Breaking Records and Hearts

On day one of this road trip, on Long Island, we met Mario Castellon, the Dallas resident who had undertaken a five month bike ride from El Salvador to the convention in Denver to highlight the plight of immigrants in this country. He is clearly a man who doesn't do things half-heartedly: in another biking adventure, he is going to try to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records by biking around a track for 27 straight hours.

And we've just finished with the Olympics, where it's all about breaking records.

And now, it looks like our federal government is also in the record-breaking mode, having just detained an estimated 595 immigrants at a raid on a plant in Laurel, Mississippi--increasing by 50% its "haul" over the previous world record, the raid at Postville, IA, in May.

It appears that few of the 595 have yet been charged criminally for using someone else's social security number, and a New York Times reporter asked an ICE spokeswoman if it was because ICE took heat for having pursued criminal charges against the Postville workers. According to the article, �'Absolutely not,' said the spokeswoman, Barbara Gonzalez, in an e-mail message. 'In fact it�s the opposite.' She added that more people were being charged with crimes by ICE every year."

I guess ICE is going for the gold in what is surely a pyrrhic victory for our nation.