Gingrich: Track Undocumented Aliens Like UPS
Posted on Feb 27, 2012 7:26am PST
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Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made an audience of conservatives laugh when he ribbed the U.S. government for not using mail services, such as UPS, to track down the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation. What appeared to have been said as a joke-hyperbole at best-actually is not far from reality. A lawsuit has been filed by two Guatemalans that allege Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were guilty of unreasonable search and seizure, and racial profiling when they arrested them picking up a package at a FedEx facility in Florida. The package contained a passport mailed to one of them by the Guatemalan government in the type of sting Gingrich was jokingly suggesting. "It is a practical reality that we have the technology that enables us to track-between UPS and FedEx, we track 24 million packages a day-while they're moving, and we allow you to find out where they are for free," Gingrich told the Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington. He continued by referring to the inability of the federal government to hold those who are undocumented accountable for their breaches in the law. "That's the world that works. Now here's the world that fails: the federal government today cannot find 11 million illegal immigrants, even if they're sitting still. Now, I have a simple proposal: we send a package to everyone who's here illegally, and when it's delivered, we pull it up on a computer, we know where they are."
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the two Guatemalans alleging that when the two 21-year-olds drove to FedEx, ICE officials arrested one of them and held the other at gunpoint before separating her form her 2-year-old son who is a U.S. citizen. While the father was deported, the mother, who was reunited with her child a few hours later, is fighting to remain in the United States. The incident unfolded after FedEx employees inspected the package and alerted ICE officials that it contained a passport due to suspicion of document fraud. The attorney representing the Guatemalan couple said the lawsuit "challenges the interactions of private industry and the government in their attack on Latino immigrants in this country. There's nothing amusing about the idea of government using corporate efficiency in order to violate people's rights. This is a rank operation against a Latino group of people. These passports were lawful passports. There was nothing illegal about them." He accused ICE of conducting warrantless searches of the packages and has filed a suit against ICE and FedEx in U.S. District Court in Florida. The attorney also pointed out that ICE violated international law by limiting the Guatemalan Consulate's ability to get official documents to its nationals in the United States. "This is a free country. There should be a wall between the police function and corporate entities. Corporations should not become police agents of the government," he said. As it turns out, Gingrich's comment that was supposed to be hyperbole was a lot closer to the truth than he may have thought.