How Did We Not See?

So ICE is committing human rights abuses on a grand scale . . . so what else is new? Yes, they are putting young children in prison cells, breaking into homes in the wee hours of the morning and sticking guns in children's faces, ripping families apart, throwing refugees seeking safety in prison, denying injured, sick and dying prisoners care, treating innocent immigrants worse than murderers and destroying millions of lives each year - citizen and immigrant alike. We know this . . . but I was just told a story that chilled me to the bone and it did not come from the hyper-sadistic reign of ICE.

A friend of mine spoke of how immigration came and took his grandmother away to be deported. He and his sister were in school. His parents were working in the fields, his grandmother was home with this man's two younger sisters, a one year old and a toddler. This was in the mid 50s, how bad could it have been in the mid 50s? My friend came home from school at 4pm to find his grandmother gone and the two babies alone in an empty house. Fortunately they were alive. Immigration agents had taken their caretaker during the day. It was months before this man's parents were able to locate her in Mexico. She had been quickly herded onto a ship with many other immigrants and taken away, sort of reverse slaver-style. When the agents came for her she had begged them not to leave the babies alone, but they had not listened. They took her away and left two infant girls untended alone in a house all day. Anything could have happened to those children. Fortunately nothing did, but wouldn't a parent doing the same thing be brought up on charges for child endangerment? The picture I have posted on facebook in the past of the four or five year old child in a United States prison cell is bad, very bad. It is child abuse, no question about that, but this is worse and it was not done by ICE. No, this was done decades ago. There had been no terrorist attacks to use as an excuse to create such an inhumane agency. There was only immigration and they followed no rule of law or humanity.

Our human rights abuses toward immigrants have been going on for a very long time. Long before the anti-Vietnam War movement, before the Civil Rights protests, long before any of our protests aimed at bringing about a greater respect for humanity, this has been going on. What is happening now is nothing new, it is simply happening on a larger scale and during a time when news travels quickly. This was going on the whole time those protests were being waged during the 60s and no one protested. Did anyone even notice? While I was in Georgia making my personal statement in support of an end to segragation in the 60s, thousands of Mexican families were living with constant fear of the kicked in door, heartless men with guns and families torn apart. These inhuman conditions have been with us right along. Why have we not seen them? How did they go undetected for so long? Now that I look back I see that the signs were there. If I had looked just a little more closely I would have known . . . why did I not look?

This time I'm not going to finish this blog by answering my own questions. Let's just leave the questions there . . . how was a whole group of people allowed to live and work in this country while enduring slave wages, dangerous working conditions, destruction of their families, abuse and endangerment of their children and untold other forms of persecution for decades without it ever being found out, totally without protest? Have we been selling our collective soul for cheap food and clothing? How is it that we all missed this?

This is my last blog post for the year 2009. Tomorrow I start fasting to show solidarity for Fast for Our Families. I think perhaps I have some serious soul-searching to do as well, some questions I must ask myself, some answers I must find . . . Happy New Year.