More Immigrant Detention Cruelty
Deportation uber alles.
Given the exposure of the perverse inner monologue of the president, as well as concerns over what the long-term implications will be for the economy due to his little excursion in Iran, it is hard to keep focused on the other policy triumphs of the administration.
To wit, as per the NYT: ICE Agents Detain Newlywed Spouse of Soldier Training to Deploy.
A U.S. Army staff sergeant and his wife arrived at his base in Louisiana last week, expecting to begin their life together as newlyweds.
The couple checked in at the visitor center, identification in hand, ready to complete the steps that would allow her to move into his home on the base.
Within hours, that plan had unraveled.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered the base and detained his wife, an undocumented Honduran immigrant who was brought to the U.S. as a toddler. By nightfall, she was in a detention facility with hundreds of women facing deportation as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The detention came just days after Annie Ramos, 22, a college student with no criminal record, and Matthew Blank, 23, celebrated their marriage with family and friends. Sergeant Blank, who enlisted more than five years ago, is assigned to a brigade at Fort Polk, La. that is set to begin training at the end of the month for deployment.
Maybe it is having two sons who were recently married, or the fact that none of them are much older than Blank and Ramos, or maybe I’m just too woke or a bleeding heart or somesuch, or maybe it is because I have at least normal human levels of compassion, but this is just grotesque.
Can I point out the obvious: deciding what is “legal” or not is a choice. So, yes, the long-term problem here is that Congress has failed to address the obvious injustice of not providing a fix to the problem of persons who were brought here as children and have grown up here. They are, in practical terms, even if not legal ones, as American as anyone else who grew up here.
Enforcement, too, is a choice. And the Trump administration, as fueled by people like Stephen Miller, thinks that the right choice is cruelty.
Ms. Ramos had applied in 2020 for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, a program that shields from deportation undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children. Her application was never processed by the Trump administration because the program was halted for new applicants.
Sure, people make the argument that providing legal pathways for such children is just rewarding the parents for coming here illegally, and it incentivizes such actions.
I am not going to argue that point, but I will ask, “So what?” It is possible that if Annie Ramos were allowed to become a permanent resident, somebody, somewhere in Honduras or El Salvador or Venezuela, will find that information to be the tipping point for their choice to walk to the United States. But, so what? Not to mention things like desperation, but legal abstractions tend to drive such choices.
Or maybe the moral balance of the universe is so perverse that the lack of punishment of Annie’s parents for their transgressions will be appeased by exiling Annie to a place she does not know.
I just don’t see what the harm to the United States is for the children of the undocumented, if they have simply grown up and lived their lives, to be allowed permanent status, if not a pathway to citizenship.
What is the more just outcome for a 22-year-old woman in this situation? Detention and deportation back to a country she does not know? To be ripped with her husband and her life? Or is it more just to allow her a pathway to full legal status?
I simply don’t see the hard choice here.
This move makes no one safer.
This move is cruel and is clearly more about the current administration’s view of the racial makeup of the country than it is about anything else.
Like so many other such cases, it is part of a shameful chapter in our history.
And, I would note in conclusion, she and her husband were trying to follow the law, perhaps naively, and this nightmare is the result.
