DEPORTED
I read a story this morning about Donna Hughes-Brown an Irish citizen married to an American who has been in the USA legally the last 50 years with a green card. She went back to Ireland with her husband to the funeral of an aunt. On her return she was arrested at the airport by ICE and spent 5 months in detention in Campbell, Kentucky. She has just been released. She was accused of writing a bounced check for $25 twenty years ago. She hadn’t realized that she had bounced a check. When a warrant was put out for her arrest she paid $80 restitution plus court costs. She is a caring person who with her husband a year ago brought two truckloads of relief supplies down to people flooded out by Helene in Western North Carolina where I live. When asked why she didn’t long ago become an American citizen she said that she would have been giving up a part of her heritage and couldn’t do it. Many Americans would probably feel that way about giving up their own American citizenship in order to live somewhere else.
My wife, Kathe Mosher, who died five years ago, was a German citizen with a green card which allowed her to work and live for 50 years in the Unites States. She was a nurses assistant for much of this time in a psychiatric ward of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Asheville and a caring person, committed to the church committees she joined, who brought up two American children and was much loved in our community. I am an American citizen. She couldn’t give up her German heritage, which has now become part of my heritage, and I didn’t want her to. Maybe 15 years ago when I was in India with students she was stopped by a policewoman because the registration tag on our car’s license plate was out of date. She knew nothing about the registration tag, that was my responsibility, but she was called into court, stood in front of a judge, and paid a fine and forgot about it.
Now I realize that if Kathe were still alive and was accompanying me to the 70th anniversary of her best friend, Elke, in Germany which I am doing in April without her, that on our return through whatever intensive snooping ICE does in order to find excuses to deport people, Kathe, at 87 could very well spend 5 months in detention in some corner of the USA as part of a deportation process.
For me what ICE is doing has suddenly shifted, I’m ashamed to admit, from being the deportation of nameless illegal immigrants to being intensely personal and I find it loathsome.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 