In an interview with CNN on Monday, “Orange Is The New Black” actress Diane Guerrero was brought to tears on-air as she described the deportation of her family when she was a teenager.
“I got home, and their cars were there and dinner was started and the lights were on, but I couldn’t find them,” Guerrero told host Michaela Pereira.
Guerrero explained that at age 14, she had arrived home from her performing arts school only to find her parents had been removed from the house. They were eventually sent to Colombia.
The actress broke down when she said the separation had caused her to feel alienated from her own family.
“It’s tough, it’s like we’ve been separated for so long, I feel like sometimes we don’t know each other,” she said. “It’s difficult because I’ve grown up without them, and there’s things about them that are new that I don’tah recognize, and it just — it hurts.”
Guerrero also recently wrote about the ordeal in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times amid speculation over possible executive actions on immigration by President Obama.
“Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me,” she wrote. “No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.”
Watch below, courtesy of CNN:
And all the GOPers/Teatrolls watching felt nothing but schadenfreude.
When I started to read this I thought this must be a story from Soviet Russia or a similar place like that.
While I support immigration reform, I find anecdotes like this of questionable usefulness.
Are we going to have any immigration laws at all or should any and everyone who wants to come live here be allowed to stay? Or should the law state that anyone in the world who can manage to have a child in the US before they are caught will be allowed to stay?
If we are going to have immigration laws, are they going to be enforced at all or only against people who haven’t managed to have kids here?
While this is admittedly a very sad story told by a very sympathetic young lady, you can’t make policy on the basis of such anecdotes. Even if immigration reform is passed – and again I hope it is – , presumably we will still have immigration laws and stories like this will still occur.
“Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me,” she wrote. “No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.”
Well, she probably should have stayed with her family…
Yeah, anything that brings it home that what we’re talking about here is living, breathing, feeling, family-having human beings really just throws all sorts of irrelevant confusion into writing draconic laws that treat them like animals.