America is Simply Losing It Folks

By Dave Lindorff

Reading the latest AP report
on how American citizens are being snatched up, detained and deported
(sic) by the Immigration and Naturalization Service has reminded me
just what a screwed up place this country has become.

Ever since September 11, 2001, the country has simply lost it.

` Remember back then, no sooner had the dust settled over Lower
Manhattan, than the INS and other police agencies began rounding up
thousands of people with Muslam sounding names, or even with non-Muslim
sounding names but Muslim-looking faces, and locking them away in
federal and county detention centers, with no access to lawyers. People
who were here on grants of asylum because of political persecution in
their home countries were being shipped home to likely torture and
death, without any hearings.

Most Americans seemed okay about this.

There has been a “nativist” (sic) resurgence, with people who
consider themselves “real” Americans getting hysterical about all the
non-white immigrants and descendants of non-white immigrants in this
country. (Of course the whole idea of calling such idiocy “nativist” is
itself nonsense, since the real natives are the people that we
systematically exterminated in the 19th and early 20th century, and
that we try to keep confined on reservations.) So it shouldn’t be
surprising that besides plenty of immigrants who are here on legitimate
grounds being caught up in the government deportation machine, there
turn out to be many actual American citizens who are being snatched up
and sent to god knows where.

Not that any of this is new.

La Migra, as the agency is known among Latinos, and by people who
live south of the border, has never been particularly careful about
whom it deports when it comes to those with Hispanic surnames. I
remember back in the late 1970s, when I was part of a collective
running a spunky little alternative weekly newspaper, the LA Vanguard,
in Los Angeles, we had a had a cartoonist, Joseph Billie, who did a
comic strip for us called “Taco Rabbit.” Despite his name and surname,
neither of which was Hispanic in the least, Joseph was at least half
Latino, and looked the part.

Still a teenager, he on at least three separate occasions within
only one year’s time, found himself, despite his being a native-born US
citizen with only minimal Spanish language skills, snatched off the
street by agents of La Migra, who with no hearing would whisk him off
to the border at Tijuana and dump him in Mexico. Once there, he would
call his father, who would drive down and pick him up. Once Joseph had
to call us from Mexico to say he’d be late delivering his strip,
because he had been snatched by La Migra.

Joseph’s problem was that he didn’t drive, and so he didn’t carry
any ID. That was enough for the INS, which didn’t bother with any legal
niceties, like granting the arrestee a phone call—which would have
saved Joseph’s dad a long drive down to the border. Joseph, as it
turned out, didn’t mind being deported that much. He liked Tijuana, and
it was a free ride down, even if the INS guys could get a little rough
putting him on the bus.

But that was then. Now things are much worse. Lawyers who have
tried to defend some of the victims of INS roundups report that many
detainees are subjected to what can only be termed torture—things like
having themselves slammed into walls or pushed down stairs while arms
and legs are manacled, having their teeth smashed out, being left
outside in cold rain or blazing sun, kept from sleeping for days at a
time. Sound like Guantanamo or Bagram? In fact, there is little
difference.

But I really cannot think of anything much worse than being a US
citizen, or a legitimate Green Card holder, and being snatched away
from family and friends and job and, after being held incommunicado in
some stinking cell, shipped off to some country to which I did not
belong, and where I might not even be able to communicate.

The AP report quotes immigrant rights groups as saying that the
erroneous arrest, detention and deportation of US citizens has been
soaring, with one group saying that documented cases have gone from 129
in 2006 to 322 in 2007. But the numbers are going to really soar,
because in addition to the INS, increasingly local police agencies are
getting into the act. Last year over 950 law enforcement officers from
23 states attended brief training sessions run by the INS to learn
about picking up and detaining alleged illegal aliens.

Not so surprisingly, an appalling one in 10 Hispanic Americans
reported in 2007 that they had been stopped by law enforcement and
asked to prove that they were citizens or were in this country legally.

Ahem. Those kinds of numbers are the description of a police state, folks.

There is a simple solution to this problem. It’s in the
Constitution, actually. It is the Bill of Rights protection against
“unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment), and against
arrest “without due process of law” (the Fifth Amendment), as well as
the right to “a speedy and public trial” and to “assisstance of
counsel” (The Sixth Amendment).

People really flipped out after 9-11, and many still think it’s
okay to treat “furriners” differently than we treat our own citizens,
but aside from the fact that the US Constitution doesn’t distinguish
between citizen and tourist or illegal resident, the growing number of
arrests, detentions and even deportations of American citizens by the
IRS shows what can happen when we start saying that some people don’t
deserve the protections afforded by that document.

In the end, any one of us could end up in an INS hellhole with no access to a phone.

_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
"The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net