There’s nothing, NOTHING, I tell you, like waking up Monday morning, checking my social media and finding cases like this.

Nutshell, here’s the timeline of events:

ICE RAID–>Bail is incarcerated for immigration violation –> loses custody of son –> son is bounced around before being officially adopted by a midclass family who just fell in love with him –> Bail’s lawyer appeals and loses –> case itself is bounced around, going all the way up to the Missouri Supreme Court and now awaits until December 6 for the next step in this custody hearing

What can be gathered from this undocumented mother is that she broke a law of identity theft and immigration.

And OUR legal says that that choice to steal identity, to find her way to our land of eroding yet unsympathizing immigration laws, and to steal identity to, probably, protect herself so she can make her way through this country is so egregious that she loses custody of her own son to a childless middle class family and changes his name and now “lives a wonderful life.” Even though that wonderful life also means he very likely may never see his birth mother ever again. In the eyes of the law, Bail “abandoned” her son by breaking the law and being thrown in jail.

At every level of this case, one can see how we, as a nation, with our idea of “justice” and “what a wonderful life” means, we continue to criminalize and demonize the undocumented people of our nation which was founded on the backs of immigrants. We, as a nation, continue to exploit the labor and, clearly now, children of these laborers who we want to give wonderful lives to without any regard of the definition of family, sanctity of family, or respect for the family relationship. With these legal decisions, favoring adopting middle class families, we continue to support the colonizing ideals of taking what is not ours, of upholding the rights and needs of the privileged over the lives of those who we perceive as alien or foreign. In this matter of a child, I can scarcely understand how this is one of the most gross interpretations of justice and a complete travesty of human rights.

For a mother to be separated from her child is an immeasurable trauma. For a child to be legally stolen from her mother is an immeasurable and perilous trend that I fear may affect the millions of children of undocumented beings in the US.