Deportation Gets Mean and Personal

Tom Homan, Punk’s border czar, probably shouldn’t show his face in his hometown for a while. We knew he was without conscience by the ferocity of his support for deporting 200 men to a jail in El Salvador. Now he’s in the hot seat for deporting his neighbor in his hometown of Sackets Harbor, NY: a single woman and her three children.

Allegedly, the raid on a dairy farm was only targeted to arrest a South African national. ICE agents either don’t know how to count to one or just decided it was easier to round up everyone. The protests might not have been so volatile had their actions stopped there. But no, instead, ICE went to the school and handcuffed the kids right in front of their classmates and everyone else. The youngest child is in third grade.

Imagine for a moment the emotion of that scene. ICE bursts into a classroom looking like thrift-store stormtroopers, grabs up a student, handcuffs them like a criminal, and carries them out the door. Any attempt to stop the arrests was threatened by the officers present.

Sackets Harbor school Principal Jaime Cook wrote a scathing letter to ICE officials, insisting that the children hadn’t done anything wrong. “They had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following the legal process. They are not criminals,” Cook wrote.

The family was whisked away to a holding facility in Texas.

Had then been any other city in the country, that might have been the end of the story, but not this time. Cook’s letter was photographed and put on social media, quickly spreading around the nation and raising anger and awareness of the actions everywhere. For Pete’s sake, the kids are 9, 15, and 17. Everyone was incensed.

New York’s Governor, Kathy Hochul, got involved, along with the ACLU and the Democratic Party. While Gov. Hochul handled the political side of the situation, the Jefferson County Democratic Party and the ACLU scheduled a protest for this past Saturday. More than 1,000 people attended the protest, and it was clear that their anger was at a boiling point.

Homan tried covering his ass, telling local media, “During investigations like that, we have to ensure that any children within that area are safe. There’s a process during these investigations where, could these children—could that family be a material witness in this horrendous crime? Can they provide information and evidence in this crime? Were they victimized within this crime? So the due diligence was done.”

Yesterday, Gov. Hochul sent out a message saying that “this family – a third grader, two teenagers, and their mother – are currently on their way back to Jefferson County. I cannot imagine the trauma these kids and their mom are feeling, and I pray they will be able to heal when they return home.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union issued its own statement saying the level of “inhumanity and cruelty” in this raid and others like them sends shockwaves through society. The outrageous events of the past week do make one thing clear: when people in every corner of New York see the real, human impact of ICE’s cruelty and Trump’s mass deportation machine, they mobilize, speak out and fight back,” the NYCLU’s senior education strategist, Mabel Tso, said.

She added: “At the rally on Saturday in Sackets Harbor, I saw dozens of teachers, families, organizers, and residents from all over marching together, chanting the same thing: ‘Bring this family back home to our community where they belong.’ Families shouldn’t be torn apart, kids shouldn’t be ripped out of class, and people shouldn’t be transported thousands of miles from their home. Trump and ICE must stop terrorizing immigrant families – and New Yorkers must keep fighting back.”

That would not be the end of Monday’s immigration news. Late Monday afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts decided to ‘pause’ the deadline requiring the administration to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the prison in El Salvador. The administration has already admitted that arresting Garcia was a mistake but has continued to insist that they have no way to bring back anyone who has been sent to the mega-prison. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis didn’t buy that argument and had given the administration until midnight last night to bring Garcia back. The Chief Justice decided that more time was needed to debate the matter. [Insert eye roll here.]

Oh, but SCOTUS still wasn’t done trampling people’s rights. In a 5-4 decision, the court has said that deportations of people to the same Salvadoran prison. The caveat, the court said, is that they have to appear before a judge in Texas as a form of ‘due process’ before being deported. The unsigned opinion gave no remedy as to what the consequences would be if prisoners are deported without seeing a judge or if there are other issues within that hearing. Neither did they address the problem of how to bring back anyone who is falsely accused.

Sunday night, CBS News’ program 60 Minutes revealed their investigation showing that a majority of those sitting in the Salvadoran prison have no criminal record of any kind, show no known link to a criminal gang, and that agents said that normal, common tattoos could be considered as gang signs. Here’s that segment of the show.

Any way it’s sliced, anywhere it looks, the entire immigration policy is riddled with problems. Too many innocent people are being caught up. No one seems to know until it’s too late who is a citizen and who isn’t. Treatment of prisoners could easily be considered cruel and unusual punishment before they get to their final destination.

This presents a big question for the country. If the Supreme Court is not going to uphold citizens’ rights, who the fuck is? Who is left to defend us and the Constitution?

Maybe this is a sign that we’re going to have to defend ourselves and our neighbors.