AST Digital Magazine July 2017 Digital-July | Page 10

Volume 14
telling, living testimonials to all that was broken
about the immigration system.
Still, those who appeared on the campaign’s be-
half said they had never felt like props. Mr. Trump
was no more using them, they said, than Mrs.
Clinton was using hardworking Hispanic families
to humanize the issue.
“He’s never once asked us to speak,” said Mi-
chelle Root, 48, Sarah Root’s mother. “We’ve
chosen to speak.”
July 2017 Edition
The glare of other people’s judgment did get to
them sometimes. Mr. Ronnebeck took a break
from social media for six weeks, as the anniver-
sary of Grant’s death passed, then the inaugura-
tion, then Grant’s birthday.
“There’s people that think I’m a racist and there’s
people out there that think I’m the devil,” he said.
“It gets to a point where you just can’t do the neg-
ative anymore.”
Not for long, though. With Mr. Trump in the White
House, they could take their message straight to
the corridors of power. Some hope the president
will revoke Obama-era protections for young un-
documented immigrants; others pray to see the
wall built.
“I think we could email or text or even pick up the
phone, for some of them, and call them and have
them pass it on,” Ms. Root said of her contacts in
the White House.
(Eswin Mejia, an illegal alien from Honduras, killed Sarah
Root on January 31, 2016 while street racing in Omaha, Ne-
braska when he rear-ended her SUV. She had graduated
from Bellevue University with a 4.0 GPA the day before she
passed away. Courtesy of the Federation for American Immi-
gration Reform and YouTube. Posted on Aug 26, 2016)
It looked very different to the other side, of course.
People on social media, and even some friends,
did not hesitate to let them know that they thought
they were being used.
“And he would listen. He might not agree, and
might not do it, but I know our voice would be
heard.”
Original
post
https://www.nytimes.
com/2017/06/25/us/trump-undocumented-vic-
tims.html
Lots of people called them racist. They insisted
that they were not, emphasizing that they did not
think all undocumented immigrants were bad.
A large body of research, accumulated over
many years, has found that immigrants are less
likely than native-born citizens to commit serious
crimes or to be imprisoned.
For the families, such studies were beside the
point. To them, illegal immigration was an epi-
demic of preventable deaths.
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