ICE rounded up 680 immigrants yesterday in Mississippi, leaving their American born children stranded on the sidewalk for their first week of school.
This little girl, along with other children, was taken to a gym by bystanders where she stayed overnight. She’ll probably get put in the foster care system. In Mississippi. Yeah, think about that.
We saw this coming. I wrote this back in June this year in Who Gets their Stuff?:
What happens to their American born children? Do they get swept up too? That would likely trigger judicial injunctions. Would they stay with their parents? WHERE would they stay with their parents?
Would they get left behind? Where would all those little American children get left behind? On the street? Who will feed them, house then, make sure no one hurts them?
If you were an American born kid of migrant parents and you saw the sudden panic on your parents’ faces in the last 24 hours, how would you focus on your spelling test tomorrow? How could you even sleep?
By the way, who does get their stuff now that they’re gone? Is this little girl entitled to any of her parents’ things?
I mean, isn’t it enough that we’re heartless? Do we have to be thieves too?
I only ask.
*************************
Former Missouri senator, Claire McCaskill asks a different but equally important question:
Well?
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Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
On target, as usual, RD.
I managed to carry out a minor sting on a Washington State employer who knowingly employed many undocumented immigrants, including one Mexican whom they rehired after he got out of jail for violence against a woman he lived with. That company, a large mushroom grower, had an overtly stratified workforce: immigrants on the bottom doing the work that kept the company going, white male owners and supervisors, white females in HR and the office (at much lower pay than the men).
That mushroom farm had been requiring their actual workforce, the ones who did the work – South Asian immigrants and Latinx immigrants from Mexico, Latin America and South America – to come in a minimum of half an hour to an hour off the clock, in order to suit up and prepare their stations.
After a lawsuit against Tyson Chicken made it plain this was illegal, I reported the company to Washington State Dept. of Labor and Industries. It took over three months to get someone out there to invesigate. The Latina “investigator” for Washington State L&I told me initially that “most people lie” when reporting these kinds of violations. I went over her head until I got someone (a white woman, imagine that) who took the law seriously enough to send investigators out there. She made sure the interviews would be anonymous, so these hard working people would not lose their jobs over this.
In the end, the company had to pay several hundred thousand dollars in back pay to these people that were the backbone of their company. They should have had to pay much more, but Washington State illegally limited the award to the one year in which I filed, despite the record that showed this had been done for decades.
That same year, 2001, the Washington State legislature held a hearing on employer abuse of undocumented immigrants. I called every state representative I could get hold of to testify about what I knew from first hand experience. Democrat and Republican alike, they all told me they’d get back to me, and Democrat and Republican alike, they never did. The final bill did nothing to alleviate migrant workers’ conditions.
Washington State, like so many that depend on cheap agricultural labor, knows that its employers routinely and as a matter of business violate immigration laws. Without shame or apology, Washington state supports law breaking business owners. When punishing -someone- becomes politically expedient, it’s only the very vulnerable employees they’ll go after .
What ICE did in Louisiana is on the same continuum.
Almost all of the parents who were arrested yesterday were processed, cited, and released within a few hours.
The owner of the company has previously been cited for exploiting immigrants.
Awwww, look at Niles, dropping in to make lame excuses for the Trump administration terrifying little American school children. it made no provisions for those little kids who were stranded in the street with no one to pick them up or take care of them.
So different compared to what NJ did during 9/11 when some parents in my town who worked in the city just didn’t come home that day because a building fell on them. Those kids were well taken care of. Their emergency contacts were called. School psychologists stayed with them. They were coddled.
Well, ICE didn’t bother with any of that for THESE kids.
Hmmm… I wonder why…
Wow, excellent post RD and the header was perfect. Can’t get any more succinct than that!
On another issue of concern: Quixote cross posted this on Widdershins. Ties in with the previous comments from IBW on GOP kompromat.
“Via Paula Chertok, points made by Chris Vickery:
Is this why #MoscowMitch got so under McConnell’s skin?? Along with other prominent Republicans, Mitch has been using a subpoena-resistant (Yandex?) email server in Russia. Does this also mean Putin has major GOP kompromat??
Paula Chertok
Chris Vickery
Here it is.
This site [CivicMerit.com] is owned/run by a leading GOP digital operative. He runs systems on servers physically located in Russia, and advertised it. Mitch McConnell is a client. Ben Carson is a client. Gingrich is a client. And many more.
He *advertises* the subpoena-resistance of his “service.”
This is not like Hillary’s email server. It had former-president level of security, and was just about the only civilian government-associated server that was NOT hacked, and was based in NEW YORK,
Russian email providers must use Russian servers by law and they have to be accessible to the FSB (secret service).
So Putin didn’t even have to hack anything to get kompromat on these goons. They handed it to him.
I’m betting the people are right who are guessing it’s election fraud — no doubt planned out in those many fine FSB-accessible emails — which is the blackmail Putin holds over these idiots.”
Cats, these are chilling connections. Everything they projected onto Hillary were things they did or were doing. I will just say that I don’t think that Russia needs “kompromat” to get someone like McConnell to act like he does. McConnell is a fascist at heart. He has used Senate rules to turn the body into a state run only by him. People like him didn’t have to be threatened or bribed to do what they do. They have a Manichean view of the world, and they are bent upon destroying or completely nullifying the side they see as their enemies. There is no humanity in McConnnell or Trump or the rest of them, to appeal to.
It is certainly possible that Russia and the Republicans have cooked up a plan to hack every state’s election system, and insure a Republican sweep. Everything the Trump administration has not done in terms of election security points to that. The question is whether the diminished law enforcement apparatus can stop it. I would guess that about 80% of Republicans, and maybe about 90% of Republican officeholders, would prefer a country in which Russia got them elected, to one where elections were fair and they had a sizeable risk of losing. The relentless Republican slide into a view where winning is all, anything you can do to beat the other side is worthwhile, no matter how dishonest or corrupt or traitorous it is, is horrifying. The utterly phony moralizing that comes from Republicans, allows them to rationalize anything they do. When you cannot appeal to people out of a sense of fairness or honor; when they put some notion of “winning,” of glorying in your tears, ahead of everything else, it is a frightening prospect. They cannot be reached. One can only hope that there are no more than 40% of them, as large a number as that is.
To a certain extent yes, McConnell is not going to do some of the things he’s refusing to do whether Russia is involved or not. Even if Russia was not involved with the GOP, McConnell would refuse to do anything about guns. However the election security bills make no sense unless he is acting as agent of Russia.
You could well be right. And we know that his state is getting money from Russian oligarchs. But simply that he knows that Russia helped his party in the last election, might in itself be enough of a reason for him to not do anything to stop them from doing it again, since he has no morals.
“…they are bent upon destroying or completely nullifying the side they see as their enemies.”
Ascended Madoka forgive me, but I’m starting to feel that way about them. Not physically destroying them, no, I haven’t reached THAT degree of rage–yet. But completely nullifying them as a political force in the USA, and their Russian masters as a political force in the larger world? OH HELL YES I’m up for that.
Early, i applaud your activism, you take civic responsibility to a new level. How infuriating that the real wrong doers get more protection than the workers. I understand working conditions in processing plants can be brutal, especially if slicing and dicing machinery and sharp objects are involved. I am sure long hours also lead to more accidents.
Thanks, Cats. I’ve been unable since about the mid-eighties to understand the conventional wisdom that seems to exempt employers from any concept of fairness or morality, while applying an almost religious code of ethics to employees.
You brought up another area, besides horrible working conditions and illegally low pay, that makes undocumented workers so attractive to employers: workers’ compensation. This is another area where employers are known to skirt or break the law virtually with impunity, even though it is one of the few employee’s rights cases lawyers will actually take. A common enough response to an employee filing for the medical treatment and limited temporary income provided by workers’ comp. is to simply fire the employee as a warning to others. I’ve known white American-born men who continued working with serious injuries, including a broken rib in one case, rather than file and risk losing their jobs.
Even this minimal protection is lacking for undocumented immigrants, who risk deportation in addition to the loss of their jobs. It makes them that much more attractive to employers, who know they can maintain unsafe plants and factories with a low risk of any consequences to themselves if an employee is seriously injured.
This is another area where enforcement entities allow far too much of this to go on. Consistently and predictably enforcing the law *on employers* might cause the media and employers to call state enforcement agencies nasty names like “anti-jobs” and “anti-business”. Combined with the kid-glove treatment of employers who hire undocumented workers, it gives American employers access to a large captive workforce virtually without rights.
And don’t get me started on how rightless women are within this lawless structure – fair game for their male coworkers seems to be the attitude of far too many employers and employees alike.
Great post, RD! And grateful that you have been all over this for so long.
On the lighter side — I loved the cartoon in (I think) USA Today which had Trump dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West and sending out an army of evil flying monkeys wearing ICE badges.
Breaking, EPSTEIN DEAD in his cell. Now if i put my tin foil hat on….
Epstein is dead from an apparent suicide.
Perhaps he had a leetle help, da, Keptin?
What would Uncle Vlad not do to protect his most valuable foreign asset?
That would be consistent with the current plot, but there are a whole lot of other people who may have dodged a bullet with that predator’s death. Curious to see what Barr does to stand by his man.
Considering the fact that all the evidence was seized the only way people are going to dodge a bullet is if Barr suppresses the evidence which is not out of the realm of possibility. In what was released yesterday some of those girls were sex trafficked out of Mar A Lago.