[Salon] I’m a Republican. This woman tried to do everything right

Don Bacon, a Republican and retired Air Force brigadier general, represents Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

On Sept. 1, a young woman in Omaha named Mariana self-deported from the United States.

A migrant from Mexico who had lived in this country for eight years, she was under a final removal order from the Department of Homeland Security and had no options left.

She had no criminal record. No reasonable person looking at her case would have called her a threat to anyone. But she had to go.

I tried to help her. In August, I detailed Mariana’s case in the Omaha World-Herald. I personally talked with the secretary of Homeland Security about her situation, and my office exhausted every avenue available to us to prevent her departure. None of it was enough.

Mariana’s case urgently raises the question of whether this country still has the moral clarity to differentiate between people who endanger it and people who strengthen it.

Deporting committed community members who’ve built lives here runs counter to common sense and to the compassion, mercy, and prudence central to my Christian faith. Like most Americans, I support securing our border. For too long, Washington failed to enforce our immigration laws, and the resulting chaos overwhelmed communities and strained resources nationwide. The Trump administration has restored real order at the border, and it can and should take a victory lap.

Removing violent criminals, gang members, cartel members and those who refuse to work is wise and popular policy. But Mariana fit none of those categories.

She came to the United States at 16 with her mother, fleeing a life of hardship and instability. Rather than avoid the border, the two presented themselves at a legal port of entry without documents. That is not a crime.

Though she had been out of school for two years, Mariana enrolled at Omaha Central High School. She graduated in four years, then earned an aviation degree with academic honors from the University of Nebraska Omaha. She got a private pilot’s license and had started training to become a commercial pilot, all while working to support herself. That is the textbook American way.

Long before this, Mariana’s mother had returned to Mexico, leaving her with relatives. Mariana was still a minor when an immigration hearing was scheduled for her. According to Mariana’s attorney, the notice of the hearing was returned to the court marked “return to sender,” and the court made no further attempt to reach her. She did not appear, and a removal order was entered against her. By the time Mariana learned about that order in 2022, she was no longer eligible for the relief that might have been available to her as an abused, abandoned or neglected child.

Some in my party say they welcome immigrants who follow the rules and use the legal process. Since Mariana learned about that order, that is exactly what she did. She did not hide. She reported to ICE every year. She applied for a stay of removal through the process the government provides, and for years, she received it.

But the government gave her no fair way to fix what happened when she was a child.

The White House says it is simply enforcing the laws Congress has passed and does not pick and choose which ones to uphold. Fair enough. Congress does bear real responsibility here, and too many of my colleagues are afraid of their own shadows on this issue.

But the final decision on Mariana’s case belonged to DHS. Its own Form I-246 states that a stay decision is within the sole discretion of the secretary or his designee, and federal regulations confirm that authority. DHS had the power to grant Mariana another stay. It chose not to, even though it told Newsweek that people who are here legally and are not breaking any laws have nothing to fear, and that ICE officers are focused on arresting the worst of the worst.

Mariana is not alone. According to ICE’s own numbers, people with no criminal conviction and with only an immigration violation and no other pending charge are now the single largest group the agency holds in detention. That should worry anyone who believes that enforcement ought to focus on actual threats to public safety.

We see the same failure in temporary protected status. Afghans who served alongside U.S. troops in the Afghan war have already lost the right to work and remain in this country legally. So have Haitians who have worked here for years. Ukrainians, including more than 1,000 in my district and 2,500 in my state, could be next.

We are doing this at the exact moment the country can least afford to lose workers. Our fertility rate has fallen to roughly 1.6 births per woman, well below the 2.1 needed for a generation to replace itself, and the Congressional Budget Office now projects that deaths will outnumber births by 2030. Without immigration, our workforce shrinks, and we are pushing out the people who could help fill the gap.

Most Americans understand this better than Washington does. A February Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 58 percent think this administration has gone too far on deportations, and Gallup found in June that 73 percent still see immigration as good for the country.

Congress created this failure, and both parties share the blame. Democrats, especially under President Joe Biden, spent years treating border enforcement as optional, and the chaos that followed put American safety at risk. Republicans, including many of the administration’s top officials, now see any legal solution for people who work and follow the rules as amnesty. Some have grown hostile even to legal immigration.

There are practical fixes right in front of Congress. I have worked closely with nearly 40 of my colleagues on the bipartisan Dignity Act, which secures the border while giving people who are already here, working and following the rules, a lawful way to stay. But such efforts struggle to gain real traction in a Congress locked into an us-versus-them posture. This does not get fixed unless the parties work together.

In the last speech Ronald Reagan gave as president, on Jan. 19, 1989, he said that anyone, from any corner of the earth, can come live in America and become an American, and that every generation of newcomers renews and strengthens the nation.

Mariana did exactly what we say we admire in people chasing that promise. Yet none of it mattered.

Most Americans are caught between two extremes — open borders or mass deportation — when what they want is a system smarter than either.

Mariana left before her scheduled report date rather than wait to be taken by force. And unless Congress acts to fix our broken system, she will be far from the last to do so.

[Salon] I’m a Republican. This woman tried to do everything right — and was deported.

I’m a Republican. This woman tried to do everything right — and was deported.