Sputtering, frothing rage.
Which is about all I can muster at the moment:
KIDNAPPED AT FEDERAL PLAZA
Immigrant Families Expecting Greencards & Citizenship Get Deported Instead
WHAT:
Immigrant families are facing a deportation crisis. In the last month immigrant advocates have received emergency calls from New Yorkers whose loved ones—on the road to obtaining a greencard or citizenship—were deported from Federal Plaza after responding to government appointment letters. Others who are not being deported immediately are being shipped away as far as Louisiana without seeing a judge. Devastated and enraged, the relatives left behind will return to the site to speak out against the rapid-fire detentions and deportations that have broken apart their homes.
WHO:
MARIANA TAPIA, cousin of 19-year-old Juan Jimenez, who was deported to the Dominican Republic 16 hours after reporting to Federal Plaza for citizenship.
GEORGIANA FACEY, U.S. citizen whose husband was deported to Jamaica. She is left to raise 4 children alone in Brooklyn.
Many others…..
Watch TalkLeft for the changes. Read up on how our utterly disgraceful immigration system has acquitted itself in the past. Start making phone calls. Start writing letters. Start sharpening your votes.
In April, in response to the unprecedented cultural destruction that attended our invasion of Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld had this to say:
The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”
Let this become their mantra—or a variation of it. Tomorrow, when the phone calls come in. Next week, as the email piles up. Next year, when the votes are counted, and this entire benighted administration, this foul and unspeakable blot on our liberal, inclusive, democratic history has been kicked to the curb. I want them—all of them, from Rumsfeld to Rove, from Rice to Powell, from Bush himself to Ashcroft, at whose feet this latest particular outrage can be laid, I want them all sitting back, dumbfounded, their heads in their hands, staring at the mailbags and ballots, muttering to themselves.
My goodness. Were there that many decent people? Is it possible there were that many decent, humane people in the whole country?
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this is a dirty trick, and its been used before. I believe in either California or Arizona in the '90s. I don't recall how the cases went, and my memory is fuzzy but i think they went after either child support delinquents or probation-skippers, or bother. Or neither. I'll have to look it up.
Cops in general have pulled this sort of stunt: send out offers for free football tickets or a chance to win a free boat to addresses on file for folks with outstanding warrants, for child support, or skipping probation, or whatever. Tell 'em they have to show up at a central location on a certain day at a certain time. Bust 'em when they present their prood of identity to claim their prize.
And it works, I suppose, though it's sleazy as hell; it's one of those "What profiteth a community that locks up its miscreants but loses its soul" kinda deals. --But when the error in question is falling afoul of our notoriously Kafkaesque immigration policy, and the bait being dangled is a long-awaited chance to sort out this or that snarl in the paperwork, while you hold on to the life you're trying to build in a strange country by the skin of your teeth, and the whole thing is sold as something being done to keep the rest of us safe from terror--it's horrible. It's an outrage. One of many, but each camel's back, I suppose, is broken by a different straw in the load.
(It might not excuse my rather mawkish rhetoric above, but hey.)