Immigration enforcement is turned into a cruelty Olympics

When my father was crossing the U.S.-Mexico border like an undocumented Road Runner back in the 1970s, la migra caught him more than a few times.

- GUSTAVO ARELLANO COLUMNIST

FEDERAL agents patrol the halls of immigration court last month in New York.

They chased him and his friends through factories in Los Angeles and across the hills that separate Tijuana and San Diego. He was tackled and handcuffed and hauled off in cars, trucks and vans. Sometimes, Papi and his pals were dropped off at the border checkpoint in San Ysidro and ordered to walk back into Mexico. Other times, he was packed into grimy cells with other men.

But there was no anger or terror in his voice when I asked him recently how la migra treated him whenever they'd catch him.

“Like humans,” he said.

“They had a job to do, and they knew why we mojados were coming here, so they knew they would see us again. So why make it difficult for both of us?”

His most vivid memory was the time a guard in El Centro gave him extra food because he thought my dad was a bit too skinny.

There's never a pretty way to deport someone. But there’s always a less indecent, a less callous, a less ugly way.

The Trump presidency has amply proved he has no interest in skirting meanness and cruelty.

"The way they treat immigrants now is a disgrace," Papi said. "Like animals. It's sad. It's ugly. It needs to stop." I talked to him a few days after a gunman fired on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas, killing a detainee and striking two others before killing himself. One of the other wounded detainees, an immigrant from Mexico, died days later.

Instead of expressing sympathy for the deceased, the Trump administration initially offered one giant shrug.

What passed for empathy was Vice President JD Vance telling reporters, "Look, just because we don't support illegal aliens, we don't want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence" while blaming the attack on Democrats.