Your Papers, Señorita?
A DEPARTMENT LIKE ICE has no conscience, of course. Just directives (like “make 400,000 arrests this year”) and a great concern for its public image. If that’s the case, however, I can’t imagine why they’d think chilling out on train platforms and plucking young Latinas out of the crowd would go over well.
IS ICE ASHAMED of its tactics? No. A Department like ICE has no conscience, of course. Just directives (like “make 400,000 arrests this year”) and a great concern for its public image. After all, ICE needs to keep functioning to funnel cash to the Corrections Corporation of America. That is why, obviously, they are so tight lipped, issuing only steel-plated machine-stamped public statements stinking of the PR room or flat, faceless (and sometimes false) phrases like “We did everything by the book.”
Is it “by the book,” I wonder, to hang out on train platforms or stations and interrogate brown high school girls? Ask for their papers and when they cannot produce any, to solicit confessions about legal status, have them sign a paper “agreeing to voluntarily return to Mexico without seeing an immigration judge” and then ship across the border?
Is that really “the book” the Obama/Napolitano administration is using?
SAN DIEGO—Three high school students who were arrested last month on their way to school and sent to Mexico by Border Patrol agents have been allowed to return to the United States. The teenagers, ranging from 15 to 17 years old, returned Wednesday to San Diego after the federal government allowed them to stay with their parents while they fight their cases in immigration court. …
The students’ arrests on May 20 at a trolley station in Old Town San Diego provoked outrage among immigrant rights advocates who questioned whether border agents should be arresting children.
Lilia Velasquez, an immigration attorney representing the students, said authorities didn’t follow required procedures, and failed to give the students a special form that outlines their right to speak with an adult.
“They treated this as any other raid,” Velasquez said. “I think it is implicit of the mere fact they agreed to this rare type of procedure of paroling the students back into the U.S. that they did something wrong. And they want to do damage control.”
Stephanie Jiménez, 16, surrounded by her family Photo by Laura Embry, Union-Tribune
If DHS/ICE has to resort to loitering in train stations and bullying high school girls into Mexico, they have no game plan whatsoever. And I’m not surprised they are trying to hide acts like this. How pathetic. But you know. For ICE, it’s just another day of terrorizing the Latin@ community.
WTF!!! Have they no shame?
This is why I have begun to carry my US passport on my person everywhere I go except hiking. When in the wilderness, rather than pack a passport, I prefer a .38 special.
this girls eyes says volumes. i can’t even conjure up a real time image in my mind of these girls on there way to school, being approached by military trained ice agents. wtf is right. i think it is a bullseye nez, to suggest that ice is but a economic stimulus for the corrections corporations.
get rid of ice! i do not want my tax payments going to support this “program”, that by it’s nature works to destroy any foundation of moral and ethical standard this country is working to rebuild.
watch out for those forest service rangers laura, i’ve heard stories.
ohh…. stepanie i know you,….. ahhah you are right nxt to me … it was sad when they told me that you’ve been deportd…..