Raids

On Tuesday, August the 10, 2010 at 9:00 pm I got a phone call from a teenager asking for help. Her home have been just raided by ICE agents in a little town in rural Arizona and she could have been taken but the agents were in their own words "humanitarians" and they ordered her to appear the following day at the ICE building in Downtown Phoenix. The raid, later I found out, was part of the Obama Administration's show of force to demonstrate its critics they are as tough on immigration as the Republicans. In fact, the Democrat administration has been increasing the numbers of deported immigrants to a record 380,000 during the past fiscal year and according to TRAC, exceedig in 2009 the number of deportees by 20,000 from the previous numbers in 2008. The operation took place from Monday, August the 9th to Wednesday, August the 11th in at least 6 cities across the state and more cities and towns in the nation, according to the Arizona Republic. I knew when it was in progress.

At this point I have spent the last two days stopping the deportation of my mentee, a DREAM Act student, star HS graduate from a small town out of the big cities,recipient of a handsome full ride scholarship to a great university in California, victim of this aforementioned operation.

Thanks to the network of hope created by dreamactivist we were able to gather support for her and a good lawyer who stepped forward to take her case pro-bono, so impressed the lawyer was of my young friend's academic and leadership accomplishments. Otherwise she could have been in Nogales right now.

And this story does not have a happy ending. Her dad was detained and he is awaiting deportation. Her family is broken now.

While trying to make sense of all this, specially the fact that ICE wanted to take a teenager just barely 18 years old, my young friend's grandmother, and elderly lady kept asking me "Why do they treat us like this???" I had not explanation. By the way, my young friend family is a mixed status one with members that are citizens, legal residents, non legal residents in the process of fixing their immigration situation and undocumented immigrants.

My friend's family described how ICE had taken at least 10 residents from the little town in the last days and how the kids are not been sent to school terrified of "la migra".

The family related too how many businesses are empty or closing down but she did not had to tell me that because the same is happening in the Hispanic working class neighborhoods in the Phoenix Metro area and all over the state.

Big time.

So things are just the same as in the GOP days.

According to The Center for Constitutional Rights and due to a freedom of information request placed by immigrant's rights organizations who ordered the bureaucrats to release data, the Obama administration and DHS continues to deport non criminal immigrants whose only infraction is to come to the country illegally, contrary to the Administration's claims that now they are targeting on the criminal elements.

I have the story of my friend, the star student, as proof that although they promised change, things continue the just same or worse.