Imagine you’re a 10-year-old in school and an immigration officer, with a badge, uniform, bullet-proof vest and all, comes into your school and removes your friend. And you witness it.
Of course, it’s terrible for your friend, who may have been undocumented. But it’s a horror for every other kid in the school too, the kind of image that sticks and causes who-knows-what kind of trauma short- and long-term.
But Douglas County Commissioner George Teal wants to allow agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to grab kids from schools in Douglas County — and presumably anywhere else.
Asked by a commenter on Facebook to confirm “whether or not the commissioners would support ICE coming into schools and removing children,” Teal replied, “If needed, yes. Confirmed. But why go into schools when they can just go into our jails?”
A commenter then wrote that “children should not be deported.”
Teal wrote, “But if their parents are deported, they should be separated from their parents?”
I guess that’s Teal’s idea of compassion: to snatch undocumented kids, who may not know any other place but Douglas County as their home, from their schools.
Then ICE can detain them or their parents without determining whether the kid or the parents are guilty of any crime.
Under a new immigration law signed by President Donald Trump this week, ICE can detain certain immigrants for months or years simply based on an accusation or false arrest. No conviction is needed.
The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition was likely looking at heartless people like Teal when it issued a news release this week, stating, “We call on local leaders, elected officials, and all Coloradans to reject these harmful measures and attempts to vilify and criminalize our immigrant community and stand firm in support of policies that reflect our shared values of safety, justice, and opportunity for all like a path to citizenship for the immigrants who call the U.S. and Colorado home.”
To get to a place where he can understand what the CIRC is saying, Teal needs to put himself in the shoes of the kid he wants to let ICE agents arrest in elementary school.
Teal was a kid once, too. Even he can get there.
