What makes it okay to deport Audemio Orozco-Ramirez?

Supporters of Orozco-Ramirez march in downtown Billings.

In 2013, Audemio Orozco-Ramirez with the passenger in a traffic stop in Jefferson County, Montana. At that time, he had been living in the United States approximately 16 years. Orozco-Ramirez was born in Michoacan, Mexico. He has no criminal record, but the officer of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s department who stopped the car he was riding in suspected that he was in the country illegally, in part because he did not speak English. Orozco-Ramirez was arrested on a civil immigration violation and placed in a county jail sell with nine other men.

During a period of time that went missing from the jail’s otherwise continuous surveillance footage, a number of these men held down Orozco-Ramirez and raped him. In December, Jefferson County settled a federal lawsuit filed by Orozco-Ramirez for $125,000 without admitting that he was assaulted or it was liable. Since then, he has lived and worked outside Billings, checking in with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents on a monthly basis. During his last check-in, he was arrested and scheduled for deportation.

An appeals court judge has issued a stay against that decision pending a hearing. The feds frequently issue “U visas” to foreign nationals who are the victims of crimes and have aided authorities in their investigations, but in settling Orozco-Ramirez’s lawsuit, Jefferson County did not admit he was a victim of a crime. Legally, we can deport him. The question of whether we can do so ethically is more complicated.

Except for crossing the border illegally 20 years ago, Orozco-Ramirez has participated in the social contract. Our state and federal governments, on the other hand, have betrayed him multiple times. For example, there was the time we investigated him for civil violations as the passenger in a traffic stop. That doesn’t happen to Americans who enjoy constitutional rights. There was also the time we locked him in a cell full of rapists, also for a civil violation, and stopped watching what happened. Then there was the time we made a deal with him to forget about the rape thing and then picked him up for deportation while he was upholding his end of the bargain.

No American would agree that is the right way for a government to treat the people it governs. Yet because Orozco-Ramirez is not a citizen but merely a person who has lived here for the last 20 years, anything we do to him is fine. That’s a peculiar moral calculus, and you can read all about in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

The day after we deported the immigrants

train

The day after we deported the last illegal immigrant, America was not yet great again. That’s to be expected. Even though illegal immigrants had been causing a lot of problems, something as complex as the United States isn’t going to turn around overnight. We’re talking about a whole, complicated system. It would take a while for the job creators to restaff the illegal immigrant’s old, illegal jobs with working-class white people. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

But then, on the anniversary of the day we deported the last illegal immigrant, America still wasn’t great. The factories hadn’t opened up again, and houses cost about the same as they did before. They were still too slow at the doctor’s office. The busboys were all white teenagers with no sense at all, but otherwise, little had changed.

We figured something must have gone wrong, and it didn’t take long to figure out what. Even though we had gotten rid of the illegals, there were still a bunch of legal immigrants who were basically the same people. They came from the same places. They looked and talked the same way: different. The only difference between an illegal immigrant and a legal immigrant is a piece of paper, and that’s no difference at all. When you’re tackling a project as big as making America great again, you have to tell it like it is. Anybody who says otherwise is just being politically correct.

So we deported all the legal immigrants, too. Anybody who wasn’t born here was out. We figured that would make America great again. But after a year or so, everything was still about the same. If anything, the doctor’s office got even slower, and there were a lot fewer restaurants. But the big stuff—jobs, terrorism, that overall feeling that everything was getting worse—hardly changed at all. All we did was spend a billion dollars on trains.

Then we realized what it was: Even though we had gotten rid of all the immigrants, their kids were still here. Technically, they were born in America. But everybody knows that if your parents are from Mexico or Syria, you’re not going to learn American values. You’re going to learn what they teach you. All those people were running around keeping America from being great, acting like this was their country just because they grew up here. And then they turn around and indoctrinate their kids!

It was a real problem, so to make America great again, we deported people whose parents or grandparents were immigrants. A lot of people didn’t have their grandparents’ birth certificates, and some didn’t even know who all of their grandparents were, so we deported them, too, just to be safe. Now everyone in America is an American, and it’s going to be great. I mean, what else could the problem be?

NC bill would outlaw sea level estimates

Downtown Durham

If you have a cat, make sure he is not sitting on your lap when you read this article about the North Carolina legislature’s plan to make exponential sea level projections illegal, lest the rage beam that shoots out of your face fill your home with the smell of burning hair. As everyone’s grandfather taught them, there are two ways to project future sea levels. One is to make an exponential model based on expected climate phenomena and rates of increase from recent years using math and scientists and stuff, and the other is to make a line graph based on sea levels from the last hundred years. As you might expect, the method that expects next year’s increase to be the same as in 1902 yields a much lower number, since it disregards global warming. “We’re skeptical of the rising sea level science,” says Tom Thompson, who just happens to be chairman of an economic development group representing 20 of North Carolina’s coastal counties.

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Congress outlaws protest near Secret Service-protected

Rick Santorum and his imaginary friend, God

The difference between the US President and a king, as any red-blooded American knows, is that you can tell the king of America to fuck himself. He probably won’t do it, but it’s nice to be able to make the recommendation. Living in the United States got a little less nice last week, when the House of Representatives approved HR 347—a bill that The Hill specifically describes as “non-controversial.” The Hill is like the guy at the poker table who looks at his cards, shakes his head, sighs and then calls three hundred dollars. In addition to “clarify[ing] in US law that it is illegal to trespass on White House grounds,” the full text of the HR 347 contains the follwing:

(1) the term ‘restricted buildings or grounds’ means any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area—

(A) of the White House or its grounds, or the Vice President’s official residence or its grounds

(B) of a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting; or

(C) of a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance;

It is now a felony to glitterbomb Rick Santorum.

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