Photo: Tyler Lake.
After a good double face palm, I’m sitting here, staring at a story, shaking my head and sputtering. Oh, I just don’t grok some people. I really don’t. There’s a level of extreme cognitive dissonance that I don’t even understand how people reach in the first place.
The family of a northern Indiana restaurant owner who ICE detained during a routine check-in in February says he’s scheduled for deportation Friday.
Roberto Beristain is the owner of a popular restaurant in Granger called Eddie’s Steak Shed. His family says he came to the United States from Mexico City illegally in 1998. He later obtained documentation to work in the country and checked in with ICE each year.
It was during one of those check ins last month that ICE took Beristain into custody because of an incident in 2000. Roberto and his wife, Helen, were visiting Niagara Falls that year and accidentally crossed into Canada. Officers there detained Roberto when they realized he was in the U.S. illegally. Helen says a lawyer helped get Roberto out on bail, but he was told he had to voluntarily leave the country within a month.
Roberto decided not to self deport because Helen was pregnant at the time. An ICE spokesperson says when Roberto failed to deport himself, his voluntary order revered to a final order of removal, meaning ICE could detain him. They didn’t act on that order for more than a decade.
[…]
During an interview earlier this month, Helen said she voted for President Donald Trump because she supports his immigration policies. She said criminals should be deported, but she didn’t think her husband would face that fate.
“[Trump] did say the good people would not be deported, the good people would be checked,” Helen said.
For Chrissakes, how do you, I uh, okay, I give up. I don’t know how anyone could think this way. It’s a mystery to me. I would have thought that someone who loved a person who was initially an illegal immigrant, then legal, would at least have had more sympathy for other immigrants, if not compassion, but no. I guess all those other ones are bad ones.
Via IPM.
Well Helen, you got the government you deserve.
During an interview earlier this month, Helen said she voted for President Donald Trump because she supports his immigration policies. She said criminals should be deported, but she didn’t think her husband would face that fate.
I’m reminded of Chappelle’s great skit about the blind white supremacist…
This is why philosophy is important and ought to be part of every curriculum. Kant’s observation is right, damn it: your choices help shape the world you’re going to have to live in. If you want to live in a world where you’re accepted: be accepting. If you want to live in a world where people get deported (including you) then support immigrantist politicians.*
(* I know the popular term is “nativism” but that misses a really important point…)
PS -- charcoal steak sounds like what I made the time I got on a phone call while the steaks were on the grill… They need marketing consultants, stat!
Dear Helen … oh … my…. *.
“Good people”? What “good people” are those, you idiot? To Trump’s regime, all “illegals” are out of here, how could you not have heard that, it was in every one of his rallies…
I’m with Caine, I cannot do this, I cannot make any sense of this…
Yeah… I am living among that sort of very weird attitude. Most here are what people call “Mexicans” (they are actually Americans, but hey, what do I know) and they voted for the Angry Cheetoh. WTF, people? YOU are the people he is talking about deporting! **YOU** are the people he was calling “rapists” etc. and who he wants to get rid of. Yet they do not see that. It is absolutely insane.
And I don’t really dare hope that things get so bad they actually see the truth, here.
Hey, Helen, have you already explained this to your children?
Well, Helen seems to suffer from what could only be described as weapongrade stupidity. It perfectly describes the thinking that was ascribed to Trumpets a few times -- they vote for him only thinking he will only act on the promises that will hurt the “other” and are mightily suprised when he also acts on the promises that will hurt them.
Amazing. Just amazing. In a really, really, really horrifying way.
I wonder what Jose thinks of Trump now.
The right seems united by their completely unquestioned belief in: “Rules don’t apply to me.”
They support giving the government the power to torture because of course it won’t be used against them. They support giving the government the power to murder because of course it won’t be used against them. The idea of “I, personally, am a special snowflake who can’t possibly be affected in any way by the policies I support” is endemic to the right. Which is probably why they always accuse the left of being “special snowflakes” all the time— their powers of projection are so great that it’s practically a given that the right is always guilty of anything they accuse the left of doing.
We make jokes about people voting for the “panthers eating people’s faces” party getting upset when panthers eat their face, but I don’t find it funny because it isn’t actually an exaggeration. They genuinely do support terrible things and then they express genuine surprise when they aren’t magically exempted from those things.
kestrel, I’m sure those people in your area hold a bunch of the usual rationalisations that people have for voting Trump:
“He’ll protect the unborn.”
“Hillary will take away our guns, there’s no way we can vote for her!”
“Someone has to stop those tax and spend liberals”
“I don’t really like him, but we need someone to shake things up.”
Yep, that’s somewhat how my parents of European descent will defend the immigration of their ancestors. They did it the “right” way. They, of course, cherry pick from my ancestry by picking from those who immigrated well after the USA was established and ignore the Puritans who did who knows what to the native population living here.
And even if I didn’t have ancestors who had lived on this side of the Atlantic when the USA was founded, ignoring how the USA was founded is, of course, a problem in itself. When I pointed this out to my father, the excuse was then, “Oh, well, [the natives] stole land from each other before any Europeans were here.” The implication was this meant it was acceptable for Europeans to steal the land. Unsurprisingly, he wouldn’t accept that this then means that it should be totally OK for groups to now steal “our” land from us. Somehow that chain of logic stopped with the Europeans…
Sorry…I got on a bit of a rant there, but this has been a touchy issue since Steve King, who is not my representative, but is still from my state, was in the news last week making similar arguments as my supposedly liberal parents. Checking my white privilege here, I suspect this is always a touchy issue for you.
Leo:
:laughs: Yes, it is, but I appreciate every one who bothers to point out the fucked up reasoning, which I too have heard, in too many different versions.
Her common sense, where has it gone?
Also, Europeans have been stealing land from each other. My grandpa’s birthplace was in Finland when he was born, but it’s now a part of Russia. What some of my earlier ancestors did to Saami people, I can only guess. I wouldn’t like to suggest that you should be allowed to do a genocide on people simply because they’ve waged wars about some pieces of land.