A conservative couple publicly disowned and shamed as racists by their daughter in a magazine article have hit back at her explosive claims.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras wrote an essay for The Cut in which she claimed she was forced to stop speaking to husband Jeremiah Barber’s parents Blaine and Kristine Barber due to their inflammatory stance on immigration.
The Colombian-born author described one clash in which she was allegedly asked by her father-in-law if her sympathy for asylum seekers was because she was ‘illegal’ herself. Contreras never lived in the US illegally and was a visa holder until she obtained her green card and subsequent citizenship.
Writing for New York magazine’s popular female-focused website, she also accused the pair of gifting her an offensive book written by a pro-eugenics author.
But now Kristine Barber, who revealed she and her husband work with immigrants, has refuted her daughter-in-law’s accusations and suggested that she may have bent the truth.
‘Our daughter-in-law is a very talented writer, I think this article that she has written uses a writing device called verisimilitude – which is when you inject things that are not true to make your point,’ Barber, who is a retired nurse, told DailyMail.com.
In her piece, Contreras revealed that she and her in-laws had not spoken for seven years.
She claimed a major breakdown in the relationship occurred in 2018, after her they gifted her a book by eugenicist John Tanton, called The Immigration Invasion.
Tanton believes that immigrants of color are a threat to the US and thinks that ‘less intelligent’ people should be stopped from reproducing.
‘When I asked my in-laws if they could not see why giving me this book was wildly inappropriate, offensive — violent, even — my father-in-law said “no,” he could not see why they couldn’t just give me a book,’ Contreras wrote.
However, Kristine, who retired in Mesa, Arizona, after a life spent in Michigan, stated that ‘apparently no one fact checked the article’.
‘My husband and I have lived overseas and he was a pastor of an international church,’ Barber explained.
‘Now, we currently teach English to Japanese and Spanish speaking immigrants and none of those things were mentioned in her article.’
But even prior to the book incident, Contreras described how she found it difficult to stomach lectures from her Baptist father-in-law about how she should defer to her husband.
After the fall out, Contreras decided to stop speaking to her in-laws, a move she says her husband Jeremiah Barber supports as he tries to navigate his own relationship with them.
However, the Pulitzer-nominated author, who lives in San Francisco, admitted she did receive an olive branch from them just before the election.
Contreras said the short letter from her in-laws contained no apology or understanding of what had caused the rift in the first place.
She decided to pen a reply which so far she is yet to send and seems unlikely to ever do so.
‘Why, I asked, had they not recoiled at the thought of eugenics? I wrote that my trust has been broken. That I hope their lives are as full of beauty and love as mine is, sincerely, but that I can no longer be a part,’ Contreras wrote.
‘I did send her a note and ask for a path to reconciliation,’ Barber said. ‘I am sure that airing our differences in the media is not that path, but that is my ultimate desire.’
Contreras wrote that her situation is one that is being mirrored across the US in the advent of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
The president-elect has vowed to tackle the immigration crisis with mass deportations, the likes of which have never been seen before.
But for Contreras, Trump’s pledges to detain illegal immigrants triggered unpleasant memories of his first time in office.
Pultizer-winning Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, to an engineer father and a medic mother.
She described how her ‘leader’ mom made most of the decisions with the support of her husband, who helped out with managing the household.
She relocated to the US and lived in the country legally on a visa until she gained a green card through her marriage.
But she recalled how even as she was being sworn in as a US citizen, the president-elect was making controversial remarks about restricting migration from ‘s**thole countries’.
The author’s familial rift has no doubt been echoed across the country in the wake of the latest election cycle, where immigration was a dominant theme.
Contreras characterized the split and the subsequent radio silence as her finally giving up on trying to convince her parents-in-law of her humanity.
Kristine said she had not even been informed the essay was going to be written. Both parties have claimed they still respect one another.
‘We wish her well and would love to reconnect with her, but, yeah…’ Barber said.