Thursday, March 28, 2024

Members of the Congressional Hispanc Caucus Make a Plea to President George Bush

Representative Luis Gutierrez(D-Ill) and Joe Baca(D-Ca) have written a letter to the President of the United States asking that the raids being executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) be stopped. The letter summarizes the inhumanity and injustice they witnessed after visiting Potsville, Iowa the site of one of the biggest raids carried out by ICE. They believe that this is a clear example of how our broken immigration system is failing our country…

As members of Congress, we have traveled to remote corners of the world and had our eyes opened to some of the worst human suffering imaginable—abject poverty, meager wages, poor working conditions, paltry access to legal counsel and a jarring lack of fairness in the courts.

We never imagined that we would witness the same injustices in a small American town just a five-hour drive from Chicago.

During a visit to Postville, Iowa, last weekend, site of the May 12 Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant, we saw firsthand how a broken Immigration system devastates a small town.

Mothers bound to electronic bracelets were allowed neither to work nor to return to their home countries, leaving them without recourse to pay rent or feed their children. Wives and children—many of them U.S. citizens—were left to wonder where their husbands and fathers had been taken, or where they would go next. To this day, more than half of the wives do not know where their husbands are.

Almost two years to the day before the administration sent 900 ICE agents to storm Agriprocessors, President George W. Bush appeared before the American people and declared: “We’re a nation of laws, and we must enforce our laws. We’re also a nation of immigrants, and we must uphold that tradition, which has strengthened our country in so many ways. These are not contradictory goals. America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time.”

Postville has plainly shown that we are neither of those things. We are not “lawful” when we interrupt investigations spearheaded by our own Department of Labor. We are not lawful when we implement fear tactics and deportation-only policies simply to score cheap political points with conservative pundits. We are not lawful when we railroad men and women through the judicial process, without adequate representation or a full understanding of their rights.

We are certainly not “welcoming” when hardworking mothers and fathers are prohibited from raising their U.S. citizen children in the country of their birth, or when those who work the longest hours at the most undesirable jobs are treated like terrorists, simply for waking up and going to work.

Nuestra Voice