This Is Fear: ICE Raids on Parents and Children

By Nancy Hiemstra, Huffington Post
January 8, 2016

At the end of December, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would being rounding up Central American immigrants for deportation. This past weekend, the raids began, with parents and children being detained in military-style operations in several southern and border states. Fear has spread through immigrant communities around the country.

As a professor of migration studies at Stony Brook University who has researched consequences of immigration policies for over a decade, I have followed news of this initiative closely. But I am also an Anglo mom of two on Long Island, in a town with sizeable communities of Latino immigrants, many of them from Central America. I speak Spanish, so I talk with Latino immigrants, I listen, I ask. And this is what fear looks like in my town.

Sunday afternoon, my kids were playing with some kids in the community, blowing off end-of-holiday break steam. Suddenly, one boy said to me, "Miss Nancy, did you hear that they are stopping people on the streets, and taking them away? Whole families. My mom was crying, she's so scared."[...]

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-hiemstra/this-is-fear-ice-raids-on_b_8939568.html