12/14/06: At meatpacking plants Tuesday in Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Iowa and Minnesota, an estimated 5,000 or more largely undocumented immigrant workers were rounded up–on the job–by riot gear-clad, machine-gun-carrying agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and taken away. As of Wednesday, it was still anybody’s guess as to their whereabouts.
The massive coordinated raid was conducted on the flimsy and
seldom-used pretext of looking for “identity theft” suspects. But a
look beneath the surface and the “it’s-all-for-our-protection”
platitudes of government officials reveals what this raid was really
about: penetrating the apparatus for rounding people up further into
the interior of the country and testing the waters for much further
outrages. Deborah W. Meyers, senior policy analyst at the Migration
Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, was quoted in the
Washington Post as saying that the raid “shows the weakness of the
current system, the ways illegal workers have been able to find
employment in the legitimate economy, and the need for enforcement
efforts to focus on the work site and not just the border.”
The new Congress has promised to work with Bush for immigration reform
that will include further repression like the raids on Tuesday. This
past fall, Congress passed and Bush signed legislation to build a
700-mile wall on the US-Mexico border, along with more Border Patrol
checkpoints, surveillance equipment, and overall more militarization of
the border. Since immigrants took to the streets in protest of the
anti-immigrant legislation last Spring, the government has stepped up
raids and detentions of immigrants, and violent attacks by vigilantes
have increased.
Reflecting on the rise of the Nazis to power, German Pastor Martin Niemoeller said:
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, And I said nothing Because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.
Then the came for the Jews and I didn’t Speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up.
“It won’t happen here?”
“It” can, and this past Tuesday we got a chilling glimpse of what it can look like here in the “homeland”.