This is an amazing story. An amazing story of a reporters bias. It’s the story of a ILLEGAL immigrant and all the hard times she is going through because she broke the law. Feel sorry for her yet?
Marshalltown, Ia. – Before the single mother of five was handcuffed, Concepsion Mendoza made a surreptitious telephone call from the cafeteria to tell her family about the immigration raid.
It was about 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. Her 18-year-old daughter, Maria Alvarez, steeled herself to the idea of not seeing her parent again, then decided she should still take the other children to school, as usual.
“I knew my mother wasn’t going to try to run,” Maria said. “She’s a very hardworking, honest person. I knew she’d go voluntarily.”
[…]The word had spread down the Swift & Co. factory line where Mendoza was trimming meat – immigration agents had surrounded the building. The federal Homeland Security Department would later call it the largest immigration raid in U.S. history – 1,282 arrested at Swift meatpacking plants, including 90 in Marshalltown.
[…]Mendoza did not tremble. She told herself she didn’t have anything to be embarrassed about. She was there working, earning a living.
Her sister Eugenia Rodriguez’s husband, Antonio, joined the legal residents. He was carrying valid papers and was sent back to work.
Mendoza and her brother Martin Mendoza, 43, stepped in line with the undocumented workers.
Yes, a very honest person who has nothing to be ashamed about. Not like she was breaking the law or anything right? The reporter then weaves the tale about the harsh living conditions she went through all because of the Government:
After a bus ride of about 50 miles, federal agents placed Mendoza and other men and women in what appeared to be a training barracks with bunk beds at Camp Dodge in Johnston.
About 7 p.m., the detainees were fed eggs, potatoes and sausage, she said.
They could not go to the bathroom without an escort. No showers were permitted until the next day.
Some of the arrested workers cried.
Poor ILLEGAL immigrants. Why can’t we just open the borders and let everyone through…..sigh. The reporter isn’t done yet, she goes on to turn the agents into villians:
On Wednesday, Mendoza said she was called into a room with computers and told to stand before some agents. The men laughed when they took her fingerprints, and Mendoza, who speaks little English, didn’t understand why.
Mendoza said the agents told her she had no rights and would likely go to jail and pay up to $40,000 in fines unless she signed a deportation order that would send her back to Mexico immediately.
And then writes about the woes of her family:
In Marshalltown, where Hispanics made up 13 percent of the city’s population of 26,000 when the 2000 census was taken, the family kept Mendoza’s detention a secret from the two youngest children.
But when Uncle Antonio returned from work alone – he and Mendoza always rode together – Lusia, a chatty and outgoing 3-year-old, repeatedly asked where she was.
David, 5, who is reserved and attached to his mother, sensed the tension in the house and moped around, crying intermittently. He slept on the living room floor so he could watch for her.
It hurt his big sister Maria to drop him off for kindergarten when he was teary-eyed and pleading to stay with her, but she thought playing with his friends would distract him.
Even Diego cracked. It shocked his family to see the 16-year-old cry. He and Maria were with their mother when she slipped “under the chain” at the border at Tijuana in 1993.
Diego took off to play basketball at the Marshalltown YMCA. “I thought I was going to go crazy if I didn’t leave the house,” he said.
It’s all the US Government fault you see. No blame for the person who came here illegally, none whatsoever.
But alas a lawyer found a loophole. Which loophole could she possible get? Why the loophole where if you break the law long enough we have no choice but to make it permanent:
He said she was eligible – as a 14-year resident, with no criminal record and three U.S.-born children – for relief called “cancellation of deportation.” If a judge grants it, she could apply for a green card.
After negotiations with the government’s chief immigration lawyers for the region, Richard Soli and Paul Stultz, Mendoza was released about 2 p.m. Thursday.
What a tale of woe huh? We can expect more of this crap now that the Democrats are taking over. Oh, by the way, if you would like to write to this reporter and tell her what a wonderful job she has done of spreading horse dung you can reach her here:
Reporter Jennifer Janeczko Jacobs can be reached at (515) 284-8127 or jejacobs@dmreg.com
I’m sure she would appreciate it.
UPDATE
Take a look at some of the comments on the Des Moines Register’s artice:
Where are the human interest stories on the AMERICAN workers and families that have lost their jobs with packing plants in this state over the last 30 years as wages and benefits have been destroyed by the influx of cheap illegal labor?
This sounds like a very nice family. If the gushing article above is accurate, I think they’d be great neighbors in any town. However, Ms. Mendoza is here, even by her own admission, illegally. This has consequences; in spite of the week long hand wringing by the Register, the Mashalltown School Board (whe were about to lose some per-pupil cash, theoretically…) and the Govenor’s office, we DO pay law enforcement to enforce laws. Yes, it would be great if we had easier entry for good people like Ms. Mendoza. But, we don’t…the answer isn’t to come here anyway and step all over those that have come legally and the taxpayers that are being required to carry the load at social services, hospitals, schools and all the rest.
I can’t help but notice that this woman has been in this country, the USA for over 13 years and still cannot speak English nor could she understand the language. There has been no mention of the childrens father in this piece so I wonder how many fathers do these children have? How many of them are being taken care of by Title 19? How much money have the legal citizens of the USA spent to take care of this woman and her children during her nearly 14 yr stay in this country?
It’s mighty sad when our MSM will print an article gushing over a women who has lived in the country for over 13 years ILLEGALLY.
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To tell you the truth, if she has been here for 14 years and managed to keep herself out of trouble and hold down a job, I wouldn’t have any problems with her staying. She’s already doing a lot better than a lot of people that were born here. I could use more neighbors like that.
Not that I agree with the newspaper writer’s slant but people have been coming to this country without proper documentation since it was founded. We should keep the good ones. My great grandparents did much the same from Europe. I guess people here didn’t much like them either at the time.
What it points out is a need to have a mechanism in place for people to come here legally to work. The problem is that our current system can take a decade or longer to get residency from what I hear. If there was a better legal way to do it that actually worked, I would bet most of them would use it and be here legally. If they could apply for a work permit and have one within a month or so, we wouldn’t be having this problem.
In other words, our economy obviously has a need for those workers or they wouldn’t have jobs. Our immigration controls aren’t adapting from a system designed when baby boomers were entering the job market in droves and we needed to protect jobs, to a market where boomers are retiring out of the labor force (soon to be in droves) and the upcoming generation isn’t large enough to replace them.
Every day when she woke up she was breaking the law being here. But, because she got away with it for so long, it’s now OK?
I’m sure there’s dope dealers around here that haven’t been busted yet, so it must be OK for them to keep on selling too, huh?? Let’s reward them because they’re good at not getting caught?
Maybe a neighbor, who is nice to the mailman and has lived in his house for 20 years is OK too (even if he’s been molesting kids all that time)? I mean, why stop now?
How come the BDK killer is locked up, he went for years w/o being in trouble, didn’t he? Maybe he should sue the gov’t for equal protection under the law…after all, this illegal was treated different, wasn’t she?
Where do you draw the line…wrong is wrong, and doing wrong for a long period of time doesn’t make it OK. It makes it worse.
IMO, this rag for a paper has a huge liberal bias, and has had for years. They’ve been this way for so long I don’t think they can see life any other way …so I guess that makes it OK for them.