New York Times reporter Vivian Yee made the front page Thursday with the paper’s favorite liberal hobbyhorse, illegal immigration, or as the Times now puts it, “undocumented.” Immigration is the issue the paper is most aggressively liberal on, and the fearful tone of the piece is captured in the headline, which skips journalistic objectivity in favor of emotionalism: “Migrants Hide, Fearing Capture on ‘Any Corner.’”
She certainly got plenty of terrified illegal immigrants to talk to her or her contributing reporters. The Times lead sentence displayed the paper’s selective concern about people going to church:
No going to church, no going to the store. No doctor’s appointments for some, no school for others. No driving, period -- not when a broken taillight could deliver the driver to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Yee’s documentation of fear came complete with politically correct identification; there are no illegals here, only “undocumented immigrants.”
It is happening in the Central Valley of California, where undocumented immigrants pick the fields for survival wages but are keeping their children home from school; on Staten Island, where fewer day laborers haunt street corners in search of work; in West Phoenix’s Isaac School District, where 13 Latino students have dropped out in the past two weeks; and in the horse country of northern New Jersey, where one of the many undocumented grooms who muck out the stables is thinking of moving back to Honduras.
She noted indirectly that illegal immigrants today are under the same threat they were under the Obama administration except now the law is actually being taken seriously.
If deportation has always been a threat on paper for the 11 million people living in the country illegally, it rarely imperiled those who did not commit serious crimes. But with the Trump administration intent on curbing illegal immigration -- two memos outlining the federal government’s plans to accelerate deportations were released Tuesday, another step toward making good on one of President Trump’s signature campaign pledges -- that threat, for many people, has now begun to distort every movement.
It has driven one family from the local park where they used to play baseball in the evenings, and young men from a soccer field in Brooklyn where pickup games were once common.
It has kept Meli, 37, who arrived in Los Angeles from El Salvador more than 12 years ago, in a state of self-imposed house arrest, refusing to drive, fearing to leave her home, wondering how she will take her younger son, who is autistic, to doctor’s appointments.
Yee spared two sentences for the law-enforcement perspective, and the issue that helped elect our current president.
The new policies call for speedier deportations and the hiring of 10,000 ICE agents, and direct them to treat any offense, no matter how small, as grounds for deportation. For Mr. Trump’s supporters and longtime advocates of stricter immigration enforcement, they are a welcome move toward restoring law and order to a system that they say offered no deterrent to entering the country illegally. Undocumented immigrants, in their view, have filled jobs that belong to Americans, drained public resources and skipped the line for visas on which others waited for years.
But for the undocumented, the atmosphere in Washington is a signal to prepare for the worst.
The paper again uncovered Strange New Respect for religion, as long as the religious activists are on the correct side.
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Two Roman Catholic nuns with the Sisters of Loretto, who did not want to be identified because they did not want to put the people they serve in jeopardy, said they were already seeing the undocumented people they knew change their habits out of fear.
They know a woman who has stopped going out to buy medication. They know a couple, restaurant workers, who have lived in the country for 25 years and are now taking turns going shopping. That way, they figure, their children will still have one parent if the other is picked up.
....
Empty chairs inside classrooms have become increasingly common in Ceres, Calif., a Central Valley city where 75 percent of students are Hispanic, according to school administrators.
The schools there are surrounded by dairies and almond orchards, which are predominantly staffed by undocumented workers. School administrators attributed the absences to parents who were worried they could be identified through the school records of their citizen children.
In response, school officials have asked teachers to reassure students that the district does not collect data on immigration status.
In some cases, fear has lapped fact.
Yee passed on some helpful leftist tips about evading the law.
The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a nonprofit legal services group in Seattle, has issued thousands of business cards in recent days, advising undocumented immigrants what they should do, or not do, if a law enforcement agent knocks.
“Do not answer questions about where you were born or about your immigration status,” the cards advise.
The group is also telling immigrants that if a knock does come, sliding a card under the door is acceptable.
One side of the card reads, “To whom it may concern: Before answering any questions, I want to talk to an attorney.”
Last year Yee covered a hate-crime hoax at the University of Albany in which three black female students who initially blamed "white men" for racial attacks on a bus were instead charged themselves with misdemeanor assault against a white woman. But Yee did her defensive best to make it still somehow the fault of whites and conservatives.
