Sanders and Clinton vow to help a questioner whose husband was deported
Emotions ran deep as a clearly nervous mother, Lucía Quiej, stood in the audience and told both candidates her story: Her husband had been deported back to Guatemala three years ago, leaving her in the United States to care for their five children.
“What would you do to stop deportations and unite families?” Quiej, a resident of Homestead, 30 miles south of Miami, asked, in Spanish. Her husband, Andrés Jiménez, also a Guatemalan immigrant, was deported because he was stopped for a traffic violation and did not have a driver’s license.
The candidates onstage at the Univision/Washington Post Democratic presidential primary debate at Miami Dade College in Miami were moved to promise their help.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who got the woman’s plight a little backward (the translation seemed difficult to hear) and thought the mother had been separated from her children, said: “At the heart of my immigration policy, the essence of what we are trying to do is to unite families, not to divide families. The idea that a mother is living here and her children are on the other side of the border is wrong and immoral.”
Sanders told the story of a soldier he met on the campaign trail whose wife had been deported “while he was serving in the military,” then looked at the questioner directly and promised: “I will do everything I can to unite your family.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded with praise and promises too. “Please know how brave I think you are, coming here with your children to tell your story,” she said, summing up the situation correctly. “I’ve heard stories like yours where your husband is deported, your children’s father is gone, you are doing your very best. … But it is time to bring families together.”
She then shifted into a little bureaucrat-speak for a moment, saying she hoped the children were American citizens by birth or eligible to remain in the United States under immigration programs put into place by the Obama administration. But Clinton matched Sanders’ resounding crescendo in the end, saying: “I will absolutely protect your children, yourself, and try to bring your family back together.”
(Cover tile photo: Wilfredo Lee)
