It somehow never occurred to Maddow, Schumer, and Hochul that children living next door to a predator should be taken in for their own safety.
Late last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carried out a raid on a farm in a small upstate New York town, which resulted in the arrest of a South African immigrant suspected of disseminating child pornography.
The target of the raid, the exact kind of public safety threat the Trump administration vowed to prioritize in their deportation efforts, lived next door to three children, ages nine, 15, and 18, whose mother also worked on the farm.
The family, Guatemalan immigrants who entered the country illegally, were taken into custody and transported to a family residential center in Texas while ICE agents conducted an investigation to determine whether the children could serve as witnesses against the target of the raid and, more importantly, to determine whether they themselves had been victimized.
That reasonable act of due diligence led to an outpouring of hostility toward the Trump administration.
After being briefed on the situation by Border Czar Tom Homan, Governor Kathy Hochul released a statement saying that she “cannot think of any public safety justification for ICE agents to rip an innocent family, including a child in the third grade, from their Sackets Harbor home.”
“That is not the immigration enforcement promised to the American people. It’s just plain cruel. I want this family returned to New York State and believe ICE needs to immediately answer for these actions,” she said.
Really?
The governor can’t think of any reason to bring in for questioning children living with a single mother next door to a suspected child predator?
Hochul wasn’t alone in her outrage. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York released a statement announcing that he was “horrified” that the children had been “ripped away from their home.”
Schumer, like Hochul, neglected to mention the circumstances surrounding that home they were taken away from.
Jaime Cook, the principal of the Sackets Harbor school, sent a letter to families claiming that the students who were picked up by ICE merely “lived in a house on the same road as a home ICE had a warrant for.”
“The fact that ICE went door to door is unconscionable,” Cook wrote.
At no point does Cook mention that the raid targeted an alleged child predator.
She did claim in the letter to be in “direct communication” with the family and insists that the children are “‘not being medically evaluated.’ They are not being ‘questioned as potential victims.’”
Tom Homan, who is presumably more familiar with the conduct of a criminal investigation than Cook, explained why and where the children were being held in an interview with a local news station.
“ICE is doing everything by the book,” Homan said. “Once the investigation gets to the point where we don’t have an interest in this family, then a decision will be made on release.”
“Here’s what people need to understand. During investigations like that, we have to ensure that any children within that area are safe. There’s a process during these investigations where could these children- could that family be a material witness in this horrendous crime? Can they provide information and evidence in this crime? Were they victimized within this crime? So, the due diligence was done,” said Homan.
For some critics, like the New York Civil Liberties Union, it was the decision to transport the family to Texas, rather than keeping them in New York, that was objectionable.
But, according to ICE policy, decisions on where to house detained migrants are made based upon the type of facility most suited to the individuals, in this case a family with young children, and capacity levels across various facilities. Would the family really have been better off had ICE opted to house them in a more secure, prison-like facility in New York, like the Buffalo Processing Center, rather than in the Karnes County Civil Detention Center, an open-air facility specifically designed for low-risk, minimum security detainees?
Having been told by their elected representatives and school principal that their neighbors were kidnapped by federal agents, the good people of Sackets Harbor, population 1,400, understandably felt compelled to act. They organized a protest march on Saturday, complete with signs demanding that Homan, an upstate New York native who has a summer home in the town, return the children.
“Innocent Children Exploited,” read one sign, held by a woman who was apparently unaware that the agency she was smearing was literally engaged in an effort to prevent the exploitation of children when they carried out the relevant raid.
The protest caught the attention of Rachel Maddow producers who ran a glowing segment praising the townspeople and lambasting ICE for acting so cruelly. At no point during the segment does Maddow explain that the family was taken into custody as part of the investigation into an accused child predator, she merely tells viewers that federal agents “took” the family and deposited them in “some kind of immigration jail.”
With the investigation completed, the family was returned to Sackets Harbor earlier this week.
Maddow rejoiced in the news with her viewers, connecting the family’s release to the protest.
“If only we all lived in places where people were willing to come out and show up and make themselves heard for us when we needed help. Oh wait, we do!”
It somehow never occurred to Maddow, nor to any of the administration’s other critics, that the children living next door to the child porn purveyor may have needed help from law enforcement.