Eric the Blue

Reading emails addressed to Valley View Staff can be a bit of an emotional roller coaster these days, especially if those muscles have been atrophied by the accumulation of years augmented by Scandinavian heritage. We were informed a few days ago that a judge had ordered the release of our now world famous pre-k student and his dad, and then that the two of them were safely back in Columbia Heights. After those two had been detained and whisked off to the detention center in Texas, but before they were released, the school office got a call, one day last week, from the mother of two of our students, a fifth grader and his second-grade brother. She’d been detained that morning and wanted her boys delivered to her at the Whipple Building–there was no one else to take care of them, she said. This was done. The principal gave the boys the news, then drove them down there with a couple of other staff members. Can’t imagine that car ride, or saying good-bye to the kids before they walked alone through a door: uff da. The next day they were in Texas.

Now those boys have been released, along with their mother, and are back home as well. The boys cleared up a mystery about another Valley View student with whom the school had lost touch, a fifth grade girl who had not been in school since the first week after winter break. When kids are absent and the school doesn’t hear from a care giver, we try to make contact, to find out what’s going on, but in this case those efforts had failed–because, it turns out, she’d also been detained, with her mom and stepfather, and the released boys reported having seen her in the Texas detention center. That’s how we found out what had happened to her: from two of our other students who had also been detained. Now we learn, in a message from the superintendent, that this girl has also been released, though she is not back in Minnesota: apparently the measles outbreak at the detention center has forced her to quarantine somewhere first.

I haven’t often seen it directly stated, but these releases, while good news, amount to a tacit admission that the detainments were unjust from the start. In the case of the 5-year-old and his dad, their release was ordered by a judge. I think that’s the only one triggered by a court action. According to school officials, all these detained parents had a legal right to be in our country–an open asylum petition, for instance. The total number of deportation orders in these cases is zero. People are being swept up and, within hours, flown with their young children to a “detention center” more than a thousand miles away, where unknown federal bureaucrats leisurely conclude that “mistakes have been made.”

Unless it’s not a mistake, and the purpose isn’t to pursue justice and enforce our laws but, rather, to inflict pain and arouse fear.

UPDATE: This morning comes news that the federal government has requested that the asylum claim of the 5-year-old’s family be expedited, closed, and an order for deportation entered. The family’s lawyer says the request is highly unusual and best understood as a retaliatory measure. Cross us, or be the cause of one of our many embarrassments, and we will make things worse for you. Be very afraid.