September / October 2009 - Sacramento County Bar Association

Con Law continued from page 5
here about families, with all the wonderful complexities
that the word entails. When you come down to it, that’s
what these stories are about. They aren’t all horror stories-
-though there is, unfortunately, too much of that. We have
stories of detention, of violence, of terrible abuse. But
what I think Underground is mostly about are families and
how they--like us all--struggle to survive in this country.
The only difference is--a key one of course--they are living
here, enduring here, without the ordinary legal protections
that documented people take for granted. And this leads to
human ri
the book), others are locked up in immigration detention.
We have one horrific story in the book about a detainee
with AIDS who was denied her medication. She died
chained to a bed. It’s painful reading. The story is told by
the detainee’s mother, Olga. We have the freedom here to
talk about these things openly without fear. Or, I should
say, I do. Lawyers out there know that the first amendment’s
protection of free speech is a right guaranteed in the
constitution to people--not citizens--so undocumented
people have the right to free speech (as well as minimum
wage and police protection, etcetera, etcetera) and yet actually
exercising these rights is another matter entirely. In
California and around the country, for instance, we did
have a time a few years ago when undocumented immigrants
began marching and making themselves seen and
heard. This didn’t last too long, though. Fear (of raids, of
being locked up, of being deported back to dangerous
home countries) took over and undocumented people
have retreated back to the shadows. I still believe we [as a
country] have a very strong claim to being a bastion of
human rights, but we have much work to do.
Interviewed by Edward Schwarzschild, author of Responsible
Men and The Family Diamond, associate professor of English
at the University at Albany, SUNY, and fellow of the New York
State Writers Institute.
18 SACRAMENTO LAWYER SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009