ICE Agents Are Kidnappers and Sociopaths, So Trump Honors Them
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
21 August 18
In June of 2014, the ACLU and the International Human Rights Clinic at the
University of Chicago Law School filed complaints with the Department of
Homeland Security. And the complaints documented the cases of 116
unaccompanied children, ranging in age from 5 years old to 17. According to
these organizations, a quarter of the children said they were physically or
sexually abused. They said they'd been placed in so-called stress positions
and were at times subjected to beatings by Customs officials. More than half
of the kids reported receiving death threats from U.S. government agents.
- Reporter Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept podcast, Intercepted, May 30, 2018
S immigration agencies have been committing crimes against humanity for
decades. The Obama administration raised immigration ruthlessness to a new
level, earning the president the derogatory title of deporter-in-chief,
balanced by no redeeming effort to resolve an issue more rooted in hate than
harm. Now the Trump administration has taken official viciousness and
stupidity to a whole new level, prompting Human Rights Watch to object
strenuously to US immigration policy and practice:
Misdemeanor illegal entry (for entering the US without authorization) and
felony illegal reentry (for reentering the US after deportation) have been
crimes since the early 20th century. But prosecutions were limited to
immigrants with serious prior criminal histories or repeat offenders. In
2005, Operation Streamline was introduced in Del Rio, Texas, permitting
rapid-fire mass prosecutions of migrants.
The Trump administration's policy is the first to target parents traveling
with children for prosecution and to couple criminal prosecution of asylum
seekers with policy changes intended to restrict eligibility for asylum to
those who enter the US illegally. Penalizing asylum seekers for entering
without authorization is a violation of international refugee law. [emphasis
added]
How inhumane can the US government get before a majority of the American
people begin to care? Why should Americans tolerate law-breaking that should
be an impeachable offense? How long before a majority of us have zero
tolerance for official cruelty, abuse, and lawlessness?
Abusive treatment of a woman about to give birth should shock anyone's
conscience, but it hasn't, apparently. For now, ICE (the US Immigration and
Customs Enforcement) can get away with almost any atrocity.
On the morning of August 15, in San Bernardino, California, Joel
Arrona-Lara, 36, was driving his nine-months-pregnant wife to the hospital
to give birth by C-section. Two ICE SUVs surrounded their car at a
convenience store, for no apparent reason except racial profiling. The ICE
agents did not know who they were stopping and first asked the wife, Maria
del Carmen Venegas, for her ID, which she had. She and her husband have
lived in the US for 12 years and have four other children, three of whom are
citizens.
When the ICE agents turned to the husband, the driver, for identification,
he didn't have it with him, having left hurriedly for the hospital. He had
his ID at home, a few blocks away. His wife pleaded with the ICE agents to
let him get his ID. The ICE agents didn't care enough to check it out.
Instead they handcuffed Joel Arrona-Lara and took him into custody. They
searched the car, finding nothing amiss. With two vehicles available, the
ICE agents could easily have escorted the wife to the hospital. They didn't.
They left her alone to drive herself, which she managed to do. The baby was
later born safely.
The ICE agents still have no reason for arresting Joel Arrona-Lara other
than his not having proper ID on his person. The surveillance camera video
of this arrest went viral online and was picked up by media. On Friday, ICE
officials claimed Joel Arrona-Lara had been arrested for "illegally residing
in the United States," an assertion patently false, since he was arrested
before ICE knew who he was. According to ICE's Friday statement, ICE
considered Joel Arrona-Lara someone "who poses a threat to national
security, public safety and border security."
On Saturday, under media scrutiny, ICE officials issued another probably
false claim, that Joel Arrona-Lara was arrested for an outstanding homicide
warrant in Mexico. This not only fails to persuade for its belated timing,
as well as ICE not knowing who he was when they arrested him, but there's no
evidence yet that such a warrant even exists. Joel Arrona-Lara said he knows
of no warrant, his attorney has seen no warrant. The Mexican consulate has
said it has no warrant. Maria del Carmen Venegas, 32, says her husband has
never had trouble with the law, not even a traffic ticket. She said his
brother had done jail time in Mexico, maybe that was the source of
confusion.
(Elsewhere, in fake news, Tucker Carlson of Fox News lied on Monday about
the homicide warrant, claiming other media coverage omitted it. They did
omit it for awhile, but only until ICE changed its story and added the
alleged warrant. To be fair to Tucker Carlson, maybe he didn't lie, maybe
he's just incompetent. He's right about the story being propaganda, but it's
ICE propaganda. Over on Fox & Friends, the headline was "Media Slams ICE
Over Illegal Immigrant Arrest" with nice ambiguity, while misrepresenting
the facts and trying to justify this arrest because some other unrelated
person was killed in a head-on car crash with an illegal immigrant. This
message was delivered by a well-programmed "angel mom" who said that
"there's an American victim for every illegal alien criminal who's in our
country." Really? Twelve million victims? Almost all going unreported? Now,
THAT's propaganda.)
The fact remains that ICE arrested someone before they knew who he was, they
didn't explain why they were arresting him, and then they changed their
story about why he was arrested. That is fundamentally corrupt. ICE has been
an invitation to corruption since it was created, since it is not
accountable to the US Justice Department but to the Department of Homeland
Security which was created to run both sides of the law to protect us from
"terrorists."
The legally dubious arrest is bad enough, and common enough for ICE, but
leaving a nine-months-pregnant woman to fend for herself by the side of the
road is a new cruelty for ICE. "ICE acted in total disregard for the health
and wellbeing of the mother," said attorney Emilio Amaya Garcia.
To ICE's credit, perhaps, the ICE agents did not take the mother and unborn
child into custody, even though the mother is also undocumented. ICE can
always go after the mother later and do untold damage to this harmless,
self-supporting family. Meanwhile, ICE can take pride in having created a
situation in which an American-born child may never get to meet his father.
That seems unlikely, according to Russell Jauregui, staff attorney for the
San Bernardino Community Service Center, who represents Joel Arrona-Lara,
currently being held in the Theo Lacy detention center:
He does have a right to a bond hearing before an immigration judge in
immigration court. He does have the right to counsel. We're going to
represent him pro bono. He does have the right to pursue a bond hearing to
see, determine if he can be released. We're hoping that he can, given his
length of time here in the United States and the fact that he does have
three U.S. citizen children. And then, if he is, hopefully, released on
bond, then his case will continue with the immigration courts, where he'll
be pursuing his, hopefully, relief during a removal hearing before an
immigration judge, where he'll have to prove that, you know, his U.S.
citizen kids will suffer exceptional and extreme and unusual hardships
without him if he's removed.. And this process could take one or two years.
Politicians of both major parties have demagogued the immigration issue for
decades, numbing the public to the unlawful and inhumane treatment of a
vast, undefined victim class that includes citizens and non-citizens alike.
Even more horrific abuses of immigrant children under the Trump
administration have finally sparked some outrage, but nowhere near enough to
change the police-state practices of ICE. Sadistic, perverted, police-state
abuses of children by American border police that flourished during the
Obama administration, whose foreign policy drove millions of people to seek
asylum from their American-sponsored Central American police states. Under
Trump, it's all the same only worse. Now the US policy is to take children
hostage - and then abuse them and lose track of them. As far as immigrants
go ("They're not people - these are animals"), President Trump is betting
there's to limit to what atrocities Americans will tolerate as long as his
demonized victims are non-white. So far, he's winning that bet.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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