| Page 2 of 3 < > |
Poster Child
This March 7 photo of 2-year-old Tomasa Mendez, crying in her mother's arms because her father was suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, has become iconic in the immigration debate.
(By Peter Pereira -- New Bedford Standard-times)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Money raised by the community helped the family with food and rent for about six weeks. Now that money is gone. The rent is due. The phone and cable service have been cut off. Their church helped them find a lawyer, and organizers from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition visit twice a week to do what they can.
Hector Mendez ended up in a detention facility in Massachusetts, but Dominga can't visit because she is undocumented. She and the children were able to speak to him on the phone, until they lost phone service.
"What am I going to do with the children?" Dominga asks.
Immigrant-rights organizers say the family's plight is typical. Scores of families have been separated in the recent wave of workplace raids. The human cost of enforcing the law is much greater than the violation, and many victims are children, organizers say.
Pat Reilly, a spokeswoman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responds that the government isn't to blame for the families' straits. "You should look back to the decision the parents made in coming to the country without legal status," she says. "Our job is to enforce the laws."
The girl in the picture: That's Tomasa's Dora blanket in the foreground. And Diego is the blurry boy to the left. Those are Dominga's nail-bitten fingers lingering over Tomasa's right ear, from which hangs a little gold hoop.
What is it about this photo?
"There's something about that face," says Pereira, the photographer. "If you look at her mouth -- her mouth is fear. And her eyes are sadness. That's the contrast that makes that photograph so powerful."
There's another quality in those brimming eyes, those sprouting pigtails. "Innocence," Pereira says. "This innocence of not having any control, and being completely influenced by the events."
Pereira happens to be an immigrant himself, legal, who arrived from Portugal when he was 7. Now 37, he chucked a career in computers six years ago to pursue his passion, telling stories with pictures. "The best you ever hope for is to capture a whole story in a single frame," he says.
The photo did not make the front page of the Standard-Times, circulation roughly 35,000. It ran inside.
But activists working in that frantic church basement saw Tomasa's picture, and it struck them.
