ICE's inhumanity to immigrants

Detroit--Last month a woman contacted me about her husband getting picked up by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). They came in the middle of the night and rammed the door with a battering ram. The family was asleep upstairs and the police screamed and cursed and turned the house upside down. An eight-year-old and a four-month-old were held at gunpoint, the baby in his mother's arms. They took the men away and left the women, as one was nursing her child and the other was a U.S. citizen. They tried to take their car, too, but the women stopped them.

The people were at home, sleeping when all this went down. No criminal activity, no warrants. The woman is still here and the husband has been deported to the wasteland of Mexico, where he is unable to earn enough money to live, much less send support for his two children here.

I took them to say goodbye to him in the Monroe Detention Center and it was a sad scene. Earlier, I had been with them in court while the children came in with me to witness their father on a video feed. The mother could not come inside due to her status. So these two little girls, four and six, and I watched as he wept, alone in a cell and unable to face his children in person to say goodbye.

It was hard to watch, and the little ones did not understand the gravity of this situation. They did not know they may never see him again, or maybe not for a long time. These contacts we have with families create a bond that is deep, and when they get deported or have to move on to the next place because this place got too hot to handle, we suffer the loss as well. This is no way to live.

I remember when we did not know any of the recent Mexican immigrants. Now, it seems like we all know each other and are all connected. Other friends in the community are touching base in a more organized way. Now we are connecting, and the web is being woven to encircle our vulnerable community and keep us from becoming isolated and bitter.

The friend who called me last month brought a young man to my house to discuss what could be done about his brothers being detained on false charges in the Detroit jail. We all go to the city council to raise hell about the profiling. Another of our classmates from Chicano Boricua Studies relentlessly requested the meeting with the new mayor until we got it, and without her insistence, we would not be heard. It takes all of us, with our myriad contacts and connections, to bring some level of justice for the most vulnerable undocumented people who are being hated and despised by the most powerful.

It is such a strange time; to describe it as late capitalism does not quite capture it. The police state is intensifying. There is a theory that when a thing is about to die, it becomes the most powerful. The greatest repression comes before freedom, as we have witnessed in so many struggles. Lots of people are harmed in this process, but there is hope. Hope for relief for the legions of people having to leave their beloved homelands to become fugitives and criminals when they have no malice and have done nothing wrong. And the most predatory and worst among us are in places of power.

I find hope in the fact that this is simply not sustainable. And in the meantime, we stand in the breach. What else is to be done? Pray, fight, do whatever, but we must do something. Hasta la Victoria Siempre!

--Elena M. Herrada

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