liberal in Congress and those politicians know if they tell the immigrants story, they will be able to advance their own agenda. It is not to help the illegal immigrant. Helping is not part of their game plan…notoriety and votes is!
It would be great if we could help everyone. I look at California, and we have gone from being tops in education to #48. We have a growing poverty rate; in fact California makes the top of the list there as they make the bottom in education. Our taxes are out of sight with little reward for doing good and obeying the laws. People come here for a reason, and they know their country, because of corruption, is just as President Trump supposedly said; otherwise, why would they want to come here. Even President Clinton went to Haiti to help their people, but you don’t hear of any success that he reaped. Maybe it was because there wasn’t any. There have been people who died standing up for what they believe, and until the people of those poor and corrupt countries, with our help, try to change the environment in their country, people will try to escape from their homelands to come to America illegally. It doesn’t make it right!
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