ACLU Displays its Paranoia

The facts, but not the legal conclusions, for this article come from an article in the Boston Globe on 26 March. The title of the article is, “Inhumane raid was just one of many (Endgame).” It begins with a reference to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on illegal alien employees in New Bedford, Mass.

What makes the article interesting, however, is its display of paranoia on the part of the Massachusetts ACLU, plus its direct quoting of factually false charges made by the ACLU about this and other efforts to find and deport illegal aliens. The article refers to a website address of the Mass. ACLU for the “Endgame” plan, which it claims is the plan by the Homeland Security Department to deport all illegal aliens in the US by the year 2012. Of course, the article refers to them as “undocumented” rather than “illegal.”

The article contained charges like these, drawn from ACLU documents about New Bedford, and established by later investigation as flatly false, “arrest first, ask questions later. We’ll hear more stories of the human suffering that results from such tactics: of nursing babies who become dehydrated when separated from their mothers, of 7-year-olds frantically looking for their missing mothers, and of minors being flown to distant states without adequate protection.”

The article even claims that the actions of ICE in New Bedford are similar to “Slobodan Milosevic’s attempt to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Kosovo in 1999.” For those who have forgotten the situation in Kosovo, it involved mass murder of civilians.

This article was written by the Executive Director and Communications Director of the ACLU of Mass. But the Globe should not have printed it without a bare minimum of fact-checking. Its readers deserved better than they got.