Last year, Hispanic Heritage Day at the Capitol brought thousands of people to the Oklahoma statehouse in protest of legislative efforts to criminalize anyone in the state without a legal immigration status.
This year, Norman Democrat Rep. Annie Menz says the focus was back on celebrating two of the biggest cultural pillars for Latinos in Oklahoma:
“We prioritize working and praying,” Menz said during a press conference held by the Latino caucus. “And it's in that spirit that we wanted to go back to our original format and, kind of, lighten it a little bit and remind people, you know, our community is no threat. We are your neighbors. We are your friends. We are your coworkers.”
The message comes as immigrant Oklahomans across the state are being detained and deported by federal authorities on short notice.
So, while on the second floor rotunda, Latino-led businesses and community organizations danced and sang in honor of their cultures, traditions and contributions to this country, their representatives in the legislature were lobbying their Republican colleagues through the press for a better solution to illegal immigration than separating families.
The lawmakers standing next to Menz as she spoke were Oklahoma City Democrats Rep. Arturo Alonso-Sandoval and Sen. Michael Brooks. But they also brought along self-proclaimed conservative Republican and Superintendent of Santa Fe South, Chris Brewster and The National Association of Evangelicals’ regional representative for Oklahoma and Kansas, Joel Kersey.
Brooks, who chairs the Latino Caucus, said part of the mission for this year’s designated day for Hispanic advocacy in the Oklahoma statehouse was to bring representatives in the community who are privileged enough to not worry about detainment, and allies who aren’t necessarily Latinos, or Democrats, but who share their concerns.
“There are people that are nervous.,” Brooks said. “And so having a huge event on the steps of the Capitol wasn't the right thing to do this year. And so instead of doing that, what we did is we reached out to friends and allies, who perhaps could serve as the voice of the community.”
Leading up to the press conference, which took place at 1 p.m., members from the landscaping, restaurant, hospitality and construction industries met with Governor Kevin Stitt at a roundtable discussion, without the press, to express their concerns regarding the harmful economic impact of deporting valuable members of the state’s workforce and business minds.
Brooks said he felt Stitt was sincere in hearing the concerns of a community he values as a state workforce and a strong political support base for him.
“Since the governor has run for reelection, he has always reached out to the Latino community,” Brooks said. “And so there's never been a reason to … doubt his affection and his affinity for the Latino community.”Still, the state’s senior Latino lawmaker said, sometimes politics just “gets in the way of good policy.”
“And right now, the politics on this is a steamroller,” Brooks said.
Celebrations with an undertone of tragedy
Rep. Alonso-Sandoval took various opportunities throughout the day to recite statistics proving Latinos are an essential piston in the state’s economic engine.
“The Hispanic community is huge within the state of Oklahoma,” Alonso-Sandoval said.” And I think it's always a great reminder to recognize just how big of an impact our community has within the state.”
Citing data he collected from the state and studies by the center-left think tank The Oklahoma Policy Institute, he pointed out immigrants, not just Latinos, make up 7.9% of the state’s entire workforce. That’s around 151,000 workers, the data shows.
Alonso-Sandoval also provided the following breakdown of the state’s immigrant workforce within key industries:
- Animal Slaughtering & Processing – 34.7%
- Landscaping Services – 30.1%
- Crop Production – 21.3%
- Construction – 17.9%
- Accommodation and Food Services – 14%
That’s in addition to people who work as lawyers, engineers, nurses and other facets of healthcare, the south Oklahoma City representative said. Alonso-Sandoval is the child of two immigrants, a dual American-Mexican citizen and an engineer by trade. Sen. Brooks, who’s stated his family has been in Oklahoma for around a century now, is an immigration attorney by trade. Menz is a Navy veteran.
In those ways, the handful of Latinos in the Oklahoma legislature is a well-rounded representation of the broader population in the state, save for their predominantly liberal ideology. Even so, just like the minority Democrat caucuses in both chambers, the Latino caucus has little to no power to stop legislation that will harm their constituents.
And with Trump’s mass deportation agenda underway, and what Brook’s called ‘inklings’ of people arrested and flagged for violating the state crime impermissible occupation, some immigrants in Oklahoma are going about their lives and, sometimes, not returning home to their families.
Chris Brewster, the Santa Fe South Superintendent, in his capacity leading the Santa Fe South Public Charter School, said he serves around 5,000 students. 97% of which come Latino households.
As a conservative Southern Baptist pastor in addition to being an educator, he said, recent state and federal immigration policies violate several tenets of the Christianity the politicians pushing them claim to practice. He provided one anecdote to help keep that point salient in the public discourse over immigration.
About a month ago, Brewster said, a fifth grader “went into crisis” when he was picked up from school by someone who wasn’t his mother. It was their neighbor, who relayed to the young boy, and the school officials now tasked with his care, that mom was “picked up by authorities.”
Brewster said the mother-son duo had arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum from violence in Honduras only a few months ago. They had filed the relevant paperwork and crossed the southern border, eventually landing in Oklahoma and finding a job in a construction crew.
“This is a young single mom working in a roofing crew, and then enrolled her son in the school she found would take good care of her son,” he said. “So we've been serving this young man until this day, when he tries to go home and his mom is not there.”
Brewster said the mother was detained by local law enforcement at a gas station in Meeker while on her lunch break.
“As school officials, I'm anxious about what we do with an 11-year-old boy who has nobody in the state right now, estranged from his father, who happened to be somewhere in the country, but we couldn't locate him and we just didn't know what to do,” he said.
Eventually, the boy’s father was contacted, Brewster said, and came for the student and took him to another state. Immigration enforcement can’t go on the way it is for long, Brewster said, as promises kept by state Republicans that families weren’t going to be separated are actively broken.
“This is not a one-off story,” Brewster said. “I don't find this to be tenable.
“The way that we treat children, those that have been made in God's image, that they should go through this type of turmoil and tragedy because of what's taking place in our immigration system and how, frankly, we're treating the sojourner in our state.”
There is a new legal battle shaping up to try and stop state-level immigration enforcement. If the plaintiffs get their way, HB 4156 will again be paused in the courts. But what federal authorities do is beyond the scope of state lawmakers' and the governor’s actual authority. It’s the whole reason the lawsuit exists in the first place.
So, they’ve been forced to break the promises they made to immigrant Oklahomans about keeping innocent families together, while pushing the very Trump agenda that helped them get elected and is working to tear those families apart.
