I sincerely believe that most police officers are decent and thoughtful people doing their best to protect and serve us. Nonetheless, what we have seen in the last few years shows that many police forces need better recruitment, better training, better supervision, and more community involvement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, is so unAmerican, so corrupt, so vicious that it can’t be reformed. It must be abolished.
ICE stopped its raids for a time because of the pandemic, but the raids have resumed. ICE is not going after people who have committed crimes, but people who are status offenders. The only thing they have done wrong is live in the U.S. without proper papers.
Example: Alicia Flores Gonzalez dropped her little girl at day care and went to work at a winery in Sonoma Valley. When she parked her car, she was surrounded by armed men. “What happened? What did I do?” she asked them.
“Hands up! Turn around,” one of the men shouted. She was shackled, taken by six men in three unmarked vehicles, and deported in 24 hours. She is 43. She had lived in the U.S. for 27 years. She has four children. The oldest one is trying to get custody so the kids can stay together.
ICE is not targeting criminals. It is picking off law-abiding citizens because they are easy. Since mid-July ICE has taken 2000 people into custody and deported most of them.
How does this help our country? This is cruelty for the sake of cruelty, worthy of Stasi or the KGB. And please, please don’t give me that “What part of illegal don’t they understand?” Have a little empathy for that little girl who was dropped off at day care by her mother, now gone.
See Miriam Jordan, “After Monthslong Pause for the Pandemic, ICE Resumes Deportation Arrests,” New York Times, (Sept. 20, 2020), p. 29.
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