This morning the Syracuse Post-Standard published a story about a couple whose possible deportation to Guatemala became the ongoing nightmare in their lives.
According to the news account, the couple fled violence in that country and entered the United States illegally.
They have been living here with the knowledge of Immigration Control Enforcement (ICE) authorities and have been allowed to stay as long as they checked in with that agency and stayed out of trouble.
They have three children, age’s elven, nine and seven, who, because they were born here, are United States citizens.
The father is a painter, the mother cleans houses and they pay taxes and have stayed out of trouble.
Their lives changed dramatically after Trump was inaugurated.
The husband was taken into custody by ICE a few days before Christmas in 2017 outside their home in Syracuse.
He spent two months in detention and is now free on $5,000 bond.
His wife, who has been reporting to ICE in Syracuse faithfully since 2013, has now been ordered to report to the ICE facility in Batavia, New York which has a detention facility and court to process deportation cases.
Neither parent knows when they might be taken into custody there, be separated from their children and removed from the country.
Also this week, we witnessed the deportation of Miguel Perez, a United States Army veteran, who served two tours in Afghanistan to Mexico.
Perez’s case involves a denial of an application for citizenship due to a felony drug conviction following his military service.
He attributes his conviction to drug and alcohol addictions that were a product of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that he suffered resulting from his combat experiences.
Now, age thirty-nine, he entered the United States at the age of eight and has lived here continuously.
His parents, sibling and two children are all American citizens.
There are several facts that are undeniable in both these cases.
In the first case, Guatemala is and was a violence wracked country and the home to some of the deadliest gangs and cartels in the world.
It is little wonder that people fled without waiting to go through all of the bureaucratic channels necessary to enter this country.
In the second case, it is undeniable that thousands of veterans who served not just one tour but repeated tours of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere are suffering from PTSD and its attendant consequences of drug and alcohol addiction.
It is equally undeniable that the Veterans Administration has been woefully inadequate providing treatment for these condition as far back as the Vietnam War.
According to the Post-Standard article, in 2016 there were 1,103 arrests by ICE in the Buffalo region which serves Syracuse. 160 involved non-criminals.
In 2017 there were 1494 arrests and 396 were non-criminal.
There is one fact that seems to cloud the debate over how these cases should be treated.
It is that entering the United States illegally or overstaying a visa is not a crime but rather a civil violation of the immigration Law.
Re-entering the country after having been deported is a crime.
According to the2019 Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Control Enforcement Budget Overview, more convicted criminal illegal immigrants were removed each of the last three years of the Obama Administration than during the first year of the trump Administration.
During the first three months of this year, ICE deported 56,710 people.
Forty-six percent of them had not been convicted of a crime.
Like many of his claims, Trump’s claim that they are targeting and removing illegal criminals from this country that the prior administration didn’t, rings hollow.
This morning, Trump while entering Easter worship services, pronounced that DACA is dead.
There is one class of criminal illegal immigrants that hasn’t had to worry.
Nazis who entered the United States and who lied on their immigration applications are living and dying in the comfort of their homes in this country.
Jakiw Palij, who confessed to being a guard at the Trawniki labor camp where 6,000 people were exterminated in one day and participated in the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation was stripped of his American citizenship in 2004 by a U.S. District Court.
Yet, he remains living in his house in a Queens’s neighborhood in New York City.
His is not an isolated case.
John Klaymon, who served in a Nazi allied SS Ukrainian auxiliary police unit, was stripped of his American citizenship in 2007 and died at his home in Troy, Michigan seven years later.
ICE and the Justice department offer the excuse that Germany, Ukraine and Poland will not accept these criminals back although none of these countries are on a list of countries classified as “uncooperative” in these matters maintained by ICE.
One would think, that at a minimum, these war criminals would be in detention rather than living and dying in the comfort of their homes with their families.
We should ask ourselves what it says about us, that we have become a country that will break up families and remove people who have committed no crime other that fleeing the violence of gangs and cartels while tolerating the monsters living comfortably in our midst after exterminating millions of innocent people in the Holocaust. ?