It was bound to happen.
As Black-rights advocate Angela Davis warned 50 years ago, “If they come for you in the morning, they will come for me at night.”
That sinister warning also applies to what is happening now in America during this indiscriminate wave of immigrant round-ups.
Expelling immigrants who were dangerous and violent of murder, rape and mayhem? Yes, President Trump had every right to do so. It was a good move.
However, he and others quickly began to demonize all immigrants as illegal and dangerous. That attitude led to cruel arrests and detentions of immigrants working hard and going about the business of living their lives in peace.
One of the latest who was plucked off the street by five or six masked, unidentified ICE agents is Nariso Barranco, a landscaper who on June 14 was trimming greenery outside a pancake restaurant in Santa Ana, Calif. All of a sudden five or six ICE agents approached him. Scared by the sight of what he perceived as a bunch of thugs, Barranco, carrying his weed-whacker, ran. One agent sprayed his face with pepper spray. Within seconds the agents wrestled him to the ground, beating his face with their fists, dislocating one of his arms in the assault.
ICE agents claimed he attacked them with the weed-whacker. Not true. The disturbing video of the agents’ over-reaction shows they were the nasty aggressors, not Mr. Barranco.
Barranco was hauled off to a Los Angeles detention center and put into a “cage” cell with seven other detainees and one toilet. He received no medical aid, almost no food and very little water, according to his son, Alejandro, who visited him there.
Alejandro, by the way, is a U.S. Marine veteran. His two brothers are active members of the Marines who were inspired to join the military because their father loves this country and inspired his sons to help serve and protect America and to become well educated, law-abiding citizens.
Illegal immigrants are those who live in the United States without required paperwork or by not renewing temporary work/study permits in a timely manner.
However, it’s certain immigrants, technically legal or not, boost economic growth, contribute more in tax revenue than they collect and tend to work for lower wages in jobs that most native-born Americans prefer not to do, such as in agriculture, meat-packing or the service sector.
What is badly needed is an end to this draconian expulsion of immigrants (unless they are indeed proven to be dangerous and violent). Many have worked here for so long and are good, productive citizens part of just about every thriving community. They deserve a chance to become “legal” rather than treated as criminals to be deported to countries where they didn’t even come from – El Salvador and South Sudan, to name just two examples.
Trump’s senior executive advisor, Stephen Miller, is and has been a rabid anti-immigrant spokesman ever since he was a high-school student in southern California. Of Jewish descent, Miller advocated for separating children from their parents during Trump’s first administration. And now, he is pulling out all the stops by fueling round-ups that recall Nazi Germany and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s when so many citizens “disappeared.” Even an uncle of Miller’s excoriated him publicly for being a Jew who, considering the horrific Holocaust, should have empathy for other persecuted people, immigrants included.
What we need right now, badly, is a kind and compassionate United States that honors legal due process, not one that is knee-jerk harsh, vindictive and cruel.
