Escobar’s return highlights ‘policy of cruelty’

Lisa Falkenberg says father’s arrival bittersweet after reunion with family, stresses the senseless bureaucracy of Trump’s immigration procedures.

Drug dealers. Rapists. Criminals. That’s who President Trump would have us believe he’s targeting with his immigration and border-security policies.

So how do people like Jose Escobar get caught up in the net?

How is it smart border policy to take a law-abiding man away from his American wife and two young children for 2 ½ years while he’s forced to wait in a dangerous foreign country for paperwork to clear?

Short answer: It isn’t smart. It’s asinine, wasteful and, above all, cruel.

And, of course, that’s the true aim of Trump’s immigration policies. Not to rid the country of criminals who would do us harm but to employ a policy of cruelty that Trump mistakenly believes will act as a deterrent for people contemplating a better life in America.

This is a war on immigration — both legal and illegal, as Trump’s policies have shown. It’s a contemptuous affront to the very idea of the American dream.

The Escobars — 9-year-old Walter, 4year-old Carmen and their mom Rose — are just collateral damage.

That’s why the news of their reunion Monday night was bittersweet.

I’ll never forget visiting the family back in 2011, the first time Escobar was detained by immigration authorities, and seeing the jagged, bent miniblinds barely hanging from the window where Walter kept vigil, waiting for his dad to come home. Eventually, he was allowed to return to his family after high-profile news coverage and the intervention of Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee.

But he was arrested again in 2017 soon after Trump took office during a routine check-in with immigration authorities.

No congressional intervention could help. He was deported to El Salvador, leaving his wife, a receptionist at Texas Children’s Hospital, to fend for the family and his son Walter to suffer the trauma of losing his best pal, his dad.

And what infraction against the U.S. government brought such severe consequences?

A paperwork error as a teen that caused him to lose his legal status.

Of course, it was joyous news the father had been allowed to return to his family in Pearland this week. The Chronicle’s Lomi Kriel reported that after years of bureaucracy, Jose Escobar arrived at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Monday night, visa in hand.

In June, just before Father’s Day, the government agreed to grant Escobar a waiver for his deportation order and unlawful presence and approved him for a visa as the spouse of an American.

But it’s maddening to know the whole process could have been completed on U.S. soil.The paperwork could have been completed without the missed birthdays and the restless nights when Rose cried herself to sleep.

But the Trump administration wouldn’t allow it.

“They destroyed this family’s life,” the family’s attorney, Raed Gonzalez told Kriel. “This wasn’t necessary.”

Oh, but it was. For President Trump, it seems to be the whole point.

First Word pieces are short commentaries by individual members of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. While they tend to reflect the board's values, they exhibit the author's perspective rather than the institutional view. Falkenberg is is vice president and opinion editor.