De Aquí/De Allá (From Here/From There) (Galewind Films, Voces, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Hitler’s Olympics KPBS showed a fascinating episode of the series Voces, an outreach program to Latino/a Americans, called De Aquí/De Allá (“From Here, From There”), profiling Mexican-American attorney Luis Cortes Romero. Luis Cortes (the “Romero” is his matronymic) was born in Mexico but was brought over to the U.S. at age one by his parents. They later had a second son, Eric, who since he was born in the U.S. was automatically granted American citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. Luis grew up having no idea he wasn’t legally an American until he was in middle school in Redwood City, California. His class was scheduled to go to Europe on a field trip, and Luis, an eager student of European history, was eager to take the trip and see the places he’d been reading about. Then he found out that because he was undocumented, he couldn’t go. Faced with the trauma of essentially being stateless, which was only magnified when his father was deported, Luis’s school grades nosedived and he went through a phase of wearing a mohawk, getting himself tattooed and listening to punk rock – which his mother (interviewed extensively for this program, though only in Spanish since she’s monolingual) said she managed to endure. Then he pulled himself together, graduated from high school and college at San Jose State University, and sought a career as a lawyer. Luis applied to law schools in California but found that the tuition was so pricey he would actually be better off financially if he went to law school in another state. So he ended up at the University of Idaho, until midway through his first year he realized that even if he completed his studies, he still couldn’t be admitted to practice law because he was undocumented.

Luis called his mother and told her he was dropping out and coming home. His mom chewed him out and said, “Whatever a Cortes starts, he finishes.” Told point-blank that he wouldn’t be allowed back home until he got his law degree, he finished the four-year program. In 2012, his last year of law school, President Barack Obama announced the so-called “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program, which he instituted by executive order. It meant that people in Cortes’s position – people who had been brought to the U.S. as children of undocumented immigrant parents – could apply for a semi-protected status. It would not confer citizenship or even legal residency, but it would mean that individuals granted DACA status could legally work in the U.S., pay taxes, accumulate Social Security and have the other rights and privileges of legal residents. Under DACA protection, Luis was not only admitted to the California State Bar but became a working attorney, not surprisingly specializing in immigration cases. Then Donald Trump announced for President in 2015 and got elected a year later. Trump had run on a strongly anti-immigrant platform, and one of his campaign promises had been to end DACA once and for all. In March 2017 Trump’s administration announced that they would seek a deportation order against Daniel Ramírez, a young DACA recipient who Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were claiming was a gang member because he had tattoos on his forearm. Luis took Ramírez’s case and joked on the program that he’s such a gentle man he’d make the world’s worst gangbanger. When Trump issued an executive order terminating DACA and effectively targeting all its recipients for deportation, Luis became part of the legal struggle against it.

This case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – the old Supreme Court, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still alive and the so-called “conservative” majority was still 5-4 instead of 6-3, and it still had some respect for precedent instead of being intent on remaking American law and custom in a hellish tradition-bound fashion. Ted Olson, the legendary Republican attorney who argued the 2000 Bush v. Gore case that made George W. Bush President but later enlisted in some surprisingly humane causes, including defending same-sex marriage against the efforts of his Right-wing comrades to ban it, joined the battle. But Luis also took part in the arguments, a poignant development because he was defending the program that had allowed him to become an attorney in the first place. Ultimately the Court ruled 5-4 that the Trump administration had acted illegally in terminating DACA; though Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion didn’t address the constitutional issues, it said abolishing DACA had to be done through a process the Trump administration hadn’t followed. A recent profile of Luis Cortes in the San Francisco Chronicle (https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/movies-tv/luis-cortes-romero-pbs-19548403) offered his thoughts on the current Supreme Court and the seemingly impregnable 6-3 radical Right-wing majority since Ginsburg’s death and Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to replace her.

“The conservative [sic] bloc of the Supreme Court primarily is making decisions without much concern for its popularity,” Cortes told the Chronicle. “Or, for that matter, there isn’t much concern about the amount of people (their decisions) will (negatively) impact. If it’s going to have an impact on millions of people, then so be it. They’re committed to their views.” Cortes’s recommendation is that Congress add four more justices to the Supreme Court – but on a plan currently followed by some state supreme courts and the federal appeals courts. Only nine justices of the 13 would hear any particular case, and they’d be assigned at random so the replacement of one justice by her ideological opposite wouldn’t be as consequential as Ginsburg’s replacement by Barrett was. Fortunately, Cortes himself is no longer under the cross-hairs of Trump’s determination to eliminate DACA. His father was not only readmitted to the U.S. but got the coveted “green card” giving him permanent residency, and as his son that applied to Luis as well. But he continues to practice law and defend immigrant clients. As Chronicle reporter G. Allen Johnson laconically commented, “The Redwood City-raised attorney became the first undocumented person to present a case at the nation’s highest court. And he might have to do it again.”