(This might as well have been a Letter to the Editor but since they never publish mine…)
The New York Times, in Nina Bernstein’s article Caught Between Parents and the Law, looks at National Fugitive Operations Program and seems barely able to keep the bile from spewing out. NFOP, a growing program in the Department of Homeland Security, is tasked with enforcing deportation orders on foreign nationals who refuse to voluntarily obey them. Bernstein’s piece focuses on one family, the Thakurs originally from Bangladesh. The father is in America legally but the mother was ordered to leave in 1997 (though appeals kept on through 2003) and she was detained by one the agency’s teams last fall and put on a plane home.
The article’s hook is that the couple’s two children (two and ten years old) were sent with the mother to her homeland but due to a paperwork snafu arrived in Bangladesh ten days before her with no adults to receive or care for them. The kids could have stayed in America–both are American citizens as they were born on US soil–but the father chose to send them since he didn’t feel capable of caring for them. I am not in any way suggesting this isn’t a sad situation which may potentially cause significant emotional harm to the Thakur children and family.
Contrary to the Times’ posturing, this is not our fault. Did the mother stay in the United States illegally, after having applied for legal residency and being denied, including a lengthy appeals process? Yes, and Mrs. Thakur does not dispute this. In a perfect, or slightly better, world the deportation arrangements would have been smoother but sadly we do not live in such a world and the federal government agents were not responsible for the children; if anything the kids should have stayed in New York an extra week or two, surely Dad could have managed them for 10 days, to allow Mom to arrive in Bangladesh and make living arrangements.
But, as I often repeat, there are people who benefit by promoting the interests of people in America illegally. So Ms. Bernstein devotes most of her limited print space to putting a human face on the issue through this family’s story, along with quotes from “an immigration lawyer with the Legal Aid Society” and “a law student and a recent intern with American Friends Service Committee, a charitable and advocacy group that has addressed the issue of immigrant detainees.” Only an unenthusiastic defense from a DHS official presents the other perspective and less than a sentence from the director of a group which favors restricting immigration. The author apparently could not find a single other person deported through this program to tell us about. Particularly not a person who meets the main criteria for the program’s targets, sexual predators and drug dealers.
Poor journalism, especially from a publication which prides itself on rising above charges of liberal media.
BillSaysThis 