"Dogs get better care in the dog pound"

Too exhausted to comment, or even to finish the remaining 2/3 of the article. It is devastating.

I will just repeat: Immigration is a human rights issue.

Are Immigration Authorities Going After School Children?

I wouldn't be fucking surprised.

God damn them. I grew up with these children. My late elementary school years were spent in a school way out in county land, attended mostly by the children of the immigrants at Linell Camp, who worked the fields day to night -- I was one of two white students in my grade. What the fuck did they do wrong? They came to school and they worked their hardest and I can say, having graduated with several of them, that they damn well made something of themselves by your standards. Their parents worked much harder than most of us ever will, and they lived in homes the size of my closet on a fenced-in campground, surviving on anemic wages. And they lived in fucking fear because of actions like this.

Immigration is not an economic issue. It is a human rights issue.

Good God

I am far, far behind in my reading, but Matt was reading the news aggregator after we got home from dinner tonight, and my eyes caught a glimpse of the words "immigration raid" -- oh no -- in Iowa.

The AP has a brief sum. Cold comfort, that last line.

It does give me hope, at least, that some people saw it coming, and arranged a workshop for immigrants on their constitutional rights -- regardless of legal status. Not that it will change the system that is incarcerating them, the system that separates family members, that treats people like useless old dogs. But it will make people aware of the rights they are said to have, and maybe, maybe it will help save some.

Immigration may not be the issue that some exploitative politicians hoped it would be for whites in this country -- but make no mistake: Awful, evil things are happening in your name. Not only in Guantanamo Bay, not only at Abu Ghraib. They are happening every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we pay some smidge of attention to them, at least, but we are blind to what happens every day in these same states, in this same country, not leagues away and across a vast ocean where we can imagine a human separation: these things are happening on these grounds, in your town, next door to your home. And we look away.