The meaning of words seems to have been the first casualty in our current battles over illegal immigration. Over the past few years, some large, but unknown, number of illegal immigrants (20 million?) entered the United States. Now that it’s time for them to return home, Democrats are fighting on every front to prevent that from happening.
To that end, Democrats and the media (I repeat myself) are looking high and low for the most sympathetic cases. The “Maryland man” gambit doesn’t seem to have panned out.
A new candidate has been nominated in the form of a two-year-old girl who accompanied her mother as her mother was returned to her native Honduras. Politico, among others, takes up the cause,
A federal judge is raising alarms that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” even as the child’s father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country.
What do words mean? We have now shifted from “due” process to “meaningful” process. It would seem that the meaning of “meaningful process” is whatever process produces the correct result, which would be the opposite of whatever “the Trump administration” would prefer.
And it’s not just Politico. in the past few hours, stories have appeared on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, the New York Times, The Times of India, and many others.
Court filings allege that the mother arrived at the local immigration office in New Orleans for a “routine check-in.” I’m guessing that I have a different definition of the word “routine.” Politico offers that,
The child, whose redacted U.S. birth certificate was filed in court and showed she was born in New Orleans in 2023.
Point of fact, there is no such thing as a “U.S. birth certificate.” Such documents are issued by states (or commonwealths). America is a group of states that got together to form a national government, not the other way around. And that’s not a trivial distinction.
Politico includes this curious detail in their account,
The petition was filed under the name of Trish Mack, who the lawyers indicated had been asked by V.M.L.’s [the girl’s] father to act as the child’s custodian and take her home from ICE custody.
Any reason why the father would be unavailable to take her home? [A reader points out that the UK Guardian has partially solved this mystery, reporting,
However, prosecutors said Villela [the mother], who has legal custody, told Ice that she wanted to retain custody of the girl and have her go with her to Honduras. They said the man claiming to be VML’s father had not presented himself to Ice despite requests to do so.
It wasn’t too many years ago when “family separation” was considered to be the worst possible crime against humanity that could be committed by a national government.
Then the Biden administration lost 320,000 unaccompanied illegal immigrant children and everyone just shrugged. Now we’ve come full circle and preventing family separation is the new outrage.
I can’t keep up.
