Do Undocumented Kids Have Constitutional Rights?

photo courtesy of USAG Livorno PA / flickr

Riffling through the pages of The New Yorker, I almost dropped my teeth. Jill Lapore, teacher at Harvard has written a chilling article about immigrant students in Texas. It seems that four families  from Mexico without documented papers saw their sixteen children turned away from a public school in Tyler, Texas. “On the first day of school,” she writes , “Rosario Robles …walked her five children to Bonner Elementary, where she was met by the principal, who asked for her children’s birth certificates, and, when she couldn’t provide them, put her and the kids in his car and drove them home.”

Wait, wait, I thought. They are turning away little children dressed for school because their parents are not fully documented. Ms. Lapore writes that these parents have jobs, work, pay rent, owned cars and pay taxes. Yet their children cannot go to school. In 1975 it seems that Texas passed a law allowing public schools to bar undocumented immigrants. So in 1977 Tyler’s school board worried that their town would become as haven for immigrants driven from other towns insisted that undocumented children be kicked out ofd the city’s schools unless their parents paid a thousand dollars a year per child. Of course these families could not afford this. 

This struggle goes on a cross this country. The point: What kind of a people are we? What kind of a country do we have today? Read the article and weep. We still have much work to do to fulfill the dream of what America is supposed to be.

photo by Charles Edward Miller / flickr

—Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com