The Immigration Enforcement Mess

The N.Y. Times today criticizes in strong terms the immigration enforcement excesses in the United States today, with a focus of a television spectacle, with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio  serving as the master of ceremonies as more “than 200 men in shackles and prison stripes were marched under armed guard past a gantlet of TV cameras to a tent prison encircled by an electric fence. They were inmates being sent to await deportation in a new immigrant detention camp minutes from [Phoenix].”

Reports of racial profiling, detention abuse, misplaced goals and priorities, excesses of immigration raids, arrest quotas, etc., etc. fill this blog and the newspapers.  Just yesterday, the Washington Post wreported on a Latina who accused local police in Virginia of bias and beating her.  She was hospitalized after, police allege, she resisted arrest during a traffic stop.  Her claim was that “she was treated `like an animal’ by police because she is Hispanic and does not speak English.”  Such reports are too frequent to ignore, especially with hate crimes — including murder — on the rise across the country.

As we have said before, these are the kinds of things that we would hope that a new U.S. Department of Homeland Security would look at.  Hopefully, the N.Y. Times editorial will bring attention to these real problems of immigration enforcement.

KJ