Immigration sob stories 101

NY Times:

It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

Mrs. Villegas’s arrest has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, that gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers. It is one of 57 agreements, known formally as 287G, that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country under a rapidly expanding program.

Nashville officials have praised the agreement as a successful partnership between local and federal government.

“We are able to identify and report individuals who are here illegally and have been charged with a criminal offense, while at the same time remaining a friendly and open city to our new legal residents,” Karl Dean, the mayor of Nashville, said in a statement on Friday.

Lawyers and immigrant advocates say Mrs. Villegas’s case shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce.

“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”

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Notice anything absent from this story? How about the personal responsibility of one Juana Villegas. To borrow a phrase from Greg Ramos above, had she not come here illegally she would not be in this situation either. It was not law enforcement that got her pregnant as far as I can tell. She has been the the country illegally making babies since 1996. I suppose some think having gotten away with it that long we should just ignore her actions of ignoring the law.

It appears her story is supposed to make us decided that enforcing the law is a bad idea. The story is written to impact our empathy and emotions more than to engage our brain. If you reside in an empathy based world and want to ignore the consequences of ignoring the rule of law this story is for you. But if it were written to engage on the level of logic it would have at least touched on Villegas's personal responsibility for her circumstances. I give it an F on that level.

If the immigration empathy lobby wants to engage the empathy challenged conservatives who oppose illegal immigration they are going to have to do better than this. Ratcheting up the armies of empathy is not going to win this argument.