As Blog for Arizona Editor Larry Bodine reported yesterday, DACA recipient Karla Toldeo, who was wrongly detained for almost a week by Trump’s Gestapo-ICE agents last month, received a favorable ruling from the courts, where the immigration judge presiding over her case dismissed the deportation case against her.
Reacting happily to the ruling, Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva, who took up Toldeo’s case within hours of her detention, posted a video on Instagram, saying:
“This morning, the removal proceedings against Karla Toledo were dismissed. Karla is a DACA recipient with no criminal history, who was brought to the U.S. when she was just one year old. A couple of weeks ago, masked ICE agents stormed into her home without a judicial warrant, traumatized her family, and tried to smear her name.
While I’m very happy for Karla and her family, ICE must be held accountable. The Trump administration is actively targeting people like her, tearing families apart and terrorizing our communities. We should be standing with DREAMers and providing them with a pathway to citizenship, not treating them as targets.”
Grijalva expanded her position in an official press release, writing:
“While I am very happy for Karla and her family, they should have never had to go through this incredibly traumatic ordeal. No one should have the sanctity of their home violated by masked agents storming in without a judicial warrant. ICE must be held accountable for their actions, as well as for their smear campaign against Karla following her detainment.
“Karla’s case underscores the cruelty of this administration’s mass deportation agenda, which is now targeting DACA recipients. She has lived in this country since she was one year old and has dedicated herself to serving our community – helping recruit healthcare workers, serving on local boards, and volunteering her time to improve the place she calls home. We should be providing DREAMers like Karla with a clear pathway to citizenship. Instead, this administration is terrorizing our communities, separating families, and targeting people who have spent their lives contributing to the only country they have ever called home.”
While what happened to Karla Toldeo in court yesterday is welcome news, many innocent people residing in the Grand Canyon State, including children, are suffering in reported poor conditions as victims in Donald Trump’s concentration camps, many operated by private prison donors to the aspiring Duce, in Arizona and across America.
These include leukemia-stricken Arbella Yaddy Rodriguez Marquez, a constituent of Representative Yassamin Ansari, who has been languishing in the Eloy Detention Center, with no release date in sight.
Why is Marquez still being held?
She is not a violent criminal, and she needs better medical attention than what she is reportedly receiving at the Eloy Detention Center.
Then there is the case of Dilan Manay Paredes, an eighth-grade student from Cecil Shamley School in the Tempe Elementary School District, who was detained along with his mother and sent to the Dilley Detention Center in Texas a day after his birthday and two days before his middle school promotion.
Suffice it to say, many of the Shamley School community were royally pissed off when they heard what had happened to Paredes and protested for his release.
Neither he, Marquez, nor the great majority of the people being detained in Trump’s Concentration Camps are the violent criminals the regime said they were going after.
Commenting on the plight of Paredes and his mother, Representative Greg Stanton said:
“My office is aware that a Tempe parent and student were detained by ICE and are currently being transported to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. We are in contact with school and local officials, and my team is working urgently to reach the family.
I just returned from a visit to Dilley yesterday, where I met with families in similar circumstances. What I saw there was heartbreaking, and this case reflects the same outrageous, misguided priorities under Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
This family should be home tonight, celebrating their son’s 8th-grade promotion, not in federal detention hundreds of miles away.“
Speaking to The Arizona Republic, Representative Stanton said that Parede’s mother had not been guilty of any criminal behavior at the time of her detention, saying the situation she was placed in thanks to Trump’s ICE agents:
“…A desperate situation of having to decide whether to bring her son along with her to detention…This is such a special time in a child’s life. The excitement of being with these fellow students that he’s grown up with for the last few years in the school, getting ready for high school and now he’s traumatized and the fellow students are traumatized… No matter any circumstances, ICE knows that this kid’s an eighth grader. ICE knows it’s time of graduation. There’s no exigent circumstances that this kid has to be detained at that moment. Just let the kid go through his graduation and have some sense of happiness at this incredibly important time in his life.”
Arizona Democratic State Senator Lauren Kuby, responding to the detention and Stanton’s attempts to intercede on the familiy’s behalf, wrote:
“Thank you, Congressman! This is heartbreaking news. We need to get mom and son home to Tempe. His classmates and his school community are reeling.”
Representative Ansari, who, along with Grijalva and Stanton, has been a tireless advocate for the assistance of these people, the great majority of whom are wrongly detained in these horrid conditions, offered her thoughts on what happened to Dilan Manay Paredes and his mother:
“I’m sickened that a Tempe student and their parent were violently detained by ICE and taken to a detention center in Texas just before his 8th grade promotion.
Terrorizing a child, ripping them from their community, and forcing them into detention is beyond cruel. It is inhumane and disgraceful. This is exactly the kind of fear and trauma we have continued to see under Trump’s mass detention policies. I stand fully with Rep. Stanton and support every effort to bring this family home to Arizona where they belong.”
The people who are doing Donald Trump’s bidding as America’s Gestapo, with these repressive immigration policies and their criminal conduct in these concentration camps need to be reminded that their Duce will not be in the Oval Office forever, and the pendulum of justice will swing their way, and many of them will be the ones detained and imprisoned, but, in their case, for actual crimes against humanity.
And if they think their White Nationalist Dear Leader is going to pardon all of them before he leaves office, they should think again and remember that he does not even know their names or that they exist.
They should reassess what they are doing while the clock is still ticking on them and decide whether they want to be remembered as human beings who saw the light or thoughtless, thuggish animals.
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