A 15 year old Honduran girl escapes from a detention center, and hides on your property. You discover her; she’s distraught and terrified, and does not want to go back to that horrible place. What do you do?
A) Continue to shelter her.
B) Contact an immigration aid society, or an immigration lawyer, and try to get her some help.
C) Rat her out to the police.
I think I’d try some combination of A & B; do what I can then, but try to find a better informed and capable source to provide better help. But that’s not what Frank Gonzalez did! He first called Nora Sandigo, a member of a non-profit that helps immigrants, but then he apparently had a better idea.
Before Sandigo could get there, police vans began circling the shop’s parking lot. Gonzalez said nobody from the shop called the police, but he eventually flagged down an officer and pointed to where the girl had hidden.
So his answer was C. I think he just failed the course.
Shall we learn some more about Frank?
“She said, ‘Please don’t punish me, don’t touch me, don’t hold my hand,’” he said. “They put handcuffs on her, but not like a criminal, like a human being.”
How do you handcuff someone like a human being, but not like a criminal? Frank doesn’t seem very bright here. He’s making non-excuses.
But wait, it gets worse.
Gonzalez, who came to the United States from Cuba in 1971 with his family, said he supports the Trump administration’s tough stance on border security but disagrees with separating families.
“People who want to come here, and work for the American Dream, they should get papers and follow the rules,” Gonzalez said. “But it breaks my heart to see mothers and fathers divided from their children. Families should be together all the time.”
Still, he says he supports Trump’s general immigration policy, adding, “Let’s make America great again.”
So he was an illegal immigrant himself, but was gifted with sanctuary just because of American anti-Cuba policies. And he’s unable to see the similarities in his past situation to a Honduran family fleeing their country for a better life. He’s the personification of Republican “I got mine, screw you” attitudes.
And then he has the gall to give us a goddamn MAGA to justify his actions.
Fuck you, Frank, you moral leper. You just failed Humanity 101.
It’s unbelievable but immigrants as soon as they get residence become anti-immigrants.
Southern Italians were reviled by Northern Italians when they came north.
Now they vote for the racist League.
Albanians and Rumenians were reviled by Italians, when they came there, now they voted Salvini.
Humanity disgusts me.
“Child? What child? I think maybe I saw someone running that way.” (anywhere but the corner the kid is hiding in.)
Next up: look up secular charities and legal advocacy for kids in trouble.
“Child? No children here, officer, not since the grandkids went back home”.
While hiding the kid with my wife in my batcave. Think safe room and SCIF mixed together, so it has firearms in their safes and a high tech communications center in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Information_Facility
“What’s that, officer? I’m a bit hard of hearing, damned IED… Oh, no. You can’t come in and look around, my wife is direly ill and doesn’t need the stress and frankly, that’d turn into a contest that you’d lose horribly in for endangering her health”.
“Now, kindly get the hell off of my lawn!”
But, were I present for that shitheel, once he hit the MAGA button, I would most certainly have tripped him with my cane. Twice.
And advise him that he’s fortunate that I’m feeling well that day, as I usually end up falling when I lose footing with my cane and I’m nothing but knees and elbows upon landing.
It’s never about what you will do that counts, it’s causing the other to fear just what you may just do that counts.
He forgot the most important thing any adult can forget, “PROTECT CHILDREN”. That’s one area where I would go totally off of the reservation over and take on federal agents. Who would then have their supervisors called, so that the supervisor can know just where to collect his or her men and equipment from and that would decidedly not be on my property.
I’m thinking the shit compost yard at the local sewage treatment plant.
The equipment safely stowed – inside of the compost pile. Kevlar tends to attract and retain certain odors… Hydrogen sulfide isn’t extremely gentle on metal objects…
I’ll pay for the metal objects, not the reusable and still serviceable, if malodorous Kevlar – save if I get to retain it myself. For usage in a planned fusor project, with a mixed Bussard – Farnsworth design and a lithium deuteride core. Not as good as polyethylene, but close enough for surplus components as a shield.
Perhaps it’s behind the paywall, but I can’t see that he necessarily was an Illegal immigrant, (though Cuba probably saw him as an illegal emigrant). He may just have applied for asylum with the proper (U.S.) authorities upon entering the country. You don’t become an illegal immigrant if you follow rules and apply or if you refuse to leave the country if your application and/or appeals are denied.
Despite that, shitty move Gonzales.
@4
Very few are illegal thanks to a policy known as “wet foot, dry land” where as any Cuban refugee who touches dry land is automatic resident. One of the last things Obama did before leaving the white house is rescind this law, angering Cubans everywhere. So Cubans can be illegal immigrants now, but only recently and I doubt Gonzalez is illegal.
On immigration issues a lot of Latinos see Cubans as akin to white people. Not in skin tone since we come in any color, but rather in terms of privileged. Since Cubans never had to work for their residency, they don’t understand whats it like to truly be an immigrant. Drives me bonkers as someone who is mixed Cuban-Colombian and works together with a lot of right ring Cubans who cant seem to understand that they have it so good. Hypocrisy.
I am an autistic asexual individual who hasn’t been to school in ten years since high school. I’m in college now thanks to this unique program geared towards helping people like me get used to its environment. I live in Georgia, by the way, redneck republican central. Anyway, all I have to do is audit some classes for four semesters, and I am just now entering my third. However, I have long gotten past the point where I just hate everything thanks to this one fucker named Ryan, who I am forced to share the program with.
Ryan has all but stated, and I can quote, that he really loves this regime. He actually used that exact word, and it shows brilliantly through his comments and attitudes towards people like me. It started after he got into a huge fight with another black female student who was also attending the program and has since left since half of the first semester. Whenever in a conversation, no matter what it is, he raises his voice through the roof and pounds on the table. He has made comments such as “LGBT’s are forcing their lifestyles down everyone’s throats, Jews and blacks are oversensitive, and Mexicans don’t speak English.” I remember when a professor invited us to a small LGBT forum where I immediately came out as an individual who is grossed out by sexual intercourse but is turned on by all genders. My favorite comment, without sarcasm, came from a catholic woman who was invited and said that it is not fair that she gets to practice her own rituals, but sexual and gender nonconformists don’t. After the meeting, Ryan had the gall to call the experience a “blame game.” He also displayed or pretended to display some knowledge about the Vietnam War and Americans’ habits of tossing good food out that quite frankly scared me to death.
If Ryan actually supports what Trump is doing to people, I want him dead.
I’ve argued with my mother several times that I wanted to drop out, but she has full control over me.
well there was a regime before castro that sounded like it was a gangster fascist one, there are a lot of Cubans that are very conservative so sounds about right to me.
it is what i would expect
and yes they fail the human empathy test
unclle frogy
All too many people would have been willing to hand Anne Frank over to the Gestapo.
Gonzalez might have been afraid that if he didn’t rat her out that the cops would still find her and then accuse him of trying to hide her, which could get him sent back to Cuba, because criminal record. That’s the sort of fear ICE is instilling in immigrant communities now.
Gusano.
@UncleFroggy
They are conservative for a lot of reasons. They still feel betrayed by Kennedy who promised to back up the Cuban rebels against Castro but went back on their promise. Thousands died, and we as a people never forgot. A lot of us harbor an irrational fear of anything remotely left since we associate leftists with both Castro and Kennedy. Also doesn’t help that there are a lot of Castro apologists among Americans and their experience with leftys have been tied to them as tourists. There’s also the aforementioned privilege. Also this might be a stereotype that’s overblown since the area of Florida where we are numerous also happens to be a left leaning district.
Could this gentleman explain to me when exactly America ceased to be great such that it needs to be made great again? Was it before or after his arrival in that fair land? What were the reasons for this loss of greatness? Are there internationally-recognised KPIs by which we may judge America’s return to greatness?
@ Cat Mara: It was when a black guy from Kenya was elected president.
/s
As a point of information, I seem to remember that the law says that anyone who makes it to American soil has the right to apply for asylum. It doesn’t seem to specify how or where they need to make it to American territory.