Who could have guessed?

I'm shocked, shocked to find out that American citizens of hispanic dissent are being summarily rounded up and deported by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

Rashi Kesarwani at Pushback highlights this excerpt from a recent piece in The Nation,

CE has no jurisdiction over US citizens. If someone claims birth in the United States, as Pedro Guzman did, then ICE agents must have a “reasonable suspicion” for disbelief before detaining him. Racial profiling doesn’t count. “Not speaking English, not being white and appearing to be from a Central American country is not enough,” says Rebecca Musarra, of the Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic of Washington College of Law. In practice, ICE detains thousands of people who were born in the United States and forces them to prove citizenship. According to Mario Quiroz at Casa de Maryland, which assists low-income Latinos, “People who have Spanish names, are five-four, have black hair, get profiled. At the end of the day, [ICE] only says, “Oops, we made a mistake.” But somebody’s life was messed up.

Again we see evidence that in the hysteria whipped up by nativists like Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs reason, rationality and even the rule of law are all being thrown out the window. It can't be more clear that our current immigration policy and debate is being driven by irrational racial fear-mongering.

We need to put a stop to these made for TV raids where Hispanic citizens and immigrants are treated like cattle. Let's increase our focus on punishing the businesses that hire these immigrants and thus create the economic incentive for immigrants to cross the border illegally. Beyond that we need to do expedite the immigration process. Give people the opportunity to enter legally and remove the economic incentive to cross the border illegally. Those are common sense solutions to a public policy issue that has been consumed with hysterics and hyperbole.