Amid a flurry of executive orders signed by Donald Trump during his first few days in office was one authorizing immigration police and agents to enter places that previously had been off-limits to violent immigration raids, including schools and churches. Now there are no more safe spaces.
No More Safe Spaces for Immigrants
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Good piece today, concerning the recent DMZ podcast, Ted restated that Ukraine antagonized Russia into attacking it……………………On the more cogent side, Ted posited an idea that I’ve had for years, that we should work to get Russia into NATO.
No more safe spaces for immigrants. On this one, I have to wave my red pen.
A 2011 memo from ICE: “This policy is designed to ensure that these enforcement actions do not occur at nor are focused on sensitive locations such as schools and churches unless (a) exigent circumstances exist, (b) other law enforcement actions have led officers to a sensitive location as described in the ‘Exceptions to the General Rule’ section of this policy memorandum, or (c) prior approval is obtained. This policy supersedes all prior agency policy on this subject.”
This means two things. Policy before 2011 permitted such raids … as does the now-current policy (see conditions a, b, c). It seems very similar to how a cop will bring in a drug-sniffing dog to a traffic stop and that dog will “hit” every time because the police officer is the one who decides the dog has made a hit. If the victim protests, it goes nowhere; the cop testifies that the dog gave a positive reaction. It seems that the churches, hospitals, and schools were NEVER havens except as some sort of gentlemen’s agreement. The thing that protected the illegal immigrants before this new policy was basically the optics of it all.
Also, the immigrants in question, as illegals, leads to another question: Why did the democrats never resolve this longstanding problem in the past 40-odd years? Oh, right. “Because they never had the numbers, and even when they did, it isn’t a fair question, because, reasons and stuff.”
I think Reagan was aiming for a good balance. (1) Give amnesty to those undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for a while and (2) create a reasonable immigration system that lets a decent number of people in, and actively prevents and discourages people who would immigrate other than by the now-reasonable system.
The problem is that #2 never happened. As I see it, we are going to need to do #1 again on humanitarian grounds but this time we must couple that with a system that allows people to apply from afar, and has a reasonable chance that legal applications will succeed in a timely fashion.
There are many episodes in our history where immigrants, whether documented or not, were shunned and actively discriminated against. But there is also much history where, once immigrants from those countries have been here for a while, they are accepted into society. I think that there is a politically viable solution that allows a decent amount of legal immigration.