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"Bad Dude" No, but Deported Anyway (Logos (Ms. Rayos a 35 years…
"Bad Dude" No, but Deported Anyway
Logos
Ms. Rayos a 35 years old mother of two, was arrested on Wednesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Phoenix.
On Thursday, she was deported to Mexico, a country she left 21 years ago.
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But Ms. Rayos, fits no such definition and was no threat, though she had been living in the United States illegally since she was 14.
Mr. Trump ran for office promising to eliminate such discretion and replace it with heedless and pointless enforcement.
His campaign amplified the nativist passions of his supporters and hard-line advisers, including the man who is now his right hand in the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Advocates were mobilizing on Thursday night after reports of scores of immigration arrests across the country, from Southern California to Texas.
The orders sweep away the priorities set by President Barack Obama and his homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, under which agents were told to focus strictly on public-safety risks.
The criminalizing of law-abiding immigrants who have lived in the United States for years, and of the migrants from Central America who arrive desperate for refuge.
It is instead the prospect of ramped-up enforcement that promises to increase misery on both sides of the border.
Reinstatement of Mr. Trump's travel ban from certain predominantly Muslim countries was blocked by a federal appeals court on Thursday.
Ethos
President Trump persists in the absurd claim that America will be safe and great again only after an assault on "bad dudes" and "criminal aliens," whom he has promised to arrest and remove by the millions.
It is time to watch closely what Mr. Trump says, and what he and his administration do.
What was always most alarming about Mr. Trump's posturing on immigration wasn't the wall, which will never be built in the way he describes it.
Mr. Trump's federal force, especially if it re-enlists state and local law enforcement agencies in a widening immigration dragnet, threatens to return America to a disgraceful era of workplace raids, indiscriminate sweeps and mass arrests.
Watch Mr. sessions, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, agencies with rogue officers who have abused immigrants and broken the law, and local law enforcement, like the Phoenix police, whose officers abetted ICE in subduing protesters who tried to block Ms. Rayos's removal.
Ms. Rayos's lawyer, speaking to reporters on Thursday, said immigrants should realize that what happened to her could easily happen to them.
He suggested they use great caution in dealing with ICE, and consider the possibility of seeking sanctuary in a church.
He is worrying the agriculture industry, which is heavily dependent on workers Mr, Trump calls criminals.
The immigration courts are already vastly overburdened, even before a Trump-led onslaught of cases.
And a growing constellation of so-called sanctuary cities, towns and states is pledging not to cooperate in the president's crackdown.
Pathos
By no standard of common sense or decency should Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos have been a priority for deportation.
Her devastated family, including her American-born children, remains in the United States.
Mr. Trump, or the ideologues who speak into his ear and guide his pen, came up with executive orders the first week of his presidency that vastly expanded the universe of potential deportation targets to include anyone found guilty of any offense, no matter how old or minor, and people accused of crimes but no convicted.
The state has journalist who have covered the lies, the boasting, the abuses of power by anti-immigrant demagogues.
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But for countless innocent immigrant families, the hard question is what to do now.
The households sundered, the jobs lost, the brutal idiocy of it all.
In the years since, she would check in regularly with immigration officials, who chose not to deport her, having more important to do.
This will fix nothing, except perhaps the bottom lines in the private prison industry.
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Certainly, hope lies on the ground: Arizona has a seasoned, scarred but ferociously determined corps of immigrant-rights advocates and lawyers who have seen these battles before, under the recently ousted immigrant brutalizer of Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpio.