A friend of mine recently called to tell me a chilling story. He has a family member who teaches middle-schoolers in our city’s public school system. The students come from a relatively poor area, and are largely Hispanic ten and eleven-year-olds.
And for the past few weeks, his classroom has been visited, sporadically, by ICE.
The ICE officers who come to his classroom have a standard routine; they take a student–a ten or eleven-year-old–out of the classroom and the school for “questioning” of some sort. Sometimes, that student is returned; sometimes–presumably, if it is determined that he or she is undocumented–that student never returns. In the latter case, according to what my friend’s relative has been told, the student, along with his or her parents, has been summarily deported.
My friend was appalled. His relative, the teacher, is infuriated, but helpless.
We don’t know anything more about this invasion of a public school classroom. We don’t know whether the child or the parents are afforded any sort of due process, or whether they have the services of legal counsel. (According to a recent article, routine denial of due process in immigration cases is an intentional part of Trump’s effort to undermine the rule of law.) We don’t know whether they are simply taken, like the widely-reported case of the Massachusetts graduate student with a valid visa who was accosted by plain-clothes ICE officials on a city street, arrested and flown to Louisiana for the “crime” of writing an op-ed with which our current dictator disagreed.
Undocumented immigrants have, by definition, broken the law. They’ve come to the United States without submitting themselves to our incredibly complicated and lengthy legal immigration process. In most cases, that is the only law they’ve broken. The middle-schoolers who are being “disappeared” from the classroom of my friend’s relative are innocent of any intentional lawbreaking, as are the thousands of DACA kids who were brought here as small children.
It is one thing to agree with the administration that undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of crimes while on our soil should be deported; it is another thing entirely to stand by and watch hard-working and otherwise law-abiding people–and their children–being summarily snatched from their lives and their classrooms and taken…where? How?
All my friend really knows is what his teacher/relative is experiencing. His relative doesn’t know any more than the fact that ICE periodically appears in his classroom, takes a child away, and sometimes brings that child back.
And sometimes, doesn’t.
But thanks to the media, we do know about the graduate students (lovingly referred to as “lunatics” by Marco Rubio, our new and especially despicable Secretary of State) who are being rounded up and stripped of their entirely legal residency for the “crime” of expressing opinions with which that our madman President disagrees. Despite assertions to the effect that these students have assisted Hamas and other terrorist organizations, none of them has been credibly accused–indeed, accused at all– of any such activity. No evidence of terrorist support has even been offered. It has become abundantly clear that the only “aid and comfort” offered has come in the form of opinions–the expression of which, at least until the advent of our current fascist regime, has been constitutionally protected.
Is it possible that my friend, his relative, and yours truly are jumping to unwarranted conclusions? All we know, as I’ve said, is that ICE is routinely visiting a largely Hispanic public school classroom, taking individual students out for interrogation, and returning some but not all of them. Perhaps the fact that this is occuring during a time when we are seeing reports of unconstitutional behaviors nationally is making us more suspicious than we would otherwise be.
Perhaps.
Since I have only the information I have shared above, I’m asking any of my readers who might have additional information to share it. (I doubt any ICE personnel read this blog, but if there is such a reader, I would especially welcome a comment correcting any erroneous suppositions. I would be extremely happy to have those suppositions corrected–and the picture I’ve formed of terrified ten-year-olds expunged.)
If, however, the conclusions we’ve reached, based upon what we do know, turn out to be accurate, that would suggest that Trump has taken the U.S. much farther down the path to a fascist autocracy than most of us have thus far recognized.
I hope to see a lot of you at tomorrow’s protest….
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