I know a little place where the ingredients are always fresh. You can get a mega-burrito and a Dos Equis to wash it down for not much more than 10 bucks.
If you’re in a bad mood when you arrive, you won’t be for long, because the workers smile, they laugh, they seem like they’re having so much fun making your food just the way you like it that you can’t help but start to feel like you’re having a little fun yourself. When I’m in there with my parents, the staff are careful to treat them (and any other older people) with respect. Someone always comes around from behind the counter to carry my mom’s food to her table for her.
Last week my favorite burrito shop was dark. The door was locked. A note posted outside indicated that they would be closed for the foreseeable future for kitchen renovations.
No mention had been made of upcoming renovations at any of my prior visits though. With ICE known to be skulking about, it didn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what had really happened.
Immigration agents reportedly kidnapped several of the employees and are in the process of deporting them. I confirmed this as best I could, which basically meant asking people in the area what they had heard, because the Department of Homeland Security generally won’t tell taxpayers (their bosses) who they are taking or what they are doing with them.
I say “kidnapped” because this most definitely was not an “arrest” and there is no better word for what actually took place. When a police officer takes another person into custody, he or she is acting under the color of legal authority. This police officer must respect the constitutional rights of the accused, and must have probable cause indicating that the person being arrested has committed a crime. When police officers make arrests, their badges and the badge numbers on them are visible, their last names are stitched into their uniforms, and their faces are uncovered, so that if your rights are indeed violated while you are in custody, you know who to complain about later on. When a police officer goes beyond the legal authority with which he or she is entrusted, that police officer is subject to disciplinary action, civil liability, or even criminal prosecution.
The color of someone’s skin or the fact that they speak English with an accent does not amount to probable cause. Simply being an undocumented immigrant is not even, on its own, a crime.
The president — who has himself been convicted of far more serious crimes than almost all of the people his administration is deporting — calling some thug a police officer does not make him one. Masked, unaccountable, unidentifiable ICE agents who trample the constitutional rights of every person they encounter are not law enforcement. One cannot enforce the law by breaking the law, and the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. These are kidnappings, plain and simple.
I give far less of a damn about who was born on what side of some imaginary line drawn on a map by a bunch of dead guys than I do about whether a person is fundamentally good or evil. Even if you do fixate on ancient cartography, you should not support the cruelty and the lawlessness inflicted on the millions of hardworking, innocent people who came to this country for decades under a system that welcomed them in with a wink. We needed their labor and their other contributions to the economy, but to change the law to bring them in more officially would have required our useless lawmakers to get off their asses for once and would have prevented American bosses from exploiting immigrant employees so easily.
The individuals who worked at my favorite burrito shop are good people. They didn’t deserve this. The local economy didn’t deserve this. I didn’t deserve to lose food I liked and a place I felt welcome. If you support what ICE is doing, I don’t care what you say your reasons for that are, because I know the real reason: you are a bad person who enjoys other people’s suffering. I see the real you, and so does everyone else.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].