The empathy for illegal's story
Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.Did you see any empathy for the rule of law in that lead? I didn't either. Over six internet pages you find more about people who came here illegally and what happens to them. I lost interest after the first couple of pages. It would have been interesting to contrast their situation with immigrants who obeyed the immigration laws. Now, if one of them wound up in detention that would be a real story.Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.
After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.
In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.
If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.
Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.
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Also note the "desperation" of communities who help build the detention centers. The story seems to imply, that if the communities were not so desperate they would not care about the rule of law either. Or is that just a way of dealing with their liberal guilt when confronted with a NY Times reporter on an empathy trip?
This story is badly in need of an editor who sees something besides victims when someone who has broken the law is detained. Perhaps someone with a clue about the importance of enforcing immigration laws could have given some balance to the story. It is not that people like myself lack empathy, no matter how challenge we may be in that regard. My empathy is with the people who follow the law and wait to do it right. I have little empathy for those who cut in line ahead of them and then complain when they are caught.
AFTER READING YOUR ARTICLE, I SEE NO REASON FOR YOU TO FEEL THE WAY YOU DO AS TO AGREEING WITH THOSE WHO FOLLOW THE LAW.
ReplyDeleteIT HAS BEEN THIS WAY FROM DAY ONE....
THE ILLEGALS , CALLED AS SUCH BECAUSE THEY ARE JUST THAT, ILLEGAL.
THEY OUTRIGHT "INVADED OUR COUNTRY, THEY WERE NOT INVITED, MILLIONS WHO STEPPED AHEAD OF OTHERS, AND IN A COUNTRY WHO IS ONE MORE INCH FROM TOTALLY BANKRUPTCY, OUR MOST REDICULOUS CONGRESS, ACCEPTS LOBBYIST MONEY "NOT" TO CHANGE ANY LAW TO REMOVE THEM....
IT COMES DOWN TO MONEY ANF GREED AND NOTHING ELSE BUT.
WITH A INDEBTEDNESS OF 10 TRILLION DOLLARS , IT SEEMS CONGRESS IS SPENDING MORE MONEY THAN WE HAVE IN GOLD RESERVES....
ONE MORE GOOD REASON TO REPLACE THOSE IN CONGRESS NOW, AND START WITH NEW "TERM-LIMITS" AND RESTRICTIONS
ON THIS NEWER GROUP TO GET BACK TO NORMALCY IN THIS COUNTRY.
ONE OF THE SECOND THINGS NEEDED IS TO CHANGE THE LAW OF ILLEGAL ENTRY FROM A MISDEAMNOR TO A FEDERAL FELONY, WITH MANDATORY PRISON TERMS OF TWO YEARS FOR FIRST OFFENSE, THEN DEPORTATION, SECOND OFFENSE IS A MANDATORY 3 YR. SENTENCE, THEN DEPORTATION, AND A THIRD OFFENSE IS A MANDATORY TEN YEAR PRISON TERM, THEN DEPORTATION......THIS WOULD SERIOUSLY CURB INVADERS TO THINKING TWICE,
AFTER A FEW WHO HAVE BEEN CAUGHT PUT THE WORD OUT THAT IT IS FOR REAL.
A FENCE RIGHT NOW, WITHOUT A NEW LAW CHANGE, IS AS REDICULOUS AS HUMANS GROWING WINGS AND FLYING.
AS THE SAYING GOES, YOU SHOW ME A 25' HIGH FENCE, AND I'LL SHOW YOU TWO 30 FT. LADDERS, ONE FOR CLIMBING UP, AND THE OTHER FOR CLIMBING DOWN....WASTE OF MONEY AGAIN, AND SO OUTLANDISH FOR OUR COUNTRY TRYING TO FOOL AMERICANS THAT THEY ARE DOING SOMETHING TO CURB THE PROBLEM, ITS REALLY LAUGHABLE HOW OUR LEADERS THINK, LIKE LITTLE KIDS.
NO ONE FOLLOWS THE LAW IN THIS COUNTRY ANY LONGER, INCLUDING JUDGES, ESPECIALLY JUDGES, FROM THE BOTTOM COURTS UP TO THE SUPREME COURT.
AS SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR SAID SHE JUST HAD TO GET OUT AND RETIRE.
IT IS SERIOUSLY TIME TO "UP-DATE" OUR CONSTITUTION, NOT REWRITE IT, BUT TO AMEND IT TO TODAYS WORLD WHICH OUR FOREFATHERS COULD NOT HAVE POSSIBLY KNOWN, BUT THEU WERE SMART ENOUGH TO GIVE US A WAY OUT, AN ARTICLE 5 CONVENTION, WHERE STATE DELEGATES MAKE SUGGESTIONS AS TO WHAT TO UPDATE AND THEN TO GET IT INTO LAW REQUIRES 34 STATES TO RATIFY....SOUNDS LIKE THEY WERE FAR SMARTER THAN ANYONE WE HAVE NOW IN OUR CONGRESS, WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE OUR REPRESENTATIVES, NOT LOBBYISTS.