Flametoad

So there’s an article in the Houston Chronicle about an incident up the road in Dallas/Ft. Worth. Let me just quote the first few paragraphs.

IRVING – About 2,000 people demonstrated outside Irving City Hall on Wednesday night to demand an end to a police program that’s led to a high number of deportations.

Advocates are collecting information about cases where they say police are racially profiling people in order to stop them and verify their immigration paperwork. They asked the crowd to begin calling City Hall on Thursday to tell the mayor to stop the Criminal Alien Program.

Definitely take a moment to read the rest of the article , then come back here and explain to me just where these 2,000 idiots came from. Yes, I have written of my own first-hand knowledge about illegal immigration in the past.

I understand that racial profiling is a hot button for some people, but let’s just stop and think for a moment. People who are citizens or are legal aliens can go about their business. Those who are here illegally–and are identified after being arrested by police for breaking the law–are sent home. So where did these 2,000 people come from who think that this is a bad idea? If they don’t think deportation is a good idea, perhaps they can each be paired with a criminal alien to “sponsor”. Surely they didn’t spontaneously appear, so who organized the protest? Was it a matter of laziness, space restrictions, or incompetence that left that particular detail out of the article?

Edit: I see there’s a new AP article with a little more information about the source of the protests. I think the article could use a little more information to put things in perspective. That figure of 1,600 people tagged for deportation over the last year is pretty impressive. I wonder how that translates as a percentage of total people jailed there. Of Hispanics jailed there?

Also as a point of clarification, I don’t approve of randomly stopping anyone with brown skin and asking for their papers. Hispanics are part of the fabric of our Texas heritage. Many fought on the side of Texas during the war for Texas independence from Mexico and are just as American as anyone else. I recognize that it would thoroughly suck to be a 3rd generation American of Hispanic descent constantly, randomly stopped to prove that they belong here. That’s not what I’m advocating. However, I fully support a program that automatically deports people who have been arrested and jailed for other crimes (after justice has been served for the crime in question). I suspect that many people would be surprised that this isn’t standard procedure.