What was Wilber Rafael Garces Perez delivering that day? Panda Express? Papacitos? Something from Tamale House?
Whatever the case, he apparently needed killing for it.
But the Austin DoorDash driver didn’t die. Demerits are certain to ensue for the ICE agent who couldn’t bag his buck.
If you can’t deport ‘em, kill ‘em. Right, guys? Much quicker than trotting them before a judge. Saves gas, too.
Garces Perez’ attorney says he was here legally from Venezuela and had a work permit. You might not trust that. Seemingly, that’s what an immigration judge would, um, judge.
But, no, a so-far nameless ICE agent – a new recruit who conveniently wasn’t wearing his body camera – assumed the role with his pistol.
One more day, one more atrocity in a land where, presumably, a set of God-given rights is preeminent.
I wonder in Texas civics class if they discuss the fact that the Bill of Rights applies not only to citizens but to non-citizens: due process, free speech and religion, equal treatment under the law.
Key among those rights — a writ: a writ of habeas corpus. If the government holds someone, that person is due a court hearing.
At this president’s orders, ICE has crushed this requirement under its black tactical boot.
So doing, this marauding and lawless band has taken over our country like a demon, like a parasite, like a pathology. We have the remedy, the Constitution. College students where I teach were just handing out copies of it on Constitution Day.
This president, his shock troops and button-up lawyers ignore it at every turn.
Through February, courts had ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally under this callous regime. That doesn’t include those swept up onto transport planes and sent to foreign lands without hearings — more suited for Pinochet’s Chile or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq than for Lee Greenwood’s “land of the free.”
Under any other president, the disobedience of even one court order would be big news. And what is the punishment?
In January alone, ICE violated nearly 100 court orders in Minnesota’s federal district court.
Chief of that court, Patrick J. Schiltz, said something a judge should never need to express in this country: “ICE is not a law unto itself.”
Here’s the way our country handled deportations way back before masked quota hunters started roaming the streets targeting brown people:
Undocumented individuals could remain in their communities and keep their jobs awaiting a hearing and the opportunity to challenge deportation.
That sounds burdensome for courts. It never was. What’s ungainly is what happened in Minnesota, where the push to number-up in a manic deportation campaign clogged courts “to a near standstill,” reports The New York Times.
Due process. A divine writ. So said the founders.
In the first three months of this year, Minnesota’s federal courts fielded 1,116 writs of habeas corpus. The prior year during that same period: two.
It’s been clearly demonstrated that only a sliver of a sliver of those being deported are the murderers and rapists — the “worst of the worst” — trumpeted by career liars at the Department of Goonland Security.
No, they are delivery drivers, hotel maids, janitors, restaurant workers, roofers, increasingly critical farm workers.
I look at the man in the White House and his gold-digging family, mining riches from their connections, producing — what? Fear. Retribution. Vainglorious destruction. Unsupported war. Record high prices. More debt.
At least someone who changes the sheets on a hotel bed helps that business run smoothly, and with it an economy.
By contrast, our nation endures an outlaw force and a chief executive driven by what U.S. District Judge Fred Biery called a “perfidious lust for unbridled power.”
Write a song about that, Lee Greenwood.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
