“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” – Dalai Lama

It’s ironic (and also not ironic) that our country’s immigration and customs enforcement agency has an acronym associated with coldness. The events in Mississippi last month left us shocked, families torn apart, and a nation continuing to wrestle with what values we want to uphold.

The raids on poultry plants that detained some 700 souls were coordinated and sudden. Children returned home from their first day of school to find that their parents weren’t home. Spouses couldn’t locate their loved ones. Hundreds of people were simply picked up and shipped off with no consideration. And all this just days after the Hispanic-targeted terrorism in El Paso, where the nation was still reeling from shock and sadness.

You might be thinking something along the lines of:

“Well, they were here illegally so deserved what they got.”

“They are taking away jobs from U.S. citizens.”

“They are criminals.”

If any of these thoughts crossed your mind when you first heard about the raids – even for just a millisecond – I ask you to consider the following:

Yes, many of these people were here illegally, but why not provide information to families about where they were being taken? Why not create some support system for the many children who came home to empty house? Why create so much trauma and chaos much of that could have been avoided by coordinating with other agencies?

The working conditions in the poultry plants were, by all accounts, brutal. I doubt most people, citizens or otherwise, would willfully choose those conditions unless they had no other options. In fact, last year Koch foods settled a lawsuit for alleged charges of harassment, intimidation, and exploitation of its Hispanic workers. This is in addition to the shortage of low skilled workers many areas in the country, including Mississippi, are facing.

The “criminal charges” that you are hearing about mainly involve illegal re-entry versus theft, violent crime, or anything else we may conjure up when we hear “criminal.” Many of the workers are currently being charged as felons, thanks to the immigrant-prosecuting laws set in motion by Clinton, George W., and Obama – ripe legal ground for Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.

This quote from a pastor of a church helping those affected sums it up best: 

“The system sees numbers. I know these people by name. I know that they are hard workers, they are people of faith, they are family people, community people. They were not at Walmart killing somebody else, they were working.”

I understand that the raids had been planned for months, but surely, someone could have given the nation time to grieve after the Hispanic-targeted terrorism in El Paso. Surely, there could have been more coordination between agencies to avoid what will now be generations of traumatized American citizens we have created by this one incident. Surely, in this great country of ours, we can reform our criminal justice system and immigration laws to treat situations like this with more nuance, grace, and humanity. The things we all want and deserve as citizens of this planet.

###

Please note: this is not a criticism of individual ICE agents, but of the political framework that allowed the events we witnessed in Mississippi.

[Photo credit: eater.com]