Police state tactics against immigrants rounding up US citizens.
More instances of police brutality on display, courtesy of the Bush administration.
Armed squads bursting into homes in the dead of night with shotguns and automatic weapons, terrorizing families and taking away anyone who lacks identity papers, even if they have raided the wrong house. It may sound like Baghdad, but it is the suburbs of New York City, the latest among hundreds of communities around the country where federal agents have been invading homes and workplaces in search of immigrants to deport.
This is one more set of questions that Senators should ask the new AG nominee, Michael Mukasey -- will he sanction police raids on random homes in the name of "stopping illegal immigration?" There was a whole series of thuggish raids in Long Island which were hugely unsuccessful and which did nothing but spur fear and outrage among many people -- not just immigrants.
The ICE conducted a whole series of botched raids in Nassau County, NY in which the operations were poorly coordinated, to the point where they once drew their weapons on the local officers. To their credit, the local officials have suspended cooperation with the ICE and their vigilante-style thugs. And how ineffective were the raids?
The raids were stunningly ineffective. Nassau says they caught only 6 of 96 fugitives. ICE, using a looser definition of “gang member,” said it got 13 in Nassau and 15 in neighboring Suffolk. There, Peggy De La Rosa-Delgado, an American citizen, said her Huntington Station home was raided by mistake last Thursday at 5:30 a.m. It was the second predawn raid looking for the same man at the same wrong address. Her husband and three teenage sons, legal residents, were terrified, she said.
There is a lot greater danger from the creation of a police state than there would be from any kind of illegal immigration. This sort of climate of fear and police brutality would be replicated all over the country if the Tom Tancredos of the world were to have their way. All the Bush administration is doing is pandering to the Nativist wing of the party and disrupting peoples' lives in the process. So much for a government that purported to be about 'compassionate conservatism.' It is more of a police state than it is about that.
Obamathon
