Damian Lara:
Grateful and Giving Back to Immigrants
Damian Lara arrived in Southeastern New Mexico at the age of 6. As an immigrant from Mexico, he and his family were welcomed by the small community of Melrose with open arms and big hearts.
“I was so in awe when I came here as a child and was able to thrive with the values of my community and the United States, and I am so grateful for that experience,” Damian recalls. “I never in my life thought I would see the values and compassion of this country result in torturing people and putting them in cages.” With a quiver in his voice, he added, “It breaks my heart.”
For the last 4 years, Damian has focused on giving back what was given to him when he arrived. As a lawyer, he helps individuals make it through the massive maze of barriers – more than have ever existed in the past — that face immigrants seeking asylum. In his own way, he is countering the Trump Administration’s policies of ripping families apart at the border and detaining thousands of immigrants in prisons void of medical care, legal representation, and overall human decency.
He explained that despite President Obama deporting more immigrants during his presidency, Trump has turned back more than 10 years of immigration law by overturning case laws, resulting in more human suffering than anyone can fathom. And instead of immigration judges making decisions based on evidence of persecution, the White House is making those decisions from afar, by enacting swift orders that change the lives of thousands of immigrants with one fell swoop.
He shared a couple of his cases, both of which involved mothers leaving their countries with their young children. One client was trying to leave her husband in Honduras who was beating her. The other woman was leaving abuse imposed on her by her government, which included being raped by the police.
The woman trying to leave her abusive husband did not qualify for asylum as it is typically defined. For many countries, it is not against the law for a man to beat his wife. In fact, if the woman has a miscarriage, it has to be approved by a doctor as an actual miscarriage and not an abortion. She could be imprisoned for defying her husband. Her story of being detained is chilling.
She and her 8-year-old son were put into a detention facility in Karnes County Family Residential Center, and although they were in the same building, they were separated. Her son ended up with a sexually transmitted disease and blisters on his rectum that could only be accounted for by being molested at the facility. Fortunately, Damian was able to reunite the child with his mother and bond them out of the facility.
“There’s been a lot of sexual assault in these centers,” Damian said. “We were afraid that if something like that could happen in a family center, what is happening in a center where families aren’t in the same facility?“ He added a startling fact: 1500 children separated from their parents at the border have gone missing in the last 4 years.
Damian’s passion for immigrant law runs deep. When he completed law school at UNM, he worked at a non-profit agency for immigrants who were victims of domestic violence. He was able to last a year in that job, recognizing the hardship it took on him, and the need to effect change at the policy level. He then worked for the NM Legislature as a staff attorney at the Legislative Council Service, where he was the first staff attorney to speak on the floor in the House of Representatives. He was instrumental in helping to broker a deal in the House and the Senate which resulted in the passage of the “Breaking Bad” bill in 2013. The tax reform bill increased the state’s incentives for the film and television industry and was signed into law.
After leaving the state legislature, he worked as the Bernalillo County Deputy Assessor before running for U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 in the New Mexico primary that included 7 other candidates. Currently, he works with his wife, Iris’s, law firm, Calderon Law Firm LLC in Albuquerque. He continues to push for improved policies – especially around immigration – and has high hopes that a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris win will reverse some of Trump’s horrific policies.
“I would like to see an Attorney General who, like Biden, knows what it is to struggle, to have to work, to provide for your children, and want to not just have a paycheck but have purpose in life, to have a job and career that brings you dignity,” Damian said. “If we get an Attorney General like that, then they can start to make decisions that will allow immigration judges to have the discretion to allow people to avoid death from being deported, to avoid torture, persecution, and a life of poverty and persecution in their own countries.”
He added, “I would be extremely grateful, as I always have to this country, if we can get an Attorney General like that.”
We will all be grateful.