When Subu Vedam was seized by ICE last October, he thought he’d be released in a matter of weeks, if not days.
After all, his murder conviction had been overturned and he was still a legal permanent resident of the United States. Technically, he was deportable because of drug offenses he was charged with around the same time he was accused of killing Tom Kinser. But he had spent 43 years in prison. Surely, he had been sufficiently punished.
Clearly, he underestimated the depravity of the Department of Homeland Security.
Subu has now been stuck in the limbo of ICE’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center for seven months – with no end in sight.
As recently as April 2, Subu’s release seemed imminent. On that day, an immigration judge found that Subu had more than atoned for “possession (of LSD) with intent to sell” 45 years ago. “He is a person of good moral character,” Judge Adam Panopoulos declared. His decades of service and self-improvement while in prison suggest that allowing him to remain in this country “is in the best interests of the United States.”
Judge Panopoulos’ ruling was such a resounding rejection of Homeland Security’s contention that Subu was “a career criminal” likely to resume a life of crime if granted his freedom, that his many supporters dared hope that the feds would have no grounds to appeal.
Clearly, they underestimated the depravity of the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS has indeed appealed; another judge rejected Subu’s request that he be released on bond while awaiting the hearing of that appeal. And so this man who spent his entire adult life in a cell at the state prison in Huntingdon remains locked away in a dormitory at the ICE detention facility in Philipsburg.
The Trump administration, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote last year, regards “power not as a blessing that compels you to be generous but as a bludgeon that allows you to be cruel.”
That about says it. As another example of the Trump administration’s cruelty, consider the case of Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé. As you may have heard, Ross-Mahé dated an American soldier named Bill Ross when he was stationed in France in the 1950s. The two married other people, then reconnected when their spouses died. A year ago, they wed. Marie-Thérèse, a French citizen, moved to Alabama.
Bill Ross died in January. On April 1, immigration agents got Marie-Thérèse out of bed, cuffed her and flew her, still in her nightgown and bathrobe, to a detention center in Louisiana. She’s 85 years old, thrown in jail for the crime of overstaying her visa. (Her application for permanent residency was pending.)
This story, at least, has a happy ending: After 16 days in custody, she was deported back to France, where her adult children still live. It probably didn’t hurt that the French government intervened on her behalf. Most detainees, Subu Vedam among them, don’t have that kind of clout.
When you hear about cases like Subu’s or Ross-Mahé’s, recall that the Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that its focus is on deporting “the worst of the worst.” A Department of Homeland Security web page presents a rogue’s gallery of rapists, murderers, child molesters and drug dealers.
“These are the dirtbags ICE is arresting and removing from our country,”said former DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
What the DHS site doesn’t tell you is that more than three quarters of the immigrants ICE arrested last year had no criminal convictions. Some other stats from a Guardian analysis published earlier this year:
- Nearly half of the criminal convictions were for traffic and immigration offenses.
- Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions.
- Some 9% of the criminal convictions were for assault, 1% were for sexual assault and 0.5% were for homicide.
Think of the money we’re spending on these arrests and deportations – about $29 billion per year.
Think of the lives we’re disrupting.
This week, I started reading a beautifully written memoir by a man who was in ICE custody for 55 days this year. I promised not to reveal any of his identifying details until the book is published. But I can tell you this: The author was arrested while driving his wife to work and his 7-year-old stepdaughter to school.
Think of the cruelty.
Think of Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé, 85 years old, not allowed to get dressed, chained by her wrists and ankles to other detainees.
Think of Subu Vedam, locked up for all but the first 20 of his 64 years on this planet, a man who, in the words of our memoirist, carries himself “with the particular stillness of someone who has been tested by things most people cannot imagine and has come out the other side not hardened but deepened.”
Mark my words: This era of ours will be seen as a disgrace, like the time of the Japanese internment camps.
