Guest article by Janice Figel:

If there were a group in this country responsible for killing, on average, 12,000 people every year, would you be concerned? That would be roughly about 30 deaths per day. It is truly an astounding number and more astounding still is the fact that we are, most of us anyway, blithely unaware and unconcerned. It just doesn’t come up on our radar. It does, however, literally come up on the radar of our various police agencies, because the group in question is speeders. The numbers cited are from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Traditionally, in this country, we have been interested in reasonable law enforcement. So, speeders get tickets, variable fines, maybe lose driving privileges, maybe face stronger penalties including incarceration depending on the frequency of and/or the severity of any accidents that occur as a result of their speeding. Speeders kill not only themselves, but often their passengers, other motorists, pedestrians, and, on occasion, people in cafes or in stores or even in their own homes. Lately, however, we seem to be interested in unreasonably severe law enforcement. So, relative to speeders, I propose the following: If you are caught speeding, masked men in flak jackets with long guns will swarm you, wrestle you to the ground, whisk you away to a detention center, perhaps even one in the middle of a swamp. Your individual circumstances will not matter. Speeding is speeding. You broke the law. If you received a speeding ticket in the past and go to court to pay your fine, when you leave, no matter what a judge may have said or done, you will be immediately arrested and incarcerated and sent to some detention center miles away, maybe even in El Salvador or Sudan. We don’t care that you don’t even speak the language. The police will be empowered to search through any data base they want. If they find that you had a speeding ticket at any time in the past - even 30 years ago - they will come suitably attired with masks and long guns, and arrest you at your work place, your school, your church, or while you are at Home Depot. They don’t want to be accused of family separation, so your child with severe asthma, with leukemia, or anything else will be sent with you to whatever facility. Too bad if you or your child needs medication - or, really anything else. You try explaining. Yes, you got a speeding ticket 30 years ago, but you have been completely law abiding and hard working since, and you have raised three sons in whom you have instilled such a strong love for this country that each of them joined the U.S. Marines. We don’t care because, you know, you once got a speeding ticket. We don’t care even if it was you, yourself, who served in the U.S. Military. No matter how much you were decorated. You were good enough for that but not good enough to live here. We don’t care how hard you work. We’ll chase you through strawberry fields if we have to, and with helicopters. We have quotas to meet, so we really don’t even care if you really were speeding. It you were just a passenger in a fast moving car we are incarcerating you as well. We don’t even care if you just risked your life to help rescue a little girl with her hand nearly bitten off by a shark. You pulled her sister out of the water and chased off the shark, but, you know, you once exceeded a speed limit and we have rules we enforce, no matter how cruel or unreasonable.

To put this in perspective, according to Customs and Border Protection, the highest number of immigrant caused deaths in any year since 2017 is 62. Even if you are not good at math, you can see that in just over two days, speeders kill more people than are killed by undocumented immigrants in the worst year of the last eight. And yet, the party in power has demonized immigrants, characterized them as rapists, murderers, violent gang members and gone as far as referencing rodents when speaking of them. That party feels empowered to treat any and all immigrants as undesirable - revoking green cards, revoking Temporary Protected Status, revoking visas, arresting people legally seeking amnesty, which an immigrant has a legal right to seek. The only immigrant group that is currently welcomed by this administration is South Aftricans, but only if they are white. Is there more than one way to interpret this? I for one do not want to live in a police state in which the government demonizes any group of people, in which masked men with long guns randomly arrest whomever, even legal citizens, just because they “look” like they might be immigrants, i.e., they don’t look white. Tracking down criminals is hard work. That is not what is going on.