Informant38

Fascism In The Name Of Security
An immigrant is like a parked car. He doesn't have to move to be in violation. A car can sit there and get tickets for a tag placed wrong, a faulty rear light, a front light, a mirror, anything. An immigrant can fill out papers, answer questions for long hours, work hard for years, show tax receipts, display papers of the three citizens in his family, and there are still a hundred reasons in print for them to throw you out of the country. And if you get a Catholic from Ireland and an Ashcroft singing a psalm, the guy gets thrown out.
They took Bernadette Devlin out of a line in Chicago, where she was changing planes to get to New York for a public speaking appearance, and sent her home. They said at 5-1 and in her 50s, she was a threat to America.
Then the other day, a band from Donegal was at the Dublin airport for a flight to New York to play a benefit in the Bronx for an old neighbor, Mickey Duffy, fighting cancer. Suddenly, American immigration officers appeared and told them they were barred from entering the United States. The reason was a cheap technicality that only an Ashcroft agency could raise against Irish Catholics. The band went home. The patient's bills over here still mount.
And in the middle of July, at 5:30 a.m., McNicholl left his house as he always did for his union job as a sprinkler fitter.
He gets outside his house and he is jumped by four men in plain clothes who came out of a car. He begins to holler. Inside this house, his oldest son, Sean, 18, wakes up to the shouts...
�Breslin Newsday 09.13.03