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NORWOOD, OhioA Norwood man will soon be deported to Mexico for the 10th time since 2012.

Court records show Luis Tapia, 30, pleaded guilty in July to reentry after deportation, a felony. He has been detained in the Butler County jail since his arrest in September 2019.

Tapia pleaded guilty to the same charge in 2017, received a nine-month prison sentence and was deported, according to court records.

"It's not only that he keeps coming back, it's what he does when he's here," Assistant United States Attorney Kyle Healey told United States District Judge Timothy Black in court on Monday.

Tapia was convicted of domestic violence, theft, obstructing official business and failure to comply, according to Hamilton County court records.

Norwood Police Department

Healey said Tapia led police on high-speed vehicle pursuits in Hamilton County in 2010 and 2017.

The prosecutor asked Black to sentence Tapia to six to seven years in prison.

"He's a danger to this community," Healey said.

But Tapia told the judge that he was a changed man who wanted to be a better father. He promised to not return to the U.S., where he had lived most of his life during the past 25 years.

"I'm just speaking to you from my heart," Tapia said. "I want to be there for my kids."

Black sentenced Tapia to "time served" for the three years he's spent in jail.

"I'm giving you a break," Black told Tapia during his sentencing hearing on Monday. "It's on your shoulders."

After the hearing, Black allowed Tapia's children to enter the courtroom and say goodbye to him.

Tapia was deported three times in 2012, twice in 2014, three times in 2015 and once in 2018, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) affidavit.

"This is an offense that hasn't been taken seriously," former immigration judge Matt O'Brien said.

O'Brien, who also served as Assistant Chief Counsel with ICE, is the Director of Investigations at the conservative Immigration Reform LawInstitute.

"If this individual hadn't been caught, what else would he have engaged in?" O'Brien said. "I think experience would indicate that he's not going to keep his word and he's going to wind up back here. And given the fact that he's an individual with an established criminal history, he's not likely to decide he wants to go to optometry school and open an honest business."

Tapia's drug charges dismissed after illegal search

In addition to being charged with illegal reentry after deportation, a grand jury also indicted him for possession with intent to distribute fentanyl and cocaine.

The charges resulted from evidence found in a duffel bag on the roof of the Norwood home where federal agents arrested Tapia.

The duffel bag contained "482 grams of cocaine and 496 grams of fentanyl," Healey wrote in the prosecution's sentencing memorandum. "Fingerprint analysis on a bag containing fentanyl positively matched Tapia's fingerprints."

Norwood Police Department

But the drug charges were dismissed in July after Black ruled the critical evidence was inadmissible because it was discovered during an illegal search.

Black told Tapia he would have faced up to life in prison if he'd been convicted of the drug charges.

Court records show about an hour after agents raided the Norwood house in 2019 and arrested Tapia, a Norwood police officer responded to a 911 call reporting that a bag had been thrown on the roof during the incident.

Officer Ryan Harrison's body camera video shows he walked into the backyard and saw the duffel bag on the roof. Then, Harrison followed one of the residents inside the house.

The officer's body camera video shows the resident retrieved the bag and handed it to Harrison who took it outside.

One of the residents, a woman who said she was the mother of Tapia's three children, said the bag was "his," although she didn't identify him by name and Harrison didn't ask any of the residents to identify him by name, according to Black's court order.

Harrison's body camera video shows he placed the duffel bag on a step outside the house and searched it.

He found baggies containing what he believed to be drugs.

"This is a lot of stinking drugs, OK?" Harrison told the residents.

Harrison said he was taking the duffel bag to the officers who had arrested Tapia.

"Nobody knew none of that was here," the woman told Harrison. "We're kind of like innocent bystanders and I don't want anything to happen to my family."

Body cam: Police seize drugs from Norwood home where man who re-entered US after deportation lived

No one else was charged in connection to the duffel bag.

In January 2020, three months after Tapia's arrest, his defense attorney Zenaida Lockard filed a motion to suppress the drug evidence.

She also argued that Tapia's cell phone should not be admissible because agents retrieved it after learning suspected drugs had been found in the duffel bag.

"The search of the red duffel bag occurred without a warrant and was invalid," wrote Lockard. "The seizure of the phone (and ultimately its contents) were a product of the illegal search of the bag."

The prosecution argued that Harrison's search was "reasonable."

"Officer Harrisons training and experience alerted him to the fact that the bag likely contained contraband of some kind, and that it was likely dangerous," wrote Healey in a response to the motion to suppress.

In his 47-page order, Black wrote that Harrison "knowingly" entered the property "without consent," then "takes a duffel bag and seizes it without permission."

Black wrote that Harrison also searched the duffel bag "without authorization."

"The Court finds the search was objectively unreasonable and the deficiencies were sufficiently reckless, if not "deliberate," to require deterrence and warrant suppression," Black wrote.

On Tuesday, Norwood Police Chief William Kramer told the I-Team he had reviewed Harrison's body camera video.

In a text message in response to the I-Team's questions, the chief wrote that he had "no issues with the way the officer handled things. There was nothing reckless or deliberate" about the search.

On Tuesday, ICE agents took custody of Tapia again, for the final leg of deportation for the 10th time.

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Norwood resident will be deported to Mexico for 10th time in 10 years - WCPO 9 Cincinnati

Rep. Michael Cloud is announcing new legislation Tuesday that would require ICE to improve cooperation with state and local police departments, pushing back on the Biden administrations embrace of immigration sanctuaries.

The Texas Republicans bill would push U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to approve so-called 287(g) agreements with any local or state agency that requests it. Mr. Clouds bill would also prod the homeland security secretary to promote the program, reversing the Biden administrations more skeptical approach.

Empowering state and local law enforcement to work with ICE to detain and deport criminal illegal immigrants is common sense, Mr. Cloud said. The Biden administrations carelessness about enforcing our immigration laws continues to benefit criminals while harming law-abiding Americans.

The 287(g) program allows local law enforcement agencies to serve as immigration officers in identifying and beginning deportation of illegal immigrants found in their jurisdictions.

ICE has called the program a force multiplier, allowing more eyeballs to scour prison and jail records for criminals whose immigration histories make them deportable.

The Biden administration hasnt inked a single new agreement in its 20 months in office and has lost seven agencies from the program.

Some of those agencies were ousted by the Biden administration, while others withdrew, including some that did so in protest against the Biden teams handling of things.

Arrests of serious criminals under 287(g) have dropped.

In 2020, the last full year under President Donald Trump, the program flagged 920 immigrants convicted of assault, 104 convicted of sex offenses and 37 convicted of homicide.

In 2021, which was mostly under President Biden, 287(g) agencies flagged just 394 immigrants convicted of assault, 74 convicted of sex offenses and 21 convicted of homicide.

ICE also has stopped updating a list of the programs successes.

The last arrest touted is from Jan. 27, 2021, just a week after Mr. Bidens inauguration. That was for a Mexican illegal immigrant whod been flagged in Georgia after being arrested for violating child pornography and forgery laws.

Mr. Clouds bill seeks to reinvigorate the program.

He would require the Department of Homeland Security to approve any new application to join 287(g) unless the secretary had a compelling reason. And any rejections must be reported to Congress in advance.

Kicking an agency out of the program would require 180 days notice.

My bill enables the proven-effective 287(g) program to be implemented widely to allow state and local law enforcement more control in keeping their communities safe, the congressman said.

His legislation comes amid a battle at the local level over the amount of cooperation authorities should have with federal immigration efforts.

The Trump years saw an explosion in the number of sanctuary cities jurisdictions that limit or outright ban cooperation.

Immigrant rights groups say ending 287(g) programs is a critical element of sanctuary policies.

The American Civil Liberties Union says it empowers racist local cops who use nitpicky infractions to flag and start the deportation of illegal immigrants.

The group, in a report earlier this year, blasted the Biden administration for not shutting 287(g) down altogether.

Even though the sheriffs involved in this program have engaged in well-documented abuses, the Biden administration continues to partner with and empower them, the ACLU said.

Mr. Clouds bill has the backing of NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, two groups that back stricter immigration enforcement.

RJ Hauman, head of government relations at FAIR, called the legislation a bold step to protect 287(g).

These common-sense measures will make ICE think twice before pursuing more ideologically driven 287(g) terminations, he said.

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GOP bill would bolster ICE partnerships with local cops - Washington Times

Oct 05, 2022

Five years ago, a seventeen-year-old girl left her home in Guatemala to pursue a work opportunity in central New York. She wanted to earn money to support her parents and two of her sisters. Her brother had immigrated to the United States before her, and he'd found a job on a dairy farm. He was able to get her hired there, too. When she arrived, he walked her through the farmer's land, back to the tiny building where he lived with a few other workers. She couldn't believe what she was seeing.

She recalled saying, "I'm going to live in this house?"

By the time she left that farm, she'd spent a year living with rats, cockroaches, and bedbugs that she said made her skin break out in hives.

NCPR granted her anonymity because she's not authorized to work in the United States and fears being deported.

Latino immigrants who work on the North Countrys dairy farmsand the dairy farmers who hire themlive in legal limbo.Work on dairy farms happens throughout the year, and theres no year-round agricultural visa program, so hundreds, perhaps thousands of dairy farm workers exist in the shadows. Many live on the farms where they work, in housing provided by the farmers. There's no regular government oversight of the quality of that housing.

Some workers live in perfectly good places, but others find themselves in housing barely fit for a human being.

When the young woman from Guatemala lived on that first farm, a retired couple who volunteered with a local community action program would visit twice a week to bring food and clothingNancy Fefer and her husband Marty.

"The walls were alive with cockroaches," Marty Fefer said. "The insects and rodents were throughout the [space], on both sides. I mean, so much so that you didn't want to sit down."

There were other problems, too. In the winter, the heater didn't work.

"The heater didn't work in the wintertime," the worker from Guatemala said. "You were freezing. You had to wear so many socks and so many sweaters."

The farmer came to fix the heater, but then it started blowing black smoke into the building, the worker said.

She and her companions did not have a refrigerator. Insects and feces from rodents would be in their food.

She stayed for a year. Now, she's 23 years old, and she's been working on farms in New York for half a decade. During that time, no one from the government has ever come to inspect her housing, she said.

"Never in the time that I've worked in dairy, never did I see any supervision come to see how the immigrants were living," she said.

Under New York's Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act, local health departments conduct annual inspections of housing for migrant workers who hold H-2A visas, which are for seasonal agricultural laborers.Those inspections check for compliance with the state Department of Health's Part 15 regulations, which require things like working heat, adequate floor space, functioning windows, and pest control.

But the building where this worker lived was not on an annual inspection schedule because she and its other residents were not H-2A visa holders. Many dairy farmers in the North Country hire Latino immigrants who are not authorized to work in the United States. Farmers say local people don't want the jobs. The work is dirty, repetitive, and physically taxing. As for the housing conditions, workers can complain to their local health department about issues, but various obstacles can stand in the way of their doing so.

Jessica Maxwell is the director of the Worker's Center of Central New York, a farmworker advocacy group. She said workers who live on farms often lack private mailboxes, cellphone service plans, and transportation. Many do not speak English. For those who speak indigenous languages, Spanish is a second language, too. Some do not know the name of the town or county where they live, or even the farm where they work, she said. Furthermore, their time off is limited. And many fear deportation, she said, so they avoid drawing attention.

Maxwell said substandard housing is not uncommon on dairy farms.

"We do see a lot of issues with overcrowding. Some of the other common things we see are, you know, houses that aren't weatherized appropriately," Maxwell said. "In the worst case scenarios, [we see] workers who are really being housed in buildings that are really outbuildingsbuildings that are designed for storing equipment or animals that really shouldn't be housing workers at all."

Richard Stup is an agricultural workforce specialist at Cornell. He said housing on dairy farms varies widely.

"I've been in housing that's excellent and relatively new, and I've been in housing that's adequate, you know, it's okay," Stup said. "And I've been in housing that's just, you know, rotten."

Farmers can get up to $200,000 per year from New York's Farmworker Housing Program to build or improve their facilities. Stup said there's actually been a construction boom in recent years. A lot of dairy farmers have made bunkhouse-style living spaces for their employees. When those structures are first built, Stup said they do have to meet regular building codes, but the building codes do not regulate conditions after the buildings have been approved and people have moved in.

"Thereis no particular state or federal code that governs permanent housing for these many different dairy farm employees that are in housing of one sort or another," Stup said.

In other words, if no one with an H-2A visa lives in the housing on a farm, then it won't get regularly inspected. So Stup said farmers and workers must share the responsibility of keeping the spaces livable.

"It's totally up to the farmer on how well they manage that facility, and how good of a communication system that they have established with the residents in that facility," Stup said.

But communication can be difficult when workers have very little leverage because they're in the country illegally.

Lazaro Alvarez is from Mexico City. He came to New York State several years ago, and started working on a dairy farm in the North Country. He said the housing there was overcrowded, dirty, and had a pest problem. And he spoke up about it.

"Fifteen days after I arrived, there was a meeting between workers and bosses," Alvarez said. "I said there were a lot of cockroaches, and my coworkers told me I shouldn't have said that because they were gonna fire me. And I said 'I don't care. If they fire me, they fire me.'"

Lazaro Alvarez. (Photo: Lazaro Alvarez)

Fortunately, Alvarez said, he was not fired. Instead, the farmers fumigated the housing and thanked him for telling them about the cockroach infestation.For him, saying something worked. But not every farmer is as responsive.

The female worker from Guatemala said she spoke up about her housing problems, too. She said the farmer told her he couldn't afford to fix them.

A new bill moving through Congress could change this situation. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would create an option for immigrants to work on dairy farms legally.

The New York Farm Bureau, a lobbying organization for the state's farmers, is in support of the bill.

"It would expand the H-2A guest worker visa program to include year-round workers. So their housing, too, would be inspected and subject to all the federal housing regulations," said Steve Ammerman, a farm bureau spokesperson.

"There's a real need in this country to reform our ag labor system. And we've been an advocate for immigration reform for more than two decades now," Ammerman said.

The farm bureau supports adding year-round workers to the H-2A program despite the new hurdles it would create for dairy farmers, like having to pass regular housing inspections.

"Having access to a reliable labor force would be a great thing for our farms, our farm workers, and for our food supply," Ammerman said. "We're talking about food security here and that's national security and this would be one of the costs of doing business."

The young workerwho came to join her brother told NCPR she is part of that business, and she wants to know why the government doesn't do more to help people like her.

"The animals live better than we do. Than we do. And we are part of the economy of the United States. And there's no law to help us," she said.

She's in a better situation now, living and working on a different farm. The housing there is not perfect, she said, but it's better. She doesn't want anyone else to go through what she did.

Back on that day five years ago when she arrived on that first farm, there was nowhere for her to sleep. She remembers how her brother told her not to worry. He slept on the floor so she could have the bed.

She said seeing her brother sleeping on the floor, wrapped in sweaters to keep warm, changed her perspective on the American dream.

She remembers thinking, "Esto es Estados Unidos para nosotros," she said. ["This is the United States for us."]

More here:
Dairy worker housing goes uninspected. The result is horrific conditions on some farms - North Country Public Radio

Former Gov. Paul LePage sought to limit the flow of immigrants to the state during his eight years in office, cutting public support for noncitizens seeking asylum and ending the states participation in refugee resettlement.

Gov. Janet Mills reversed many of those policies over the past four years, supporting public assistance for legally present noncitizens and speaking out about the importance of welcoming immigrants, migrants and asylum seekers as both an economic and moral imperative.

The two major party candidates running for governor have well-established, and nearly opposite, records when it comes to the emotionally charged topic of immigration. And its an issue that will be front and center again for whoever wins in November.

Business leaders struggling with severe workforce shortages say asylum seekers, refugees, seasonal migrant workers and foreign student workers are crucial to the economy of an aging state that historically has recorded more deaths than births.

At the same time, an influx of asylum seekers who must wait for permission to work is straining public resources and the availability of affordable housing in Portland and other communities, feeding opposition to taxpayer-funded assistance for noncitizens.

The race between a sitting governor and former governor offers an unusual opportunity to compare records and not just rhetoric. The third candidate on the ballot, independent Sam Hunkler, has never held public office and described only a general philosophy that Maine should welcome immigrants who arrive legally and can help fill the demand for workers.

The LePage campaign did not respond to a request to interview the former two-term governor for this story and did not respond specifically to questions sent by email.

LePages political strategist, Brent Littlefield, provided a statement criticizing Mills for supporting public assistance to asylum seekers and saying LePage supports comprehensive immigration reform to fix a broken system and allow vetted, law abiding, people into the United States and Maine. He also supports efforts to ensure that those here legally can get any required certifications quickly to become employed.

This summer, Republicans opened multicultural community centers in Portland and Lewiston as part of what the party said is a national outreach campaign to immigrant communities. And LePage has softened his rhetoric on the subject.

We are all immigrants in this country, LePage said at a campaign event in Lewiston in June. As long as we come here legally and do it right, we are one big happy family.

But LePage, who was governor from 2011 to 2019, also has continued to say he does not believe asylum seekers are here legally, even though they are allowed to remain in the country while pursuing their application for permanent status.

In an interview with the Press Herald this month, Mills discussed the important role immigrants can and should play in the states economy, saying businesses are looking for ways to better integrate new Mainers in the workforce.

And shes been pushing for immigration reforms on the national level that include addressing the immigration court backlog and shortening the waiting period before asylum seekers can work.

Many of them come here with not only availability, but skill, Mills said. Some have advanced degrees. Some have experience in the trades. Many of them have skills we need in our workforce today and thats what businesses are telling me and asking for.

COMMON GROUND

A close look at their records in office shows there is one area of agreement between Mills and LePage.

Both acknowledge the importance of both foreign students holding J-1 visas and seasonal migrants working under H2A and H2B visas.

While supportive of most of former President Donald Trumps immigration proposals, LePage did not agree with Trumps efforts to end the seasonal migrant and foreign student worker visa programs. LePage expressed his opposition in two separate letters to the president in 2017.

This tight labor market, combined with our status as the oldest state in the nation, is creating a workforce shortage, LePage wrote. If Maines workforce supported these jobs, I assure you we would hire American workers first. We are working to solve the problem of our aging workforce, but we need to stay open for business in the interim.

He added, the elimination of these programs would leave a gap in Maines tourism industry, the backbone of our economy, and would result in slowing our economic growth.

Mills also has written federal officials, requesting more worker visas, which were curtailed during the pandemic. In 2021, she wrote to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, requesting more H2B visa workers. In early January, she joined governors from seven other states in writing President Biden, calling for more J-1, H2A and H2B visa workers.

Again, we request your help to increase the flow of work-based visas as an additional tool to help address our workforce shortages and the cascading economic consequences of those shortages, the governors wrote.

LEPAGES HARD LINE

Beyond worker and student visas, however, their records mostly show they implemented opposing policies when it comes to noncitizens hoping to start new lives in Maine.

LePage staked out a hard line on immigration even before winning election as governor.

As mayor of Waterville, LePage wrote Democratic Gov. John Baldacci in 2004, blasting his executive order that prohibited state employees from asking about immigration status when providing public benefits.

One of LePages first actions as governor was rescinding that executive order and then eliminating the ability of noncitizens, including those in the country legally seeking asylum, to receive state-funded Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. They remained eligible for federal TANF funds.

In 2016, LePage wrote to President Barack Obama, saying he was formally withdrawing Maine from participation in the federal refugee resettlement program because of concerns about screening immigrants and the burden on the states welfare programs, which supports immigrants who already have been processed and can immediately seek work and full citizenship status. The action did not stop the flow of refugees because the federal government can work directly with private resettlement agencies to do the work of placing and supporting refugees.

LePage was a vocal supporter of Trumps proposals to restrict entry into the United States of people from Muslim-majority nations and to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows the children of illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. and apply for drivers licenses, social security numbers and work permits.

LePage strongly opposed public assistance for noncitizens, sometimes incorrectly arguing they are here illegally.

Throughout his terms and while campaigning this summer, LePage has repeatedly described asylum seekers as being in the country illegally, even though federal law allows foreign nationals to remain in the country while their asylum applications are decided. Foreign nationals are eligible for asylum if they are fleeing persecution for reasons such as political or religious beliefs.

LePage repeatedly criticized Portland for supporting noncitizens and falsely described it as a sanctuary city, which generally means the city does not allow law enforcement to help immigration authorities. Portland has no such prohibition.

In 2014, he sought to punish Portland other municipalities that provided asylum seekers with General Assistance, a state-funded safety net program that provides vouchers for shelter, food and medicine for those in need.

In court, he secured a partial victory in that effort. He successfully argued that the 1996 federal welfare reform act, signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, prohibited noncitizens from receiving public benefits unless a state has enacted a law specifically making them eligible. LePage accurately noted that Maine had never enacted such a law, despite years of providing assistance. And the court ruled in his favor.

The Republican-controlled Legislature responded by passing a law making asylum seekers eligible for assistance. It became law when LePage failed to veto that and 64 other bills before the statutory deadline.

LePage, however, sought to restrict eligibility through rulemaking, prohibiting some asylum seekers who are legally present in the country from receiving benefits, including victims of human trafficking.

MILLS REVERSES COURSE

Mills set herself apart from LePage well before she became governor. The pair clashed when Mills was attorney general and publicly opposed Trumps travel ban from Muslim-majority countries and his effort to end DACA.

Mills also engaged in a high-profile confrontation with LePage over General Assistance for asylum seekers. She sided with the Maine Municipal Association, Portland and other communities when LePage threatened to withhold funding.

As governor, Mills rewrote the strict, LePage-era eligibility rules for asylum seekers to receive GA to ensure that all asylum seekers who had been excluded by LePage, including the victims of human trafficking, would be eligible for assistance.Mills has supported efforts to reduce the amount of time asylum seekers need to wait before they can work.

Mills has not taken steps to unwind the state-funded TANF rule approved by the LePage administration, but she worked with the Legislature to restore MaineCare eligibility for noncitizen children under 21 and pregnant women who are not citizens.

That came in response to the sudden arrival of hundreds of migrant families that entered the U.S. through the southern border to seek asylum and traveled to Portland in 2019. Virtually all of these migrant families were from sub-Saharan Africa, including Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Over the last two years, the number of asylum seekers coming to Portland has grown. The Mills administration helped secure hotel rooms to shelter the migrants, and other people seeking housing, during the pandemic.

The cost of those rooms is being covered by federal funding. That funding is set to expire soon, although a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said no date has been announced. So the Legislature added $10 million in additional General Assistance funding in Mills supplemental budget to help offset costs in the event federal funding is not renewed.

And Mills allocated an additional $22 million to secure transitional housing for asylum seekers, and others experiencing homelessness. A spokesperson said that $750,000 in funding has been invested into a new partnership with the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, a Portland nonprofit that helps asylum seekers with their applications for asylum and work permits.

Mills also has increased investments in English language programs, which are key to helping asylum seekers become integrated into the community and gain meaningful employment.

Mills increased adult education funding by 14 percent since taking office in January 2019, including a $1.2 million increase specifically in adult education workforce development funding, according to a 2021 release from the Department of Education.

Mills steps to support noncitizens have nevertheless fallen short of some advocates hopes.

Immigrant leaders, as well as elected and administrative officials in Portland, issued a very public call for Mills to create a new asylum settlement office and help coordinate on-the-ground services, such as transportation, food, medicine and other services that are currently being delivered by area nonprofits.

At the time, a spokesperson for Mills said the governor would consider the request.

When asked in an interview with the Press Herald last month where her administration was in evaluating this request, Mills emphasized the steps she has already taken, without committing to do more.

We have been doing a lot of things in different ways, she said.

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Records show Mills' and LePage's nearly opposite views on immigration - Press Herald

Oklahoma has 33,000 teachers who are certified, but choose not to teach. Ginnie Graham and Bob Doucette talk about the state's teacher shortage forcing districts to rely on emergency certifications and more. Plus, why are extremists harassing our county election board workers?

Leave it to Ken Burns to point out what America looks like at its best and its worst.

In his three-part docuseries The U.S. and the Holocaust, Burns sheds light on how the U.S. government walked a tight wire of helping Jewish refugees flee Nazi Germany while navigating strong anti-immigrant sentiment at home.

Burns, along with co-authors Lynn Novisk and Sarah Boststein, wrote a piece published in the Tulsa World on Sept. 18 that detailed the ways in which Nazi leadership looked to American laws on immigration policy and treatment of Black and Native peoples to fashion their own framework for what ultimately led to the Holocaust.

That column speaks for itself, so Im not going to get into that here. Instead, I want to look at what has long troubled me about our country: the conflict of its lofty ideals and its sometimes bitter realities.

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My own family history shows just how good America can be to newcomers. My mother came to the U.S. from Germany as the wife of an Air Force enlisted man. She knew little of American culture and didnt speak the language when my parents settled in Virginia in the early 1960s.

She learned the language, worked as a nurse, held plenty of other jobs and had a side business when I was in high school. Her story is one of tens of millions representing immigrants who came to the U.S. and flourished.

Thats one of the things that make America great. When were at our best, we live up to the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which say in part, Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

The unspoken clause following this line is that these people, leaving dire circumstances in their homelands, can come here and find the opportunity to build a new, prosperous and happy life.

Many have done so. Some work tough jobs and grind out a living. Others start businesses and build empires. Many of their children become entrepreneurs, teachers, physicians, soldiers, researchers and more.

The U.S. has a history of positive assimilation, one where peoples of all nationalities, faiths and ethnicities have sought and found dreams unavailable to them in the countries where they were born.

The U.S. is a microcosm of humanity, something few other countries can boast. We owe that to the high ideals of our founders that everyone is created equal, with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as written in the Declaration of Independence.

You can see how someone living in a place where rights are fluid, or flatly denied, might be attracted to a country with such egalitarian principles.

I believe this exists here, and get confirmation of that with every story we do on naturalization ceremonies conducted in Tulsa. Each new citizen looks happy to be part of this ongoing American experiment.

Unfortunately, this rosy picture is incomplete. While our ideals are high and success stories real, the relationship we have with immigrants has been fraught with nativism, racism and fear.

For me, that hit home in 2006. Back then, I found myself concerned about how the midterm elections would pan out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not going well. I worried about what a Democratic takeover of Congress might mean for the country.

Ive long held that the country needs healthy liberal and conservative parties, but some of what I was hearing at the time from the left gave me pause.

I tuned into various pundits, looking for any sort of message that could counter the impending blue wave. Repeatedly, the answer was the same: Bash the immigrants, particularly those from Latin America or anyone hinting of Middle Eastern descent. Predictably, the issue was a loser. Democrats mopped up in the midterms, then took control of the White House two years later. For me, it struck deeper. My faith tells me that were all Gods image bearers. Demonizing foreigners was the opposite of what Christian scriptures teach. I did a lot of reevaluating in those days.

One particular truth stood out: Anyone trafficking in the politics of fear was someone of whom to be wary.

Burns documentary illustrated that. Anti-Chinese laws shut the golden door to people from eastern Asia. Italians, eastern Europeans and more were all, at various times, singled out by strict immigration quotas. Mexican immigrants were welcomed for a time, but they, too, became targets of anti-immigrant fear.

Fear-based persecution wasnt relegated to newcomers. For centuries, Black Americans werent legally recognized as people. Until emancipation, they had no rights. Afterwards, Jim Crow laws sought to claw back rights given to freed slaves and their descendants. Liberated Blacks were viewed by many as a threat.

Native Americans suffered their own horrors, between wars, displacement and relegation to reservations where many tribes teetered on the edge of extinction. Weve barely scratched the surface of confronting those traumas.

During World War II, Americans of Japanese descent were wrested from their homes and confined in bleak internment camps, their loyalties questioned solely on the basis of who they were.

To Burns point, the attitudes that birthed these calamities affected Jews as well. American sentiments toward Jewish refugees in the run-up to World War II were, at best, mildly indifferent. At worst, it was the type of callous spite that deprived beleaguered European Jews of safe harbor here during their hour of need.

State Department resistance toward offering more help cost untold thousands of Jewish lives; had we been more open, Anne Frank and most of her family may have lived out their lives in America instead of dying in Nazi concentration camps.

Id like to think weve advanced beyond those times, but American nativism has never been eradicated. It ebbs and flows.

What do we see now? I still see those stories of new Americans being naturalized in joyous ceremonies. Tulsa owes its new surge of growth and the economic opportunities that come with it to a steady rise in immigrant communities from around the world.

I see a suburban church actively helping Afghans, Burmese, Ukrainians and more begin new lives far from the troubles of where they were born.

But I also watch as politicians preen in front of the southern border, stoking fear of the foreigner. I see them equate undocumented immigrants to thugs and rapists. I hear the term invasion on repeat, even though these same elected officials do nothing about reforming our outdated and cumbersome immigration system.

As a result, all sorts of people end up in the crossfire, targets of violence at stores, synagogues, churches and on the street. All because they look, talk and believe differently.

Immigration reform is needed. The surge of people flooding our southern border attests to that, as do unheeded pleas from businesses that would love to greet a pool of eager new hires.

Such reform is hard. Its far easier to complain than it is to act.

But Id rather try to do the latter. It would mean that while were looking to satisfy our own interests, were also viewing those who want to come here as people and not problems.

And that brings me back to the two-edged sword we wield on immigration. If we live up to the core of our beliefs, America is displayed at its finest. At our worst, when fear guides our actions, we can be deadly cold.

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Bob Doucette: I've seen us at our best - and our worst - on immigration - Tulsa World