Back on July 27, I blogged and predicted the following:
The next strategy that will be employed by illegal immigrants and their advocates will be a play on sympathy exploiting children.
(Chicago Tribune reporter Richard) Olivo writes about 36-year old Nixon Munoz who came to Minnesota from El Salvador and married Sara, a shy Mexican woman whom he met while she was visiting on a tourist visa to attend a wedding. They were very happy, Olivo reports, until last month. Cue the attempt at sympathy.
That changed last month. Arriving from the grocery store with his children, Munoz said he saw his terrified wife handcuffed in front of their two-story stucco home. With the family in tears, she was taken away and, eventually, deported to Mexico, where she tries to continue to parent her five children through long-distance calls.
The couple's eldest daughter, Joanna Munoz, who turned 14 the day before her mother left, has stepped in as a mother figure. The hazel-eyed teen cooks, cleans and tries to comfort Edwin when he calls for his mother at night, sometimes in uncontrollable tantrums during which he hurls himself against walls.
"He still thinks my mom is visiting family," she said of her brother, unsure how all this will affect her dream of attending college and becoming a marine biologist.
The impact that such arrests and deportation have on the estimated 5 million children of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is troubling, said Randy Capps, a researcher at the Washington-based Urban Institute who has been studying the aftermath of raids in several states.
Many of these children are likely to grow up harboring resentment against law enforcement. Others will have psychological problems that stem from seeing their parents ripped from their lives, he said.
"If they stay in the country, they've been through this traumatic experience and will continue to be separated from their parents for some time," Capps said. "These are people that didn't choose to come over."
Isn’t it true that American prisons are filled with inmates who have children on the outside? Do we still not lock these criminals up?
About 26,500 illegal immigrants (are) imprisoned nationwide on a given day, according to a recent report by the federal Government Accountability Office.
Again, that’s not a bad thing.
The pro-illegal immigrant movement is poised to use children as their pawns.
Betty Reyes, 9, tries to shrug off the experience with jokes or one-word replies. Occasionally, however, the facade crumbles in tears and she will not let anyone answer a door knock, friends and family members said.
Her experience has inspired plans for a "children's march" in the neighborhood clustered near a row of Mexican restaurants and shops that began sprouting along the Lake Street business corridor in the 1990s.
"We're training the children now to become activists," said Mariano Espinoza, director of the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network. "They are going to take this movement to the next level."
Here’s hoping America doesn’t fall for this nonsense.
----From my blog, July 22, 2007
Not surprisingly, the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel editorial board fell for it. An editorial today entitled, “A little boy’s tears,” (of course) was basically a big sob job for children of illegal immigrants, citing the case of the deported Elvira Arellano.
The editorial had the sub-headline, “An 8-year-old boy is now without his mother — a reminder that we're talking about real families and real heartache as fallout from the lack of immigration reform.”
Far less sympathetic was commentator Ann Coulter. In a column on Townhall.com, Coulter wrote:
“……we were treated this week to a weeping Mexican woman on TV, claiming the U.S. government was tearing her from her infant son and saying she knew the American people would be outraged if she were deported. (I note that her message might have been more effective in English.)
Still, if Elvira Arellano is the best they've got to change public opinion on deporting illegal aliens, don't expect public opinion to change anytime soon.
Arellano has already snuck into the country illegally twice (that we know of). After being deported in 1999 -- under an administration that, astonishingly, was more serious about enforcing immigration law than the current one -- she illegally ran across the border again a few days later.
Only after 9/11 was she arrested again and convicted for using a stolen Social Security number to get a job as a cleaning woman at an airport. In lieu of jail time, Arellano was to be deported. Instead she took refuge in a left-wing "church" and began to bellyache about being thrown out again.
Despite living in this country illegally for a decade, Arellano hasn't mastered the most rudimentary English. She doesn't want to assimilate and become a "Mexican-American." She wants to be a Mexican-Mexican living in and off America.
So far, the only thing Arellano has contributed to America is one illegitimate child.”
Coulter concludes her piece with:
”Arellano can go, and take her kid with her.”
Read Coulter’s entire column.
Because liberal hearts bleed, watch for more of these tactics in the future, using children as pawns, just as I predicted.
Want proof? Look at this picture.
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