If the shoe was on the other foot!

I wonder what people would say if the Government randomly started rounding up in mass, and detaining people, US Citizens for various crimes of poverty, or being the wrong color, having the wrong ancestry, being blue collar, instead of being a doctor or a lawyer.

I wonder what their panic and fury would be like. Here you are going about your life, trying to make it, trying to survive, but because you were deemed unworthy, or somehow below the mark, you and your family become a target.

The Government sends agents to your house, breaking down your door, or using other means to apprehend the less desirable among you. You have no time to think or process what is happening as your loved one is handcuffed and marched out of the door.

Because it’s a federal issue, you don’t know where they will end up. You don’t know what to do or where to go. Because of your economic standing, you don’t have the means to get a lawyer, you are stuck.

Your bread winner is gone. Who will pay the rent? Who will buy food? What are you going to do?

You learn you have a choice. You can join your family member, of course that often means living in conditions that are violent, or that are more poverty than you can ever comprehend, but hey, you have choices.

Your fellow Americans are applauding what’s happening to you, they want more of it. They want to see more families suffer like yours. They find themselves a spokes person. Someone who will stand out and loud, talking about your family, calling them names, vilifying them, never having known them.

You will be stereo-typed, you will lose friends, you will lose family members because they will say this is your fault. You failed to marry someone better, someone with more opportunity, someone more worthy.

Your loved one will be called names like criminal. Rapist. Drug dealer. A public and very open platform will emerge. Making you cower when you walk in a room.

You’ll try to fight the case against your loved ones. Sinking more money than you have, just for a chance to get to stay together, but even that is hit and miss. There is no real way to fix it, and your friends and neighbors are silent. They say they care, they say they have your back, but when it comes down to it, they remain silent.

You’re an American Citizen and you can’t fathom this happening to you. Not here. Not in the USA. Not in the land of the free, home of the brave. We don’t do that to people.

Or do we?

The mayhem that would present itself if the Government started going door to door, checking papers, in this case employment and college degrees, ripping apart families who otherwise didn’t make the cut. I wonder how you would feel.

I wonder if your lack of opportunity, became your detainment, how you would feel. I wonder how American Citizens would feel if their loved ones, also citizens were incarcerated. I wonder how they would feel if their children, even infants, were locked behind bars. What if they shipped your love one out of the country with nothing more than the clothes on their back?

Yet, those same people, the people who would never tolerate their families being torn apart over economic issues, are very much willing to destroy mine, and countless others.

We should know better. We should know that one thing leads to another and when you allow the Government to deprive me from my family, your opening the door to them doing something worse to you later on. You’re giving them the go ahead to eliminate the “undesirables” the “less than worthy.”

It is OK to take from me, but I am pretty sure, you wouldn’t sit back silently and allow the same treatment.

Immigrant families, which includes people like me, US Citizens, live with this fear everyday. They are getting knocks on their door that rip their families apart. They are living in detentions with babies, in conditions better than the average animal shelter. But this is encouraged and applauded.

I don’t understand where we have come as a country when this type of thing is acceptable. I completely get it that we have an immigration issue in this country, but it’s not an issue of lawbreakers or moochers as some would suggest. It’s a policy issue that wedges families into a gridlock where they are unable to satisfy the requirements of the Government without assured family separation.

You wouldn’t accept it for your family, so why do you accept it for ours? Every action has a consequence. Rather good or bad, there is a consequence. Our current immigration policy isn’t just or fair.

Families are being separated, their only crime being that of illegal presence. Meanwhile we have immigrants here who should go, but are ignored by ICE. Case in point San Fransisco. If that doesn’t tell you the policy is flawed I don’t know what will.

Think. Vote.