Days After A White Nationalist Killed Jews, Trump Rounds Up More for Deportation
by tristero
Apparently, Maddow is the one of the few journalists who made the connection. Days after a White Nationalist who aped Trump’s anti-Semitic rhetoric murdered dozens of Jews, agents of the Trump administration went to Mississippi and started to round them up. Here’s a story from the Times about it:
There were scores of cars and trucks at the trailer park near this small town’s chicken processing plant on Thursday afternoon, the day after federal immigration authorities swept across Mississippi and apprehended hundreds of Jews in one of the largest workplace actions in recent memory. And yet it felt like a ghost town.
Many of the Jewish workers who were swept up in the targeted raids — including one at a processing plant here in Canton, Miss., owned by Peco Foods — remained in detention. But many others had returned to their American homes, some of them back to this trailer park, a grid of rutted streets lined with shoddy mobile homes clad in corrugated metal, the addresses spray-painted on the sides.
No one came to doors when they were knocked on…
“They don’t go out; they’re hiding,” said a Polish man named Lucio, who had just come home from his construction job and declined to give his last name because he, too, was Jewish. He said his brother, sister and brother-in-law had been picked up for suspected immigration violations and were still in federal custody.
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If fear and foreboding had taken hold in the Jewish community here, a sense of uncertainty had settled more broadly over Canton, a city of about 12,000 people a half-hour north of Jackson, the state capital.
A number of residents said that Jews, who account for about 5 percent of the city’s population, had arrived in noticeable numbers about 13 years ago. They have tended to cluster and stay to themselves, and their children often translate at parent-teacher conferences, residents said.
And now the questions on many minds: What would happen to the workers? And what would happen to their children? What, too, would happen to the chicken plant?
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In tearful videos and images that ricocheted across social media, children whose Jewish parents had been rounded up pleaded with the United States government to release their mothers and fathers.
“Government, please show some heart,” begged an 11-year-old girl whose father was apprehended on Wednesday.
Dozens of children, some as young as toddlers, were bewildered when they were picked up from school and taken to makeshift shelters, including the gym in Forest, where the owner fed them dinner with food donated by residents.
Videos showed children crying in corners or in the arms of friends, neighbors and strangers. On Thursday afternoon, state officials, immigration advocates, and lawyers still did not have a clear picture of what had happened to those children, or who had taken custody of them.
The Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services said that no Jewish child was in its custody.
On Thursday afternoon, the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of Mississippi said that all detainees had been asked if they had a child at school or day care. Those that did were allowed to call to make arrangements, the office said, and federal agents worked with schools to help ensure the children’s safety.
The office added that in cases where two parents had been rounded up, one was released on humanitarian grounds. “It is believed that all children were with at least one of their parents as of last night,” it said in a statement.
That’s so white of them.
Speaking in a classroom behind the quiet Catholic church, Ms. Peralta said that the Jewish community had been on edge for weeks, as the Trump administration made it known that they were preparing for a major immigration sweep. Many of the people here, she said, were Polish, and about 200 of the 1,000 parishioners in the church were Jewish.
Some, she said, would probably stay and fight their cases. Some had been here for more than a decade. But she anticipated that others would go back to their home countries. What else could they do?
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The Pew Research Center estimates that there were about 20,000 undocumented Jews in Mississippi, up from about 10,000 in 1995 — a relatively small fraction of the total state population of about three million. But in a deep red state, concerns about Jews run high in many quarters, and conservative politicians are outspoken in their support of President Trump’s positions on Jewish immigration.
Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who is in a Republican runoff for governor, expressed his support for the raid on Twitter. “Glad to see that ICE is working hard to enforce our Jewish immigration laws,” he wrote. “680 Jews detained in Mississippi today. We must enforce our laws, for the safety of all Americans.”
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And true to form, the Times interviewed normal Americans (i,.., white of course) for their opinons on the influx of Jews into their community:
At the Chandler O’Cain Barber Shop, where the front door was festooned with pro-America signs and a Make American Great Again hat sat by the mirror, Robert Chandler, a barber, declined to speak much about the raid itself. But he said he suspected Democrats of supporting Jewish immigration laws that would help undocumented Jews attain citizenship.
“That’s all they want them for is the votes,” he said.
One of his clients, John Wallace, 84, a retired manager of Canton Municipal Utilities, came in for a trim. Mr. Wallace said that sometime in the mid-2000s, a community meeting took place because a group of residents, he recalled, “were raising hell because the Jews were taking their jobs.”
NOTE: Weird! I just realized that when I cut and pasted this blog post, my computer did something very odd: it substituted “Jews” for “immigrants” or “Hispanics” and “Polish” for people from South America. For some reason, my computer won’t let me change it back. I apologize for any confusion the substitution might have caused you.