Mendota, Calif. -- Not a day goes by that Laya doesn’t dread going to work. Working in the fields picking fruits and vegetables, enduring climatic extremes and spending long hours on your feet can be physically excruciating. But for Laya, worse than that is the thought that somewhere between the fields of California’s Central Valley and her modest apartment in the small farming town of Mendota, she will be picked up by immigration authorities and once again be separated from her children.

Her dramatic story highlights the horrific consequences of the inhumane actions of immigration authorities that seem more like ethnic cleansing than law enforcement. The immigration raids and fugitive-search expeditions that have increased in recent months have millions of immigrants petrified.

Immigration authorities claim that the raids and door-to-door searches are intended to detain those who have deportation orders for criminal activity or those whose petition for legal status has been rejected by the courts. However, when agents encounter anyone else in the process who does not have proper documentation of their legal status, they are arrested on the spot, then detained and deported. They call these “collateral arrests.” According to some media reports, of the almost 20,000 arrests as part of Operation Return to Sender, which began about a year ago, two-thirds have been collateral arrests.

Laya falls under that category. She was sleeping with her children when she heard the knock on the door. It was agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, looking for a woman with the same name as one of the residents of the house where she was staying. They soon determined that it was a case of mistaken identity, but they proceeded to arrest all those in the house who did not have “papers.”

Laya was forced to dress in front of the male agents. She was given one hour to find someone to take care of her three small U.S.-born children; her 10-year-old daughter born in Mexico would go with her. It was the middle of the night -- there was no one to care for the kids, one of whom was a baby, but she was arrested and deported anyway.

“I’m just doing my job,” the officer told her. Two weeks later, after paying smugglers thousands of dollars and living through tragic moments of anguish, Laya was reunited with her kids. Like many deported immigrants, she turned around and repeated the dangerous journey across the border, this time with her young daughter witnessing the ordeal.

While the Senate was discussing how to deal with the immigration issue, hundreds of people were being persecuted. Within a week there were two major immigration operations. In Ohio, as soon as word of the federal crackdown on immigrants was reported, hundreds of people took refuge in a local church in Painesville -- one of many across the country that have offered sanctuary to immigrant families who fear being separated by raids and random arrests. Activists say that about 100 immigrants were arrested during that operation. A couple of days later, another 100 workers from a
poultry-processing plant in Butterfield, Mo., were detained, allegedly as part of an investigation into identity theft and Social Security fraud.

The bipartisan bill that was introduced for debate in the Senate contemplates a guest-worker program and a possible path to citizenship for the approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the country now. When questioned about the pending reform during a press conference, President Bush recognized the difficulties in dealing with the issue. “What do you do with the people already here?” he asked. It is impossible to kick them out of the country, he added: “Anybody who advocates trying to dig out 12 million people who have been in our society for a while is sending a signal to the American people that is just not real. It’s an impractical solution.”

Bush referred to immigrants as “good, decent, hardworking people who want to come here to work and feed their families.” But in spite of his compassionate words of wisdom, his government’s actions are sending a different message. It seems to be saying, “Let’s catch and throw out as many as we can before a new law allows them to stay.” Our government has the right to enforce its laws and detain those wanted for criminal activity, but it should put a stop to the so-called collateral arrests and stop separating innocent immigrant families.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www
.mariaesalinas.com)
© 2007 by Maria Elena Salinas
Distributed by King Features Syndicate