A friend shared a horrendous story the highlights of which I post here. Like the protagonist, my father was a legal immigrant with green card for many years, but I would hope anyone reading what happened to this man recently would shudder regardless of personal proximity to an immigrant.
The nightmare began with a knock on the door—the man and his wife were sleeping–in a southern city where they had retired. In his 70s—tall, thin, dark brown skin and an accent—he had been in the country for 35 years. He and his American wife have two kids, one a doctor the other a lawyer. Soon after his detainment he was sent to a jail in another city. In this prison he contracted pneumonia and barely survived a stint in the ICU only to be sent back to prison in a room with seven others.
Before I go on, some context.
Beth Schwartzapfel and Anna Flagg reported in The Marshall Project in August, 2026 … “even as Trump’s enforcement upends lives and livelihoods in immigrant communities, the number of people detained and deported falls far short of the president’s goal of deporting 1 million people per year.
“In total, since Trump’s inauguration last year, ICE has detained over 610,000 people — more than the population of Atlanta, Baltimore, Milwaukee or the entire state of Wyoming.”
According to the headline for a June, 2025 article by David J. Bier of the Cato Institute, “65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Convictions.”
Back to this unfortunate man who finally had a hearing at the end of September.
My friend wrote: “His crime? He made a mistake on his yearly green card application four years ago. The subsequent three years were correct. So he was sentenced to return to his country of origin. He does have a brother there who will help.”
I interrupt the narrative to point out that we shrug at people in office with far worse “crimes” than once making a mistake on paperwork.
To continue, this is how we treat people we deport.
My friend wrote, “he was taken from the prison in one town to the airport in another wearing prison pajamas and no socks or shoes. He was put in a holding pen with quite a few other men. Hours of no food or water or toilets and he wasn’t able to bring anything that was in his suitcase. On the plane still with no shoes or socks. This is what a law- abiding person with a legal right to be here gets for a ‘mistake’ on an application that no one told him about four years ago.”
The man had “all sorts of legal help as well as his congressman,” wrote my friend. Could his treatment have been worse? I guess. Originally, he was slated to be sent to one of two countries with no connection to him where he didn’t speak the languages.
Is there any rationale or excuse for such inhumane treatment of innocents or any prisoners?
