Jul 28 2008
The Problem with the Alamance County Illegal Immigrant Highway Arrest
There has been a lot of news over the past week about the illegal alien mother whose children were left stranded on the highway in the middle of the night after she was pulled over and arrested on I-85 by an Alamance County Sheriff’s deputy. I totally support the 287g program because the problem of widespread illegal immigration needs to be dealt with and 287g is an effective program, however I don’t think this particular incident was handled as best as it could have been.
To start, it wasn’t the police that left the kids alone. There was a family friend riding with them who remained with the children. The problem is the family didn’t know him all that well, which is problem number one, and after the cops left the guy took off leaving the kids by themselves fearing he too would be deported. Eventually the kids called their father in Maryland to come and pick them up.
The problems here are obvious. I have no issue with the mother being arrested and readied for deportation. She was breaking several laws, but the police should have taken the children with them as well instead of leaving them with this man at two o’clock in the morning on the side of the highway. This was a stupid decision and those kids lives were put in danger. Fortunately nothing happened to them, but they may as well have just been thrown into the water at the end of a fish hook. Common sense did not prevail here.
The father, Antonio Perez, said he got a cell phone call from the sobbing children around 2 a.m. They had been headed from their home in Western North Carolina to visit him in Maryland. Perez, who doesn’t have a license and had to get his uncle to drive him, arrived at 10:30 a.m. to find his children scared, exhausted, hungry, and distraught over the loss of their mother.
“They were left abandoned there in the middle of the street,” Perez said. “It was a horrible experience for them, just horrible.”
I’m sure it was very traumatic for them and it shouldn’t have happened, however Perez and his wife need to hold themselves accountable for this as well. The bottom line is if the two of them weren’t here illegally sneaking around the country with their children in tow this never would have happened to them. There is clear fault on both sides here, but I think the Alamance County Sheriff’s Department need to revise their policies somewhat so that similar incidents of this nature don’t occur in the future.
