ICE Was Looking For Someone Else. These Parents Of Six Died Fleeing From Them.

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Two undocumented farmworkers died in a crash yesterday after fleeing a traffic stop by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Kern County, California. Santos Hilario Garcia, 35, and Marcelina Garcia Profecto, 33, were killed when their SUV drifted off the road, lost control, and crashed into a telephone pole in the city of Delano. The couple had six kids, the oldest 18 and the youngest eight years old. The LA Times reports, 

According to ICE, Hilario was not the person the agency was looking for, though he matched the target's description.

ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley said late Wednesday that deportation officers arrived at the home and saw a man get into a car. When they stopped the car and tried to contact the driver, the driver sped off, she said. Officers later came across the overturned vehicle and called local authorities.

The couple had been in the US since 2003; Hilario had been convicted of DUI in 2014 and had also been returned "voluntarily" to Mexico three times between 2008 and 2017, according to Haley. So he was obviously one of those dangerous criminal aliens Donald Trump promised to get rid of, because as anyone knows, a single drunk driving conviction and several illegal border crossings almost certainly would have led him to become a serial rapist and murderer.

Get ready for the usual defenders of the New Cruelty to insist they got what they deserved, because they were illegal after all, and they should have just let ICE pull them over and deport them. And now that the surviving children have come to ICE's attention, they'll probably deport any of the kids not born in the US, too. The only tragedy here, we'll hear from the deport-'em-all crowd, is that the 14th Amendment won't let ICE get rid of the couple's children born here, too. Just think of all the jobs picking crops that would have created for Americans who don't want those jobs.

United Farm Workers president Arturo Rodriguez blamed "these aggressive actions by ICE" for leaving the six children without parents; a climate of fear has been growing among migrant workers since an immigration sweep earlier this month targeted about a thousand people, of whom ICE arrested 232 statewide. ICE has been emphasizing what terrible monsters the arrestees are, but see if you notice anything cute in how ICE describes the people it scooped up:

Of those arrested, 180 were either convicted criminals, had been issued a final order of removal or had been previously removed from the United States and returned illegally, ICE authorities said. One hundred fifteen had prior felony convictions for serious offenses — such as child sex crimes, weapons charges and assault — or had past convictions for significant or multiple misdemeanors, ICE said.

Convicted child rapists and assaulters! And also repeat border crossers and people with several misdemeanors. How many, exactly, in those rather different categories? Who cares, because convicted child rapists! No, we're not defending the genuinely bad people, just pointing out that's a hell of a creative way to lie with numbers. Good propaganda, ICE!

In addition to the big immigration raid, the migrant farmworker community has been edgy thanks to ICE's aggressive use of traffic stops according to the ACLU of Southern California. In a statement released after Tuesday's crash, the ACLU said it had

received numerous reports from Kern County and other parts of the Central Valley of ICE staking out the roads farmworkers travel to get to work and pulling them over during early morning hours without any lawful basis, resulting in numerous unlawful arrests of residents.

No "lawful basis"? They're Messican, aren't they? Jennie Pasquarella, the group's director of immigrants' rights, said it was common for ICE agents to use unmarked vehicles for traffic stops, which leads many farmworkers to assume they're just being pulled over by local police. You can bet Donald Trump will like that one, and may even recommend ICE remove identification from all its vehicles. And maybe start covering their faces, too, to strike the fear of God into those animals.

"This incident demonstrates just how dangerous ICE's unlawful practices are to our communities," Pasquarella said. "This horrible tragedy is the direct result of ICE's inhumane tactics and the fear it provokes in hardworking people who stand to lose everything if they are deported."

Yes, yes, but don't these hardworking people understand that they aren't even people because they crossed the border illegally? You can find no shortage of American Patriots on Twitter who happen to know illegal immigrants have no rights at all, and that every member of the ACLU should probably also be rounded up for defending criminals, too.

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