Every day, I hear something that makes me cringe on what we are being forced to accept.
Marcos Villanueva testified against his young daughter’s molester in an effort to get a restraining order against him. According to the victim’s family, the man who allegedly molested the young girl retaliated against the family by calling ICE on the father.
Soon after his appearance in court, where he was consoling his daughter at breakfast, ICE agents pounced and dragged him away in front of his family.
"I was left without a husband, from one minute to the next, and I didn't even know who took him," Villanueva's wife, Jenie Villalvir, told KTLA.
Marcos Villanueva is a hard-working man with no criminal record whatsoever. He can no longer protect his daughter from this monster, who lives just two doors down. He is in jail, the daughter’s alleged abuser isn’t.
If you think the family’s nightmare couldn’t get worse, it did.
Marcos was scheduled to be deported last week to Honduras, where attorney Willard Bakeman said he would likely be kidnapped and killed. The entire reason they fled to the U.S. from Honduras was that Marcos witnessed a friend's murder.
His attorney and wife said he was scheduled to be deported last week, and both thought he had been. Thankfully, a sane US District Court judge granted him an emergency stay to give him an opportunity to appeal his case. (If the GOP holds the Senate, you can expect less of these kinds of judges as they are rapidly being replaced.)
Trump campaigned on going after “criminal" immigrants. Yet since Trump has taken office, the immigration raids against non-criminal immigrants have skyrocketed. ICE agents aren't targeting the criminals, they are targeting the victims.
Victims are easier to capture than criminals because they are vulnerable, have jobs, and try to stay with their families. Yet to Trump and his mentally deficient supporters, there is no difference between an “MS-13" gang member and a grieving victim, so why make any distinction? Trump has managed to turn an entire government agency into his personal Gestapo.
I doubt he would be moved by this young girl’s plight. After all, she is everything he hates: brown, immigrant, female, and a victim of sexual assault.
I thought we hit rock bottom with throwing kids in cages. I guess we’ll see how far down the rabbit hole we are willing to go before we decide we’ve had enough.