Raids
About those ICE raids on Wednesday…
US immigration officials say they have temporarily released about 300 people who were arrested in a massive raid in Mississippi on Wednesday.
Democrats and rights groups have condemned the arrests as “cruel”.
Nearly 700 workers from seven agricultural processing plants were arrested for allegedly not having proper documentation to be in the US.
Pictures emerged of children crying after being separated from their parents.
The thing about illegal immigration is…it’s not the kind of crime that is powered by greed or malice or aggression…the kind of crime that Trump, for one, commits regularly and without turning a gilded hair. It’s not a real “crime” (as we generally use the word) despite the illegality.
It seems to me it ought to be possible to enforce immigration laws in a humane way as opposed to the cruelest way possible.
Not this way:
Ever since his father was rounded up in the massive immigration work site raids in Mississippi this week, 6-year-old Nery, who is autistic, has refused to eat, according to his older sister.
“He hasn’t eaten anything, he looks at the food and he doesn’t eat,” Stefany, 18, told NBC News on Friday.
…
Stefany said her father was driving his sister to work Wednesday morning, with his 3-year-old daughter Ingrid in the car. They then saw that the food processing plant in Morton, Mississippi where they both worked was being raided by ICE.
Stefany, a high school senior in Morton, said she was in school when she heard the news.
Her aunt called them crying and told her that immigration authorities had found them hiding in their car, she said.
She said could hear her father telling someone “he has six kids and one with autism.”
“I just heard screaming, people screaming at him that they’re going to take him to jail,” she said. “I was just crying.”
Her father and aunt were detained in front of Ingrid, who was sitting in the backseat of the car, Stefany said. It wasn’t until about two hours later that the little girl was released to another aunt, she said.
Stefany said her little sister now keeps saying, “Daddy. Where is Daddy?”
It’s also interesting that the US news media keep calling them “agricultural processing plants” or “food processing plants.” The BBC called them what they really are:
The raids took place just hours before Mr Trump arrived in the majority Latino city of El Paso to mark a mass shooting which left 22 people dead.
About 600 ICE agents arrived at the chicken processing plants, owned by five different companies, in the towns of Bay Springs, Canton, Carthage, Morton, Pelahatchie and Sebastopol.
Ohhh, chicken processing plants. Those places are hell on earth, and they are also one of the most dangerous workplaces in the country.
We don’t have to be this way.
When I was growing up, we raised chickens. One of my jobs was to pluck the chickens. Even when it is not in a factory setting but in your own dining room, it is nasty, messy, smelly, hot, and awful. I promised myself when I grew up I would never work in a chicken processing plant unless there was literally no other job I could do to survive.
For a lot of these people, they probably feel the same way, but they don’t have all the choices I have had (and I had very truncated choices compared to nearly everyone else in my high school, which was wealthy and snobbish and didn’t include kids who routinely plucked chickens – except me). People who actually manage to do this job should be commended, and paid very well, not arrested. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if people who do jobs like this made better money than I do (though it probably would increase the cost of chicken, the one meat I eat regularly).