By Ann Schweers | Fountain Hills
Masked, unidentified thugs are routinely snatching people off the streets and from their work, homes, schools, even churches without probable cause other than the color of their skin and the assumption that they just may be undocumented. Unconstitutional and totally outrageous!
In many instances, citizens have been swept up and roughly detained until they could prove their citizenship. Long-term employed, tax-paying residents, an integral part of their communities with jobs and families, have been arrested and sent to detention centers. Children have been picked up at their schools and fathers forced out of their cars in front of their children, even going so far as to break the windows to do so. This isn’t how our country handles things. Everyone’s innocent until proven guilty.
The last straw for me was when a small-statured 30-year resident with no criminal record was violently arrested while doing his landscaping job, by four very large, supposed ICE agents (wearing masks and no badges, uniforms or IDs). They pinned him on the ground, hitting him multiple times around the head and body as he screamed. This man, the father of three Marines, should be immune from deportation due to his sons’ contributions plus his many years of working and paying taxes.
And an 18-year-old student, brought here at age seven, about to graduate, was arrested on his way to volleyball practice. How do any of these arrests make us safer? Is the very abusive behavior, caught on camera, acceptable for ICE agents? Is there no oversight or training? Have we already become a police state where might makes right and no warrant or probable cause are necessary? Brown-skinned people now live in fear without protected freedoms or rights.
This doesn’t make us great. It makes us just another brutal dictatorship.
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