Esther J. Cepeda: towns enforcing immigration laws could lead to "neighborhood lynchings"

The column here ("Beginning of the end?/Towns across America are taking illegal immigration control into their own hands — with frightening results. What's next? Neighborhood lynchings?") is pretty jaw-dropping even for Chicago Sun-Times ethno-booster and "reporter" Esther J. Cepeda:

...Towns across the country are so intent on controlling illegal immigration in their backyards, they're taking matters into their own hands... Take Panama City Beach, Fla., where the cops have taken to pulling up to construction sites with sirens blaring, chasing down and arresting those who run. I guess the regard for basic human dignity doesn't apply there... The sheriff has proven it's OK to terrorize certain community members, so how long until the first lynching? How long until it's commonplace for Hispanic immigrants to be murdered in the name of immigration law enforcement while neighbors cluck, "But they were illegal"?

Via this by Dave Gorak (ST contact info at the link), which describes how he appeared on a panel moderated by her and featuring the Mexico/Western Union/Blagojevich-linked Juan Salgado of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Comments

It's more surprising that this was published (and at that in a major newspaper) than that it was written. OK, so they want some ethnic columnist so their bylines reflect the makeup of the "community". But they seems to have scraped the bottom of the barrel here.

Another slippery-slope equivocation, smearing by innuendo, in the place where we had the right to expect a rational argument, as to why loyalty to fellow citizens, such as the net taxpayer, is to be betrayed.

There is this implied racism in that Americans have a propensity to lynch people, which is extremely offensive to just about anyone who lives outside of the south. Even in the south, there has not been a lynching in the USA in nearly 40 years. Of course, lynchings never happen in mexico: "On November 23, 2004, in the Tlahuac lynching, three Mexican undercover federal agents doing a narcotics investigation were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan (Mexico City) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and mistakenly suspected they were trying to abduct children from a primary school. The policemen identified themselves immediately but were held and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on fire. The whole incident was covered by the media almost from the beginning, including their pleas for help and their murder. By the time police rescue units arrived, two of the policemen were reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured. Authorities suspect the lynching was provoked by the persons being investigated. Both local and federal authorities abandoned them to their fate, saying the town was too far away to even try to arrive in time and some officials stating they would provoke a massacre if they tried to rescue them from the mob." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching#Mexico

I'm with John S. Bolton. The "slippery slope fallacy" is the idea that every case of the sniffles ends up as virus pneumonia.

Welcome to the new America...crap like this Sun-Times article gets published all the time now. The worst of it is that clueless people buy into this guy's smearing.

Lynching is, last I heard, illegal. What these towns are doing is passing LAWS that crack down on illegal actions, not encouraging illegal actions. Duh. This reminds me of the WaPo's editorial when Virginia passed its must-issue law that more or less stated that if a person applies for a carried concealed permit for a gun, then UNLESS there are reasons NOT to allow the person a permit, the permit must be granted. What was happening was that, while most jurisdictions outside of NoVA were doing just that, some jurisdictions were denying qualified people guns just because they chose to do so. Naturally, the WaPo predicted murder and mayhem, none of which appeared. Of course in VA, to get a carry concealed permit you must be investigated, prove you know how to use a gun safely, etc. Was it surprising that folks who could meet these requirements wouldn't be out shooting up the town? Hardly. These folks had to be some of the most law-abiding people in the state. Same with these laws. People who are willing to go through legal procedures to correct a problem usually don't go to extremes. Truthfully, these idiots should be writing stories about how kind and patient the US citizens have been considering their extreme provocation.