Children as the slippery slope in the immigration debate

The following transcribes an NPR story, interspersed with my comments:

Here's another story we're following. A Border Patrol round-up along Interstate 40 in California has prompted a call for a Federal investigation. A Los Angeles attorney says agents were only pulling over people with brown skiln, which he says is racial profiling. The attorney represents a 12 yr old girl who is an American citizen. Her parents are not. Yesterday, she talked about what happened after the border patrol stopped her family's car. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.

[Kahn] Twelve year old Wendy Ortiz says last week her family set out from Arizona to California on Interstate 40. She says it was late, she was in the back seat and asleep until an officer shined his flashlight in her face.

[Ortiz] "And then that's what woke me up because they were checking if there were any people in the back, and then they asked us if we were born here and then my parents said no, and then they didn't know what to do."

[Kahn] Ortiz is a US citizen [sic] says the whole family was detained. She claims her mother was forced to sign a voluntary departure form. After both parents were deported, an aunt picked up the three youngest children and brought them all back to Los Angeles. That's the last time Wendy say her mother. [I'd like to note here that there are no allegations whatsoever that Ortiz and her family were mistreated. The whole story is about their being stopped and detained, followed by the deportation of two illegal immigrants.]

[Ortiz] "I miss her a lot. My little brothers miss her too. 'Cause they've never been separated that long from her." [Here's the human interest part. I can feel for the children. Private emotions, however, do not make public policy.]

[Kahn] The Ortiz family were stopped as part of what the Border Control calls Operation Desert Denial. It was a five day long crackdown on immigrant smugglers who use the busy I-40 East-West Corridor.

At a news conference yesterday, attorney Luis Carillo claimed the Ortiz family were [sic] victims of racial profiling. He says agents were focused on pulling over Latinos when they should have been stopping drug traffickers and smugglers at the border. [I'm really not sure how you can hunt for illegal Mexican border hoppers without racial profiling. Last I heard, there were few blonde haired, light skinned, blue eyed Mexicans seeking to steal across the Mexican-American border into the U.S. And indeed, it turned out in this case that the Border Patrol very accurately picked off a car that contained precisely what they were looking for — illegal aliens. The racial profiling claim here is even more ridiculous than the claim that has airports security are stripping down caucausian grannies and babies, while bowing respectfully to 20-something Middle Eastern men. While the jihadists could use racial profiling — if it were practiced — to their advantage by recruiting the growing number of blonde European converts to Islam, there is nothing to be done to change the fact that Mexicans with dark skin are the ones coming here illegally.]

[Carillo] "Meanwhile, they're 200 miles north of the border picking on little girls, and mothers, and workers." [Let me add again that this particular mother was a criminal, as are many of the workers to whom he alludes.]

[Kahn] Border Patrol officials insist that only suspicious vehicles were pulled over.

Advocates for tighter immigration enforcement applaud such operations, even if some children are separated from their families. Today, as many as 3 million U.S. born children have at least one parent who is in the country illegally.

Steve Camarata (sp?) of the Center for Immigration Studies, says tougher enforcement is the only way to get the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country to leave.

[Camarata] "Of course that's going to produce compelling anecdotes about U.S. born children, for example. But in the end, we may make some exceptions. We could do that. But what I think most people want, and what makes sense, is to begin to enforce the law and prove that we're serious about it. [No, no, no. If you make an exception for families with children, every illegal alien woman will get pregnant the second she crosses the border.]

[Kahn] Others wonder, however, if the American public has the stomach for breaking up immigrant families where the children are U.S. citizens. Angela Kelly is with the National Immigration Forum, a group that favors giving illegal immigrants a pathway to U.S. citizenship. [If we have the stomach for sending all sorts of other moms and dads to prison on a regular basis for other crimes, why would we stop here? If this is going to be our policy — no parents can ever be punished for committing illegal acts — we'd better spread this policy far and wide throughout the whole criminal justice system, and then accept the consequences. I'd also like to point out that there's nothing to stop the family from reuniting in Mexico, which is a better situation than that faced by the ordinary American criminal, who gets to see his/her kids once a month on visiting day.]

[Kelly] "It's just so foolhardy and naive, quite frankly, to think that we could just kind of pick away at some of these people and sweep them, you know, under the rug if you will by just deporting them or that people will leave on their own." [I consider this gibberish. It's all feeling, no logic.]

[Kahn] Meanwhile, 12 year old Wendy Ortiz said she's only been to Mexico once and doesn't want to live there. She hopes immigration authorities will let her mother back in the country. [I'm not surprised she doesn't want to live there. Neither, it seems, do many others with roots in Mexico.]

[Ortiz] "My Mom's not a criminal. She just wants the best for us." [Sweetie, that's a laudable sentiment, and I applaud you for it. But facts are facts — your Mom is a criminal.]

[Kahn] Ortiz's lawyer is asking for an investigation into the highway stops, and will ask authorities for a humanitiarian visa for Wendy's mother. [Again, if Wendy's mother gets a humanitarian Visa, we've opened the floodgates to immigration through parenting. And, as I said, the next step is to say that no one with children can be punished for committing a crime. Is that really where we want to go?]

Talking to Technorati: Immigration, Deportation, Profiling, Children