United Liberty

I mean, there’s things like SOPA and the NDAA and the Patriot Act and your typical corruption and whatnot, but then you have ridiculous stories like the Texas teen who was accidentally deported to Columbia:

Turner said with the help of Dallas Police, she found her granddaughter in the most unexpected place - Colombia.

Where she had mistakenly been deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April of 2011.

“They didn’t do their work,” Turner said. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

The only thing going for ICE in this is that the girl gave a false name. Yes, she probably shouldn’t have done that—but how in the world could ICE, in her mother’s words, deport a girl to Colombia who knew no Spanish and failed to even do the basic work of, you know, confirming this claim? You would think law enforcement officials would expect teenagers to give false names upon imprisonment; it’s not that uncommon.

Yet it’s worse than that. There is, in fact, an entire history of American citizens being deported, some even being arrested trying to reenter the country. (From that article, which I find most chilling: “Legal representation is not provided for those who are accused of illegal immigration during a deportation case.” How’s that for “justice”?) Or a case where a man died of penile cancer (I am not making that up) because officials refused to let him have a biopsy and just gave him “extra” boxer shorts.

But what I find even more baffling is that, after these sort of stories come out, we still have people who want more regulations, more government agencies, more of this and more of that, constantly more government. We have a massive bureaucracy that cannot get the job done at all, with its failures constantly in the open—and yet people want more? What is the matter with them? What are they thinking?

Is it, “Well, the basis is sound, we just need to fix it up and improve it”? I’m sorry, when the “basis” is depriving a citizen of his or her liberty by government fiat, it is not sound, and there is no way to “fix” or “improve” it; it must be dismantled and the ground salted. There are some things you can’t fix. One is our government’s management of the monetary supply; another is our national security state; a third is our immigration system. You can’t fix these, you have to dismantle them, and either start over if they’re absolutely necessary or discontinue them if they aren’t.

I do not understand this, especially when the failures are so blatant. This might be the one thing that undermines a gradual libertarian victory—not that we failed in our rhetoric and reasoning, but simply that people refuse to understand when the truth is staring them straight in the face.