TailOverTeaKettle.com

You may have heard about the illegal immigration roundup that happened in Stillmore, GA in September. After rampant use of fraudlent documents by workers at the Crider poultry plant, Immigration and Customs enforcement swept in (of course after multiple warnings) and still managed to arrest 125 illegal immigrants.

Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center staged a tearjerking photo op in Atlanta, posing a 15 year old girl for reporters. According to the WXIA, Marie Justeen Mancha and five others are suiting the federal government. “The lawsuit asks for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, and for a court order stopping the government from conducting similar raids from now on.”

Was Marie unjustly arrested? No. She’s a U.S. citizen. And didn’t like being questioned when the ICE conducted the raid.

But she looks, she says, like her Mexican ancestors; and her name reflects and honors her heritage– Marie Justeen Mancha. And Justeen stood outside the Russell Federal Building on Wednesday with her U.S.-born mother and a lot of others, to say how, one morning in September, as she was getting ready for school, her life changed. Her faith in her government– shaken.

Federal immigration agents, she said, raided her home, without a warrant.

“And one was holding a gun,” Justeen said. “And that really scared me. And they were screaming, ‘Illegals,’ and ‘Mexicans,’ and stuff like that. And they asked me if I was illegal, and I said, ‘No.’”

Mind you, right after the raids the terms “Nazi Germany” and “Gestapo” got thrown around because ICE dared to look for these people who were blatantly violating the law.

Also a party to the suit is David Robinson. He claims that his rental property was damaged during the raid, and that he had no way to check the immigration status of his renters. That’s fine. But when the raid originally took place it was Mr. Robinson who posed for photographs with an American flag flying inverted.

ICE says that it only went to places where names and addresses indicated possible violators. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last about the reasons why Miss Mancha was questioned. How dare someone ask someone of Mexican heritage if they are illegal if they are co-located with other illegal immigrants? What’s next, asking someone of Swedish descent if they have a proper passport just because they are trying to enter the country? Where will it stop?

Because a small number of citizens were involved, this is now considered ‘profiling’. I know they are trying to reach into the minds of the ICE agents and extract racist motives for their raids… but instead they might be forced to face the fact that months of work went into figuring out who was gaming the system.

Says the ICE:

In September 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents lawfully arrested more than 125 illegal aliens in southeast Georgia as part of a months-long investigation of individuals who used fraudulent documents to illegally gain employment at a local poultry plant.

These enforcement actions were conducted in accordance with constitutional principals that govern all law enforcement activities in the United States. Factors such as race or ethnicity played no role in the enforcement actions. ICE agents made these arrests based on specific information they had developed on the names and addresses of individual immigration violators in these locations. As they carried out these targeted arrests, ICE agents encountered other illegal aliens who they arrested.

All those arrested were in violation of federal immigration laws and were afforded the opportunity to appear before an impartial Immigration Judge. In cases where pressing humanitarian concerns were identified, ICE used its discretion to allow the alien to appear in court at a later date.

ICE takes seriously any allegations of wrongdoing by its employees and its Office of Professional Responsibility thoroughly investigates such allegations. ICE plans to review the lawsuit carefully.