A Compassionate Country
Your daily Froomkin:
Jim Rutenberg and Marc Lacey wrote in the New York Times last week, during Bush's Latin American visit, about how Guatemalan President Oscar Berger confronted Bush about the arrest of several hundred illegal workers, many of them Guatemalans, in Massachusetts the week before."Facing pointed questions from Guatemalan journalists, Mr. Bush stood by the raid, saying, 'People will be treated with respect, but the United States will enforce our law.'
"Mr. Bush said he disputed 'conspiracies' relayed by Mr. Berger that children were taken away from families.
"Mr. Bush denied such accounts. 'No es la verdad,' Mr. Bush said, 'That's not the way America operates. We're a decent, compassionate country. Those are the kind of things we do not do. We believe in families, and we'll treat people with dignity.'"
But that is indeed the way Bush's government operates.
Robin Shulman writes in The Washington Post on the fallout from the March 6 raid on the Michael Bianco Inc. factory -- a military contractor 60 miles south of Boston. Of the 360 illegal immigrants taken into custody, she writes, "many... were women whose detention separated them from their children, some of whom were stranded at day-care centers, schools, or friends' or relatives' homes. . . .
"Under public pressure, immigration officials began to send single parents home, or if they had arrested both parents, to release one. But as of late last week, New Bedford school officials said the children of at least six arrested immigrants remained in the care of someone other than their parents, and many more were missing one parent."
Yvonne Abraham writes in the Boston Globe that "the welfare of children affected by immigration raids has become a bigger issue in recent months as the scope of the immigration raids has expanded.
"The Bush administration has stepped up enforcement efforts to answer its critics and build a credible stance to push for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a guest worker program and paths to citizenship for some of the 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country. . . .
"Children can be separated from detained parents for months, while parents await bond hearings, or deportation. Parents who leave the United States face the choice of taking US citizen children with them, or being separated from them permanently in the hope of giving those children better opportunities here. Social service workers in other cities where raids took place told of scrambling to try to get passports for the US citizen children whose parents chose to take them back to the countries they left."
This is insane, but our entire immigration system, from policy to implementation, is insane.