I don’t know how to write about this, but I’m going to try anyway.
I’ve been following the discussion on immigration for over a year, and there are a lot of complexities to it and a lot of back story.
But this story is so terrible that I don’t think you need to know all the details of the law or intricacies of how we got to where we are in the United States as far as our broken immigration policies are concerned.
This story is about an essay written by Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, who was present at the ICE raid in Postville, Iowa.
I found out about this essay in a circuitous way. I first read the entire essay at The Sanctuary where Duke had it up in its entirety. Immediately after reading it, I rebooted the essay and found he had removed it … turns out Dr. Camayd-Freixas had asked him to refrain from posting it after finding that the New York Times was going to do a front page story on it. Duke and other pro-migrant bloggers complied. Now that the story has been published, the essay is once again up at The Sanctuary.
Today I read the story in the New York Times which, of course, was heavily edited due to space concerns and as a result, the true impact of what happened was highly muted, though it was still an incredibly terrible story.
Dr. Camayd-Freixas was called to Postville to interpret but was not initially told why or what was going to happen. The ICE, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, had planned this raid on Agriprocessors, Inc. for a long time in utter secrecy.