The People’s Tribune on Jan. 17 interviewed attorney Camilo Pérez-Bustillo to get his take on what is happening around immigration. He is former executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and still an active member of the NLG, a member of the leadership group of Witness at the Border, and a co-founder and advisor to the binational People’s Movement for Peace and Justice. Below is an edited transcript of the interview.
Bob Lee: It seems clear that the effort to attack immigrants and toughen up the regulation of the border transcends Democratic and Republican administrations for a number of years now. Is there a broader agenda behind this than what’s being publicly stated?
Camilo Pérez-Bustillo: That’s a really important point. There’s an immediate expression of that, which was a bill that went through the Senate this morning, this Laken Riley Bill. That’s a really key example of what you just described, which is, 10 Democratic senators rolling over and voting with the Republicans to promote this really outrageous historically unjust bill, which basically has the potential to criminalize just about anybody who has the wrong immigrant status and is either arrested or charged with a crime, not even convicted of a crime. There’s half dozen crimes that are listed [in the bill]. It’s basically minor offenses, you know, because immigration law already makes it very difficult for folks if there are more serious criminal offenses. And that’s of course the whole “migrant crime” rhetoric that, that we’ve been hearing so much. But the bottom line is this expands the criminalization of migrants to a much broader group, including things like shoplifting.
We don’t have the bill yet in a final form, but the key thing, going to your question, is that this reflects how within the Democratic Party, there’s this increasingly visible shift, from supposedly what was a sense of the Democratic Party being somewhat more sympathetic or aligned with immigrant rights. Those days are long gone. And that was evident, of course, in the recent presidential campaign. And all of the wrong lessons, of course, are being drawn, sadly, from the Harris defeat. And among those “lessons” is that the Democrats were being punished for being soft on the border and soft on immigration policy. So it’s the Democrats bending over backwards now, to say the least, to move the position closer, to “the center” by kowtowing, surrendering to the worst impulses that are reflected of course in the incoming administration.
Many of us in the immigrant rights movement and in broader progressive movements for years and decades have had concerns, to say the least, about the Democratic Party at multiple historic moments, going back to the 1960s. There’s a long story behind this, but it’s especially evident right now, as, as the crunch comes, so to speak. As probably the single most anti-immigrant administration in recent history gets ready to take power, the Democrats are in retreat in very dangerous ways. Because of course, this sends important signals symbolically, because beyond the fact it’s just a terrible law. And it’s almost certainly going to be successfully challenged in the courts, you know, to one degree or another. There will be further developments as this law and its application evolves. And it’s probably unconstitutional. There are a million things we could say about the problems with the law. But the important thing is that it’s symptomatic of something deeper. It’s not just one bill, it reflects a real narrative that the Democrats have bought into.
Like one that’s a recently elected senator who’s immigrant origins – he’s half Colombian, half Mexican – Ruben Gallego from Arizona, who may be perceived as a progressive on other issues, but on this one….the bottom line is he was one of the 10 who caved. And when you look at somebody like him who theoretically represents maybe a different potential within the Democrat wing of progressives, and if people like Gallego are giving up, it makes things even more concerning, you know?
