Immigration Raids Are Ensnaring Innocent, Legal Bystanders
Years ago, I drove through a Border Patrol station along a Southern California freeway in my little sports car. As a white guy in a Navy blazer, I wasn’t surprised that the agents immediately waved me along—even as they questioned the Latino drivers around me, searched their trunks and thoroughly inspected their vehicles. I clearly didn’t fit the profile of an illegal immigrant or Mexican drug smuggler.
By contrast, one time that I flew with my mom, whose 90-year-old body has its share of metal implants, TSA agents examined her as if she might be the member of a sleeper cell. It’s just how it goes in TSA’s Security Theater—although once I was diverted to a “random” line for extra vetting and noticed that I appeared to be the only person in line who didn’t look Middle Eastern. What a coincidence.
My Border Patrol story reinforces an obvious point I’ve made to some of my Trump-supporting friends: The government almost certainly will use profiling to target criminal aliens, gang-bangers and even garden-variety illegal immigrants. Sometimes, liberal activists act as if racial/ethnic disparities in any given area necessarily prove racial discrimination. That’s not always the case, but ethnic profiling always goes hand-in-hand with immigration enforcement.
As such, I’ve been appalled, but not surprised, by some of the stories emanating from the administration’s high-profile immigration raids throughout the country. In one recent raid in Montebello, Border Patrol agents—masked and driving an unmarked SUV—descended on a parking lot and detained a local man.
“One agent soon twisted Jason Brian Gavidia’s arm and pressed him against a black metal fence outside the lot where he runs an auto body shop,” according to The New York Times. “Another officer then asked him an unusual question…’What hospital were you born at?’…He did not know the hospital’s name. ‘I was born here,’ he shouted at the agent, adding, ‘I’m an American, bro!'” I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t instantly tell you the name of the hospital where I was born.
The agents ultimately released him, but confiscated his driver’s license. There’s a lot wrong with this picture. In a constitutional republic, armed officers should not be wearing face masks as if they are members of some third-world paramilitary organization. There’s no reason for that unless they are behaving in a manner that skirts the boundaries of the law.
Ci
Article from Reason.com
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