ICE raids: Where were the criminals?

Photo by Rogelio V. Solis/AP/Shutterstock used, as it happens, by Mr. Pierce, who reminds us of who did not get arrested on Wednesday, namely any of the actual criminals, the executives of the chicken-processing plants that illegally gave jobs to these workers.

1

I'm so old I remember when these massive ICE raids were being publicized as a stab at purging the violent criminal element in our midst, way back, oh, almost four weeks ago:

President Donald Trump on Friday insisted upcoming immigration raids set to begin this weekend will focus primarily on deporting criminals though he acknowledged his administration will target anyone who entered the country illegally.

“We’re really looking for criminals as much as we can. Trying to find the criminal population, which has been coming into this country the last 10 years,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to depart Washington. He touted his administration’s removal of members of the violent gang MS-13, claiming he’d deported them “by the thousands.”

Of course they had to scotch the operation after that, once again, but on Wednesday President Blabbermouth was able to restrain himself, or rather they managed to hide it from him, and don't mind admitting it—

The operation was so closely guarded that ICE officials did not even inform the White House before it began, according to Matthew Albence, the agency’s acting director, and other administration officials. Because previous plans for high-profile ICE raids had been disrupted by public disclosure — including tweets from President Trump telegraphing them — the agency this time stealthily streamed 600 agents to Mississippi, many flown from other parts of the country.

—and they managed to carry it out, though the "optics" of the timing, as the nation mourned the outcome in El Paso of another psychopath's hatred of Mexicans, was pretty unfortunate.

So now we know what the real plan was, if it wasn't obvious, because it was more or less the same plan it always is, which was to hit the workplace of people who work harder for lower wages than any US citizen would tolerate and pay their taxes for benefits they'll never be allowed to collect and have been here in many cases 20 years or longer raising families and keeping their heads down.

Every administration wants to target the criminals, but ICE can't find them, so they just have to make their quota in some less optimal way. It's almost as if all those violent criminal illegal aliens didn't exist.

2

One thing that isn't getting enough emphasis as we watch the unbearable video of kids whose parents have been kidnapped, who came home from school to find their houses locked up, with no explanations,

"I don't know where I'm going to eat," a weeping 11-year-old girl pleads after her father was arrested in yesterday's massive roundup of undocumented immigrants in Mississippi. In some cases, the arrests left children without their parents. https://t.co/k5UdqD2XWg pic.twitter.com/NK18Sy45OU

— ABC News (@ABC) August 8, 2019

is that those kids are mostly US citizens by birthright (probably well over 5 million undocumented aliens living in the US have lived here for more than ten years, and a good 4 million have children born here), a point I wouldn't normally insist on, because of my silly-old-liberal belief that torturing children is wrong regardless of what country they come from, but their parents are among precisely the millions of people who were targeted to be not deported in President Obama's Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program, suspended in 2015 before it got a chance to get going, under a lawsuit from 26 Republican governors.

They are the people most needed by American citizens who are too young to take care of themselves, and the very last who should be deported, as a majority of us have agreed for years, but they're the only "illegals" ICE can find, so they have to suffer.

Of course it turns out ICE and the US attorney for the Mississippi Southern District didn't like the publicity and have sent nearly half of their victims back to await their court dates, so most of the kids do have a parent with them at the moment, and the US attorney in question, Mike Hurst, tells Wapo that they've been exceptionally nice

“This is the only operation I am aware where . . . those released are actually taken back to their original point of detention so they are not stuck 60, 70 miles away...” 

and goes on NPR to say it "breaks his heart" to see children suffering the consequences of their parents' lawbreaking but "the law must be obeyed", which is obvious bullshit; the law doesn't have to be obeyed in general at all, it merely has to be gestured at in these periodic ritual scapegoatings (I figure yesterday's raids, the largest in history, picked up less than seven hundredths of a percent, 0.07%, of the total undocumented residents, and if you had a roundup on that scale every single day it would take four years to finish the job), and the impotent emperor made to feel mighty.