American Shame

I live in Mexico legally. I have an FM3. I know of Americans who reside peacefully in Mexico illegally. I know they often don't have much money, and they don't have official jobs. Nobody is screaming at them to get out; they don't live in fear, though maybe they are slightly uneasy. Recently I arrived at the Mexico City airport for a flight to Boston. I brought my husband's FM3 by mistake. Everyone was very kind. One immigration officer tried to fix it so I could get the stern one to let me just exit Mexico on a tourist visa. It didn't work, so I ended up taking the bus back home to get my papers. Anyway, what with one thing and another, I made friends with the airline worker and she came running over so I could jump the line when I appeared two days later with the right papers.

So today I read yet another editorial in the NYTimes about our own behavior towards immigrants. . In today's editorial, the Times reports,

Now Michael Chertoff is clear-cutting a forest of regulations to wall out Mexico by the end of the year. And through the program known as 287(g), his agency is parceling out duties to a growing number of local police and sheriff’s departments, raising an army of junior deputies in the war on illegal immigrants.

As you can imagine, members of this "army" are operating in the most shameful way. Here is how the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, where Phoenix is, operates.

For months now, Sheriff Joe has been sending squads of officers through Latino neighborhoods, pulling cars over for broken taillights or turn-signal violations, checking drivers’ and passengers’ papers and arresting illegal immigrants by the dozen....
The sheriff says, we "... have a 3,000-person posse — and about 500 have guns. They have their own airplanes, jeeps, motorcycles, everything. They can only operate under the sheriff. I swear ’em in. I can put up 30 airplanes tomorrow if I wanted.”
The sheriff says he is keeping the peace, but it seems as if he is doing just the opposite — a useless, reckless churning of fear and unrest. Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix has denounced him, saying the raids are interfering with undercover city police officers and federal agents. The mayor of Guadalupe implored him to leave her community alone. State and county officials have pointed out that Sheriff Joe has ignored tens of thousands of outstanding criminal warrants while chasing day laborers and headlines. They say he has grossly violated the terms of his 287(g) agreement — which calls for federal oversight of local police — and have called on Washington to rein him in.

Washington shows no sign of doing that, or of stopping the construction of the wall.

This is American madness. This is American cruelty. This is American thuggery. This is American shame.