Time Magazine had yet another article out this week about the plight of the “undocumented community” (meaning illegal immigrants) and how terrible things have been ever since President Trump took office. It seems like they come up with a different angle every few days to try to generate sympathy for those who cross our borders in violation of the law and push the narrative that the new White House administration is a heartless pit of blackness on par with Mordor. This week’s message is a poorly documented “record” of how fears of deportation are causing some victims of domestic abuse to not report the crimes of their attackers out of fear of ICE finding out. Of course, no names or numbers are provided beyond a generalized dip in the total number of reports in particular areas.
Since President Trump took office, the hotlines of the Tahirih Justice Center in Houston, which advocates for victims of sexual and domestic violence, have been inundated with calls.
But the women and men reaching out aren’t just reporting instances of abuse. Executive Director Anne Chandler says callers queries center on one of Trump’s biggest domestic priorities: immigration. During routine screening calls, those seeking help—from sex trafficking victims to those escaping abuse—have asked lawyers if they will report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“One caller that I was handling—I was simply just trying to coordinate follow up with that client and explaining that I wasn’t going to get to her matter for another week,” Chandler recalls. “She paused and said ‘Are you going to report me to ICE?’ In the past 19 years, I haven’t had a caller ask me at the end of a conversation. The community is scared.”
The article goes on at length with other anecdotal evidence being offered, mixed in with plenty of quotes from “victims’ advocates” without ever once making note of the fact that few illegal aliens not wanted for other, more serious crimes actually wind up getting deported. We simply don’t have the resources to process everyone in the country illegally. (At least not yet.)
The focus, of course, remains firmly on women who are suffering abuse at the hands of their domestic partners. You can sense the concern of the authors in every paragraph. But there’s one other thing they don’t seem to be aware of, or at least don’t care to mention. Some of their cohorts in the effort to #RESIST! Trump by thwarting immigration enforcement have come up with some rather unusual views on just how serious domestic violence is. Anyone remember this story out of Denver last week?
In case you don’t, allow me to refresh your memory. The City of Denver was also worried about the mean old people from ICE and DHS deporting immigrants (generally ones with green cards in this case) who had been arrested for other crimes. If anyone receives a sentence of one year or more on a wide range of charges they are automatically reported to ICE and can have their paperwork cancelled and be processed for deportation. So the geniuses in Denver decided to take a number of “minor offenses” and reduce the maximum sentence on them to under a year so they could be classified as petty crimes.
The city’s solution? Simply take a bunch of those relatively petty offenses and reduce the maximum penalty to less than 365 days. Just like that, the move takes the crimes (and their perpetrators) off the radar of immigration authorities.
It’s not a novel approach to protecting immigrants, but coming as a direct response to President Trump’s crackdown, it’s particularly timely.
So what qualified as “relatively petty offenses” in this grand solution? You guessed it. Assault and “first or second instances of domestic violence.” So if we combine the complaints coming out of today’s story with the one in Denver, those female illegal immigrants are in really rough shape. They don’t want to call for help because they fear they might be deported, but if they do call for help, the government won’t take them seriously because domestic abuse is no big deal.
And all of these directly opposing efforts are being done to make it harder for ICE to do their jobs and enforce the law. This is some first rate schizophrenia on display here (a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception). You claim you want to help these illegal immigrants, but you seem to be doing them even more harm. Perhaps you’re really not trying to help anyone and are instead simply trying to score cheap points against the Trump administration? Admittedly, that’s just a guess.
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