Synod Reflection: Maria Hinojosa, Jesus, and the Undocumented Worker

As someone who gets my news from National Public Radio, I had never actually seen what Maria Hinojosa looked like.  Surprisingly, she didn’t wear a stuffy reporter’s suit or have the classic cemented anchor ‘do like I was expecting.  No, standing behind the podium and displayed on jumbotrons around the convention center was a petit and stylish woman wearing a flirty sundress and passionately gesturing with long red nails.  But when Maria began reporting almost thirty years ago, her appearance was certainly even more surprising; no one had ever heard of a Latina reporter before.  But she set out to do what hadn’t yet been done, and today she's a household name.  Born in Mexico City, raised in Chicago, she grew up with one foot in the immigrant world, but with an upbringing that was still distinctly American.

But Maria didn’t come to speak to Synod about her relatively smooth immigration experience.  She came instead to speak on behalf of the immigrants who didn’t have her privilege; the voiceless ones -- the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States today who live in fear – who are too scared to speak up for their rights as human beings.  Maria passionately brought to light true stories of hard-working, tax-paying undocumented workers who (after on average more than 10 years in this country) we rip from their homes – many of them homeowners – often in the middle of the night.  We routinely tear parents from their young American children and their documented family members. Today we imprison almost half a million undocumented immigrants in detention centers famous for their abuses and egregious conditions, such as the outdoor prison camps in the hot Arizona sun.  We lock up countless numbers of these detainees for years without trail, all costing ourselves -- the tax payer -- about $150 per day, totaling $2 billion a year.  The vast majority of these detainees have no criminal record, but one of the few detainees Maria spoke to who had actually been to prison said he would have taken prison any day over one of these detention camps.  And despite Obama’s bright promises to Latinos during both campaigns, this administration is on track to deport a record 2 million people by 2014 – that’s as many people as were deported from 1892 to 1997 combined!  We as Americans have been complacent with our abusive and broken system for too long, and in the news we are now beginning to see calls for more compassionate reform, but does it go far enough?

As I sat there in Synod listening to Maria, I thought about Jesus, and about how he was an illegal immigrant too.  Remember that after Jesus was born, Herod issued a decree to kill all children under the age of two, so the Holy Family family fled to Egypt where they became illegal immigrants.  Even after they returned, they settled in Nazareth, not Bethlehem where they were from, continuing their life of exile.  Still, I don’t think we as Christians are called to work for justice on issues of immigration just because Christ walked in those same shoes.  We Christians are called to speak out for the voiceless, to fight for the humane and compassionate treatment of all immigrants -- documented and undocumented -- because in the Kingdom of God, as Maria said, “no human being is illegal” – all humans are precious images of the Divine.