A heart as cold as ICE

Finally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has found a way to start kicking out of the USA all those dreamers who benefited from the executive order DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) issued by the Obama administration on humanitarian grounds to those undocumented immigrants who entered the USA as minors, allowing them to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit. If President Obama had granted a presidential pardon to all the dreamers benefiting from DACA, giving them priority in the issuance of permanent residence cards, DACA would have become essentially obsolete, and Donald Trump with his fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric would not have had to deal with the issue at all. Trump would have been in a very comfortable position blaming President Obama for the granting of that presidential pardon, essentially an amnesty benefiting thousands of otherwise undocumented aliens.

However, Barack Obama took the decision of leaving Donald Trump a very hot potato, by merely not granting DACA beneficiaries a presidential pardon, leaving it up to Donald Trump to make a very hard political decision. Terminating DACA and ordering ICE to deport all those who benefited under DACA would no doubt have pleased many loyal followers of Donald Trump especially in the rural areas where poor uneducated white people live, and very specially those in fringe groups such as the Ku Klux Klan which right now is experiencing a revival, but it would have been most certainly political suicide, turning many Americans who symphatize with the DACA philosophy against President Trump. On the other hand, issuing an executive order which essentially anulls a previous executive order issued by a previous president would set a very bad precedent for a President Trump who so far has abused the executive order privilege by issuing a flurry of executive orders, all of which could be annulled by the president who comes after Donald Trump in case he decides to set such a precedent.

ICE had its hands tied while DACA beneficiaries thumbed their noses at Immigration agents, while Donald Trump was dumbfounded not knowing what to do over the DACA issue.

But finally, ICE came up with a way to kick out of the USA permanently all the DACA beneficiaries. The novel idea is very simple: in order to keep the privileges and rights afforded by DACA, the person must not leave and enter the USA without written permission; failure to do so brings the loss of DACA status. Thus, all that is required is to deport the DACA individual from the USA, arrest him if he tries to come back, and then claim that he left the USA voluntarily on his own losing his DACA status and losing it again by trying to re-enter illegaly. Presto! Mister Trump must have been very pleased with ICE.

The very first case where the new plan of action was set into motion was with Juan Manuel Montes Bojorquez, a young immigrant who had twice been granted protection from deportation under DACA. Iowa Congressman Steve King, a hardliner and firm supporter of Donald Trump on these issues, who supports vastly restricting the flow of immigration into the US and has a history of controversial statements about immigrants, cheered the action taken by ICE. “First non-valedictorian DREAMer deported. Border Patrol, this one's for you” US Representative King tweeted, with a link to the story and picture of a beverage.

The party at the White House didn't last long. Juan Manuel Montes, the first protected DREAMer to be deported following orders from President Trump, sued the Trump administration. And just by so doing, he exposed Donald Trump himself as a buffoon without any credibility when Trump said he was only going after the bad hombres. If Mexicans, as Donald Trump has always claimed, were “rapists, drug dealers and criminals”, then most of the dreamers would have been indeed bad hombres and most Americans would be cheering Donald Trump in keeping with his campaign promise. As it turns out, only a very small percentage of those deported by ICE are bad hombres. The vast majority of those who are being deported are cases that are turning out to be a major source of embarrassment not just for Donald Trump but for ICE itself, and each new statistic that comes out confirms it. This should come as no surprise, these things usually happen whenever an incompetent or a buffoon gets elected and becomes the ruler of a country.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, complying with the wishes of his master, defended the deportation of Juan Manuel Montes, praising ICE for a job well done. John Kelly had said on Tuesday April 18th that Juan Manuel Montes Bojorquez, 23, had failed in 2015 to renew his status to legally work and go to school in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But on Wednesday April 19th the agency in charge said a detailed records search found that Montes had renewed his status and was eligible through 2018, this is what the agency said. This proves there are times when the best thing to do is to put a shoe in your mouth feigning ignorance on the subject, just like the Three Wise Monkeys do.

Democrats in Congress immediately seized on the lawsuit, which claims that Montes was apprehended and sent to Mexico within three hours because he did not have his DACA paperwork on him. The lawsuit says that while in Mexico, Montes was assaulted and fearing his life, illegally crossed into the US again, where he was apprehended and detained before being removed once again to Mexico.

Complicating matters further, the same Judge whose Mexican heritage was denigrated by Donald Trump is set to hear the deportation case. Odds are that the judge will be in no mood to let Donald Trump testify as President in this case against Juan Manuel Montes.

Regardless of the outcome of the case, one thing is certain. If ICE keeps on detaining and deporting dreamers with tricks and ploys to circumvent DACA, it is only a matter of time before Congress opens up an inquiry, and heads begin to roll. Perhaps ICE agents should go back to what they were doing before the new boss took over, i.e. carrying out news making raids once in a while here and there that will catch the headlines but cleverly avoiding fiascoes such as the Postville raid that ended up bankrupting the local economy, going instead to the backstreet alleys of the skid rows to ask the floozies for documentation that will prove to the ICE agents that they are not in the country illegally and that they are American citizens instead of some happy hooker, carefully avoiding those big tax paying farms in California where thousands of Mexican undocumented farm workers are hard at work doing the lousy job of hand picking berries and chilies, a hard job that no one else in America wants to do, certainly none of the agents who work for ICE diligently hunting instead for illegal aliens in the backstreet alleys of the skid rows.

In the end, the only option left to Donald Trump in the handling of all the dreamers may be to simply ignore this issue for the rest of his administration and let them live their lives as Donald Trump tries to live his own. Trump already has enough problems with the current Congressional inquiries and FBI investigations now underway on the role Russia played in changing the outcome of the presidential election of 2016. Getting into more trouble at this point in time seems like a bad deal, a very very bad deal, a blunder not expected from the same guy who claims to have mastered the art of the deal to near perfection.