Last night Elvira Arellano, who has been living and working in this country as a janitor since 1997, was arrested by ICE and immediately deported to Mexico. There are a lot of facts that should make this a cause celebre, including that Arellano had taken sanctuary in a Chicago church for about a year, was planning to take part in immigrant rights marches and possibly testify before Congress, and was arrested and taken away in the presence of her eight-year-old US citizen son, Saul. (Among other things, it gives the lie to right wing hatemongers like Colorado's Peter Boyles and his disinformation about "anchor babies.")
Was the government legally entitled to deport her? Sure. She defied a deportation order when she took sanctuary last year, and she knew when she left the Chicago church that she could be deported. It has even been suggested that she planned to be deported as a way of attracting attention to the injustice of the US government's immigration policy and its effect on families. That's in the finest tradition of civil disobedience.
Here's just a small sample of the message Elvira was fighting to have heard:
It's wrong to split up families. I'm fighting for my son, not for myself. It's a matter of principle. I don't want him treated like garbage. . . . I am a mom and a worker. I am not a terrorist.
[Source: Time]
For more than two decades the government accepted our cheap labour, our taxes, our social security payments, but oh no, they didn't want to legalise us.
[Source: Guardian UK]
All of us in the blogosphere who stand with the undocumented in the greatest civil rights struggle of our generation should make sure this message is not lost in the noise of the right wing hate machine.