Don't Look Away 👁️

We see horrible things daily in the news, but this week felt worse than usual.

If you could scroll past images of starving children in Gaza, you might have then seen headlines or videos of people being dragged from their cars and off the streets by ICE.

The two documented incidents of ICE agents taking people aggressively in front of their loved ones shocked me. If the rising fears of deportation haven’t impacted you or someone you know, this is a reminder that it is happening very close to you - the suffering is not someone far away. It’s happening close to home.

The first video is a woman being taken from the streets in front of her family, and the second is ICE smashing a window and dragging a man from his car, both taking place in Massachusetts.

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s field offices have been told to make 75 arrests per day, and that “managers would be held accountable for missing those targets.”

As related to this newsletter, immigrants are the backbone of many service industries, but especially the food industry. From agricultural laborers working in fields for 10+ hours a day to restaurant kitchens, without immigrants, we don’t eat.

From Grub Street about New York City:

In the city’s restaurants, nearly 60 percent of the workforce is foreign-born, but that hardly tells the real story. The fact that the industry relies on undocumented labor is not so much an “open secret” as an indisputable truth. “I had a conversation with my chef, he’s Ecuadorean and he’s been working with us for 30 years, and he was like, ‘I guess I’ll just hide when they come,’” says one Jackson Heights restaurateur. “People in the neighborhood are talking about it. Agents are coming around, and people are scared to go to work.”

If you’ve ever had the thought that immigrants are “stealing our jobs,” please think again.

President Trump spoke loudly on the campaign trail about deporting violent criminals, but he has now changed his tune to say that all undocumented immigrants are criminals for having broken the law entering the country illegally and therefore are subject to deportation.

One account I follow, FlowerinSpanish, posted this quote from Anne Frank over the video I described above.

"Terrible things are happening