Neimöller time.
Shut the fuck up. Don’t tell me I’m overreacting and don’t tell me it’s hyperbole and don’t tell me I’m dishonoring the memory of thus-and-so. And don’t you dare tell me it was illegal and they were just following the letter of the law, or I’ll pull Nuremberg out, too, and smack you silly. At a time like this, when somebody does something this monumentally stupid and it’s purportedly in my name and in yours, you damn well better believe I’m going to get purple in the face and pull all the rhetorical tricks I can muster out from up my sleeve and speak up. We are all going to speak up, dammit.
They came for the Muslims whose papers weren’t in order.
The ones who came to this country because they like it. The ones who came over to our side from that “Islamofascism” we are supposedly in a death struggle with. The ones who are trying to play by the arcane and convoluted and outdated rules. The ones you shot at and spat at and smeared in your newspaper columns, the ones you berated over and over again because they didn’t immediately apologize for something they did not do and could not imagine and would never condone. —And with the dying gasp of our INS, the first breath of our nascent Department of Homeland Security, right on the cusp of a war most of us do not want, these Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria are rounded up in mass arrests and detained—in your name, in my name—for paperwork violations. (They started to round up the Armenians, too. Then someone remembered that Armenians have some political clout and they stopped.)
Atrios is all over this one; if you know of any defense funds being raised to help these folks, please pass the word along. —And among the other links I swiped, Atrios is recommending this piece by eRiposte; read it. Now.
All I can add is outmoded history, but if you’ve read this far and you still aren’t incensed (and yet, you’re still reading), then maybe you need a refresher course in how badly the INS has handled stuff like this on a routine basis. The executive summary, from the lead article:
In a four-month investigation, The Oregonian found that the INS:
- Holds 20,000 people in a secretive and poorly monitored network of prisons and county jails that often subjects them to abuse, loses track of them and sends them from jail to jail—often far from their families and lawyers.
- Jails youthful victims of sexual abuse and other vulnerable children alongside criminal offenders—violating legal agreements to move them to safer, less restrictive facilities.
- Breaks up families by jailing or deporting relatives of U.S. citizens for minor offenses or decades-old crimes.
- Mistreats some asylum seekers, who flee persecution in their homelands only to be jailed in the United States or sent back to life-threatening situations without regard for the dangers that await.
- Tolerates racism and sexual abuse in its ranks and has one of the highest rates of misconduct among federal law-enforcement agencies.
- Allows district directors and sector chiefs such as Portland’s Beebe to run their 57 jurisdictions as fiefdoms, applying the law unevenly.
- Overworks its employees, whose low pay, grueling work conditions and difficult mission demoralize officers and invite abuse.
- Bungles immigration cases, including those of U.S. citizens who are wrongly deported and imprisoned.
And: the Oregonian’s Pulitzer notwithstanding, the Mercury would like humbly to remind you they were on the case months earlier.
Now. All this happened two years ago. The aforementioned Director David Beebe resigned after an uproar over the strip-search and detention of Chinese citizen Guo Liming, who’d been flying through Portland on a business trip. And reforms—some sparked by the Oregonian and its dam’ Pulitzer—have been attempted both locally and nationally. Though they’re rather on the back burner thanks to 911 and the birth pangs of Homeland Security. —The lesson to take from all this, then?
Speaking out works. Sort of. Provisionally. You have to keep doing it, for it to have any effect. And reforming a giant bureaucracy is hard work even if you ice a figurehead or two. But!
They came for the Muslims whose papers weren’t in order, and we spoke up, and they backed off and stopped their idiocies and remembered what it is about this country that’s supposedly so great, and if they tried a bit too hard to spin their retreat as a win-win, well, we decided not to hold it against them. Though we kept our eyes peeled for the next un-American power grab.
—Hmm. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, somehow. Nonetheless: Email. Fax. Call. Get this on the news and get people talking about it. Spread the word. Go!
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Thank you.
De nada...
They came for the Middle-Easterners from Muslim countries, ignoring whether they were Muslim or not. Dozens of those arrested in the recent Los Angeles INS action were Iranian Jews -- including 10 with Israeli passports. I wonder how many Ba'hais and Zoroastrians were picked up as well.
--Art Nevsky
Indeed, they did. One of my regrets about this piece is that I let my flying fingers be led astray by the various headlines, which all said "Muslim" (some of the articles did mention the religious heterogeneity in their bodies). Since the intent on the part of our gatekeeping dunces was to round up "suspicious" Muslims, I ended up leaving the reference alone. A cheap rationalization compounded by laziness, perhaps, but I didn't want a drastic edit so soon after I posted.
My other regret, of course, is having misspelled the good pastor's name. It's Niemoller. But I was led astray by the website I linked to! I typed too quickly! It was the heat of the moment!
Still. Poor craftsman, and all that. Keep your eyes peeled for Jan. 10, the next such deadline--which includes immigrants from Somalia and North Korea. --Here's a deeply ironic article from before the roundups. Also, TalkLeft is (as always) an excellent source of information; here's some detail from those "on the ground," as it were.
several hundred Muslims detained in CA for immigration violations
Fear mounts as U.S. calls on Muslim men to register Foreign visitors tripped by deadline Is the U.S. going to