I might find the alleged justification for Mauricio Perozin's deportation a little less specious if ICE showed even a fraction of the same interest in going after the wealthy Americans and corporations who pad their bank accounts and make healthy profits while exploiting immigrants, documented and undocumented.
But I guess you can't deport a corporation. They usually self-deport, so they can make even more money by exploiting even much poorer people in Third World countries. That's the American way.
The impending deportation of Mauricio Perozin is perverse and obscene and gratuitously cynical because he is currently in the pipeline to receive a green card to legalize his status. His sister, Simone Harris, a naturalized citizen, is his sponsor.
"It's just a backlog. It will be approved," says Camila Valenzuela, Perozin's lawyer. "It's just a matter of time."
Perozin's wife, Lisia, said that mid-level ICE officials are nice enough, but they have shrugged their shoulders, saying the decision to ignore the fact that Mauricio is in line to become a legal resident was made by people in higher pay grades.
An ICE statement on Thursday insisted Perozin had been afforded full legal process in his case.
So, let's recap: ICE is going to deport a man who is the main breadwinner for a family whose American-born children will be forced to go on public assistance, and might even become homeless, even though he is eligible for and has applied to become a legal resident.
Does that make any sense to you?
Does that have any moral currency with you?
This government, our government, is going to needlessly split up a family, needlessly make them destitute, and needlessly force the father to leave the United States for a country he hasn't called home in some 20 years simply because it can.
Now, ain't that America?
Mauricio Perozin has been ordered by ICE to show up at ICE offices in Burlington at 8 a.m. Monday with a one-way ticket to Panama. From there, he is expected to make it back to Brazil.
There is something deeply disturbing about ICE's practice of forcing people to pay for the privilege of abandoning their families. It's on the same point of the moral compass as the Chinese government's practice of forcing families of condemned prisoners to pay for the bullet used to execute them.
But then there's something deeply disturbing about how ICE, under the Trump administration, has been unleashed like reckless, baying hounds, sicced without discretion — not on armed criminals who could shoot or fight back, but on ordinary, working, church-going people like Mauricio Perozin.
Lisia Perozin told me her 10-year-old son, Misael, is too young to understand what is about to happen to their family. Her 15-year-old daughter Kezya is not as fortunate. The girl is wracked with anxiety and depression.
I wanted to catch up with Mauricio and wish him good luck in his next meeting with ICE. But he was too busy working at the dealership in Leominster. He's taking every available hour of work he can get.
"We need to save money," Lisia Perozin said.
I don't know how anyone who works for ICE can look in the mirror when they spend so much of their limited time and resources going after people like Mauricio Perozin instead of locking up criminals in Lawrence or Chelsea or East Boston or just about any urban neighborhood in Massachusetts and beyond who cause havoc — not primarily in places with well-kept lawns where many of those who work for the government live, but mostly in communities filled with other immigrants.
Still, with apologies to John Mellencamp, ain't that America, for you and me. Ain't that America, we're something to see. Ain't that America, home of the free. Little pink houses for you and me. But not for the Perozin family.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
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