Mt. Holyoke audience gets lesson in resistance

Advocate shares strategies for ‘humanizing’ immigration in face of federal campaign

By EMILEE KLEIN

Staff Writer

SOUTH HADLEY — Most acts of civil resistance are rigorously planned: Rosa Parks was picked to sit at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955; Mary Beth Tinker, John Tinker and Christopher Eckhardt chose the day to wear black armbands to a Des Moines, Iowa high school in 1965 in a protest of the Vietnam War that became a landmark First Amendment case.

But immigration attorney Camille Mackler had no plan to start a defacto law office with 900 lawyers in the cafeteria of John F. Kennedy Airport in response to President Donald Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban. One moment, she was preparing to take her daughter to a play date, and the next she was driving to the airport to meet a couple of friends, calling people along the way.

“I get to ask this question all the time, ‘What were you thinking? What were you planning?’ We were planning nothing,” Mackler told an audience at Mount Holyoke on April 1. “What happened on the morning of the first Muslim travel ban was such an organic, instantaneous reaction to injustice, to racism, to a vision of this country that at JFK,

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at airports all around the country, could not accept.”

Three months into Trump’s second presidency, amid mass Immigration Customs Enforcement raids and deportations, Mackler, the founder and executive director of Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative, provided insight into the nine days she spent starting in January 2017 as the “eyes and ears of JFK airport” at a Mount Holyoke College event dubbed Protecting the Unprotected: Making Change in Today’s Immigration Landscape.

The audience of Mount Holyoke students and community members listened to Mackler ’s perspective on the severity of Trump’s immigration policies and strategies people can take to inject humanity back into conversations around immigration.

“When you just meet someone where they are when you have the conversation, and when you don’t back down from your position, but you allow that they may be coming from a place of fear, maybe it’s not understanding, (but) I think that’s how we change the narrative,” Mackler said. “We need a better conversation on immigration in this country, and we’re not going to get it by having our national leaders just throw 250-character insults at each other and figure out what’s going to make the best sound bite.”

Over the first nine days of the 90-day travel ban that barred travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, Mackler would work out of the JFK airport 24 hours a day to provide legal support for friends and family members of detained travelers. Meanwhile, hundreds of volunteers tracked incoming flights and stood outside terminals with signs in English, Arabic and Farsi to offer travelers assistance.

The team of activists in the terminal were getting calls from families, airline representatives who were worried federal government fines, and even observant strangers who noticed ICE agents ushering families from the baggage claim area into a back room.

“People wanted to help,” Mackler said.

Ultimately, the courts blocked deportations under the travel ban executive order, leading to the release of about 2,000 people. While the Supreme Court upheld one of Trump’s three travel bans, former President Joe Biden revoked the bans the day he was inaugurated.

When Trump signed the executive order to instigate the Muslim travel ban midflight for many international travelers, Mackler said his goal was to spark chaos and send messages of cruelty. However, the Trump administration was illprepared to leverage government powers, leading to legal challenges and ultimate repeal of the policy.

During his second term, the messages and desire of “ridding this country of immigrants” remains the same, only this time Trump has had four years to prepare.

“The reason we don’t have a travel ban right now is because it’s written, it’s drafted, it’s on Stephen Miller’s desk,” Mackler said. “It exists, but they know from the last time that they have to provide justification because, apparently, governments don’t get to act arbitrarily. ” It’s not just policy that raises alarms for Mackler, but the “impunity” of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. She cites examples of ICE agents detaining Tufts Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk outside her apartment in plainclothes and masks. ICE agents arresting an 18-year-old in Rochester using a car bought by a local Army Surplus store. Men with tattoos or wearing specific clothing are sent to El Salvador prisons, despite having no connection with gangs or criminal organizations.

“Obviously they think they’re justified, but they know that they won’t be punished, which is such a chilling mark of an authoritarian regime,” Mackler said.

Mount Holyoke students inquired into Mackler’s strategies for navigating the difficult landscape of immigration. Mackler said that while it’s important to have conversations with all sides of the very emotional and controversial topic, she admits that arguing for someone’s humanity day after day is exhausting and disheartening. But now that the Trump administration has signed executive orders targeting law offices, a new fire ignited inside her.

“An order targeting lawyers is not what should create such an emotional reaction, but I think for me, it just went right back to all those reasons why I became a lawyer in this country in the first place,” Mackler said.

Mackler advises students who wish to help to get involved in local politics. Not only do people have the most impact at the local level, but residents make connections with politicians during the beginnings of their careers and can hold them accountable as they ascend upward.

She adds that it’s important to inject humanity back into the conversation by moving away from inflamed rhetoric. This best happens on the local level. Mackler recalls the time she conducted training for the New York Sheriffs Association the same time she advocated for a state bill to give drivers’ licenses to undocumented migrants, and one of the angry patrol officers expressed that he wanted every driver he pulled over to simply be truthful in who they are.

Mackler responded by saying that’s what every migrant who comes to the U.S. wants, too.

“Immigration isn’t about this big philosophical idea,” Mackler said. “Immigration is the person who sits next to your kid at school, the person who’s checking you out of the grocery store, the person who might be sitting next to you at the local coffee shop. I mean, it’s not them versus us, it’s we all live here together.”