A notification lit up Paola Garcia’s phone as she got ready for bed on July 17. It was a racist Facebook message from a person she’d never met. Garcia shrugged it off and went to bed.

But she woke up to something she couldn’t ignore. That morning, her Facebook Messenger was flooded with racist messages telling her she would be deported and demanding she leave the United States.

One message came with two pictures. The first was of a man filling out the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip page, where one can report illegal aliens to ICE for detention. The second was a message on the screen reading “Thank you, your submission has been received.”

Garcia had just finished her junior year at Transylvania University, a small liberal arts college in Lexington, Kentucky. She’s also one of nearly 800,000 DACA recipients.

DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program initiated under then-President Barack Obama that protects young undocumented children brought to the U.S. by their parents from deportation. President Donald Trump said in early September the program would be terminated, giving Congress six months to agree on a solution and leaving DACA recipients, known as “Dreamers,” on shaky ground.

In today’s volatile political climate, hate is moving off the streets and into our Facebook feeds. The internet’s lack of face-to-face confrontation seems to encourage racism and threats, especially when it comes to the discussion of undocumented immigrants and Dreamers.

This rhetoric is permeating small towns, college campuses and even the White House. ICE continues to round up undocumented immigrants — 498 in a four-day operation just last week, according to a release. We can’t keep letting hate go unchecked.

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As Garcia opened more messages, she came across one that really stood out. It was from a man who had seen a screenshot of Garcia’s profile posted in a racial hatred Facebook group.

He told Garcia that another Transylvania University student had shared the screenshot and wrote “report this illegal at my school bragging about breaking the law.” Garcia documented everything, alerted the university and sat down with college officials when school resumed.

“They had already spoke to their legal counsel,” Garcia said. “It was told to me that there wasn’t enough for a case.”

The student had apparently not violated the school’s harassment policies. But the prospect of sharing a campus with the stranger who incited these attacks loomed over Garcia.

Feeling like she was out of options, Garcia recorded an emotional plea for help and uploaded it to Facebook. The video went viral and got picked up by CBS, BuzzFeed and news sites across the country. Soon, Transylvania donors and alumni threatened to withhold contributions until the administration addressed the situation.

The disturbing reality is that the student who made the post was acting presidential. The targeting undocumented Americans was and continues to be a cornerstone of the rhetoric promoted by Trump, who shamelessly traveled across the nation inciting the masses to scream “Build the Wall!”

To Garcia, this isn’t just politics. This is her life. Over the past several months, she’s seen ICE agents sitting in the parking lot of her family’s restaurant, stalking employees.

“A couple of restaurants near ours, Mexican restaurants, (have been) raided like two or three times … they took a lot of people, they just completely wiped out everyone who was there,” Garcia said. “They just detained everyone and took them.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has given Congress six months to address DACA. The worry remains that safeguarding Dreamers will be used as a bargaining chip in the political war over the continual mass deportation of other undocumented immigrants.

Yes, that’s as inhumane as it sounds. Politicians are gambling over human lives — humans who have come here seeking a better life, who have bought houses and opened businesses and who, especially in the case of Dreamers, may know no other home.

The student recently disenrolled from Transylvania, but the struggle for Garcia and millions of other Dreamers isn’t over. Garcia’s story is just one reminder of the humanity behind racially coded terms like “illegals” that have become casual soundbites in today’s political landscape.

This corrosion into blatant racism has consequences. Ideas some may think remain online manifest themselves into reality.

Just a few months before Garcia’s incident, a man walked into Transylvania’s cafe and asked students a simple question: “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?” He told Republicans they were safe and attacked Democrats with a machete, according to NBC. Two students were attacked before police stopped the assailant, who turned out to be a former student who felt discriminated against because of his extreme political views.

Letting bigotry run unchecked online is dangerous not only to the notions of democracy and justice, but directly to the human beings targeted in hateful posts. But we shouldn’t have to wait for violence before we tackle the dangerous rhetoric that sparks it.

It’s easy to ignore hateful posts and comments online. But it is essential to community police cyberspace, as social media platforms won’t do it themselves.

Now, Garcia is taking her story to Washington, D.C. She’s part of a group of 100 Dreamers traveling to Washington to push for congressional action on DACA before the six months is up, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

But Garcia said she has no fear for the future. She only has room for optimism and a drive that stems from her parents.

Kyle Smith is a third-year environmental studies major. His column appears biweekly. You can reach him at kasmi102@syr.edu.

Published on October 3, 2017 at 10:12 pm