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Introduction A Time to Think Broadly T he vitriol and hate rhetoric directed at undocumented immigrants in the United States is as palpable as ever: “They are lawbreakers!” “They take our jobs!” “They don’t learn English!” “They commit crimes!” “They run up costs of schools, medical care, and public services !” “We should place the military at the border!” “They should all be deported!” With this level of rancor, is it any wonder that the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country have become the victims of increased enforcement efforts?1 However, the stepped-up efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to round up undocumented immigrants in factories and neighborhoods has led to outcries by citizens and co-workers who have witnessed the operations. Allegations that ICE is using “Gestapo tactics” have become common. Residents decry the inhumane treatment to which their friends and neighbors have been subjected. Local business owners wonder why things have to be done this way. Consider the raid in Stillmore, Georgia, on the Friday before Labor Day weekend in 2006. Local residents were outraged over the action. Nestled amid pine trees and cotton fields, undocumented Mexican immigrants supplied a stable workforce for a thriving poultry industry and for the onion fields in Vidalia only a few miles away. Descending shortly before midnight, ICE agents arrested and deported 125 undocumented workers over a three-day period.2 Most of those captured by ICE were men, while their wives and children fled to the woods to hide.3 In the weeks after the raid, at least 200 more 2 Introduction immigrants left town. Many of the women whose husbands were deported used their spouses’ final paychecks to purchase bus tickets to Mexico.4 The impact was evident, underscoring just how vital the undocumented immigrants were to the local economy. Trailer parks were abandoned. The poultry plant scrambled to replace more than half of its workforce. Business dried up at stores where Mexican laborers had once lined up to buy groceries, household goods, and other living essentials. The former community of about a thousand people became a ghost town. Neighbors and friends witnessed the events, as ICE officials raided local homes and trailer parks. At one trailer park, operated by David Robinson, immigrants were taken away in handcuffs. Robinson, who bought an American flag and flew it upside down in protest, commented: “These people might not have American rights, but they’ve damn sure got human rights. There ain’t no reason to treat them like animals.”5 Officials were seen stopping motorists and breaking into homes, and there were even reports of officials threatening people with tear gas.6 Witnesses reported seeing ICE officials breaking windows and entering homes through floorboards.7 Mayor Marilyn Slater commented, “This reminds me of what I read about Nazi Germany, the Gestapo coming in and yanking people up.”8 When ICE agents raided several of Swift and Company’s meatpacking sites a few weeks after the Stillmore raid, about thirteen hundred undocumented workers—mostly from Mexico—were arrested. Swift and other large companies across the country have come to rely on migrant workers for their hard-to-fill jobs. Nationwide production was severely affected, prompting the following call for immigration reform from company officials: “The impact of this is so widespread. We’re being indirectly impacted—Main Street businesses and social services are all impacted. There has to be a better method.”9 In places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Richmond, California, ICE agents have arrested parents walking their children to school or waiting at public-school bus stops. These invasive neighborhood tactics have left communities in fear: Children are afraid to go to school, worried that their parents may be arrested. These enforcement strategies have left a trail of bewilderment and anger in the residents left behind, who wonder how this took place in a society that prides itself on its fairness and support of family values. Although the vast majority of Americans favor amnesty for undocumented immigrants,10 Congress has been mired in debate on the topic. In 2007, comprehensive efforts to reform immigration laws in the U.S. Senate were derailed by the perception that any path to legalization for undocumented immigrants would amount to “amnesty” for lawbreakers. More precisely, A Time to Think Broadly 3 enough senators—mostly right-wing Republicans—did not want to be perceived as supporting “amnesty for illegal immigrants” that a cloture motion requiring sixty senators was...

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