Granted, she got busted in H-town for shoplifting and gave a false name to the po-po's that unfortunately for her also happened to be the name of a wanted twentysomething Colombian national with a warrant and ended up being deported out of the country.
What needs to be questioned here is why ICE officers and officials didn't take the time to positively ID her, much less ask themselves the things that make you go hmm question of why a person who has given you the name of a Colombian national can't speak a word of Spanish, much less her fingerprints didn't match the name of the person in question?
But this catch 'em and deport 'em strategy is problematic on a lot of levels because it is breaking up families, and as Jakadrien's case points out, a lot of Latinos look like us.
With African-Americans increasingly living in neighborhoods side by side with Latinos, work with them and patronize Latino/a owned businesses. Because we live in a world with interlocking webs of mutuality, as Jakadrien's case was evidence of, what affects one group affects all of us. Let's conjure up a scenario in which ICE raids say for example a Dominican beauty shop in which a sistah is getting her hair hooked up. She happens to not have her license on her and finds herself with a one way ticket out of the country if the same sloppy procedures and bad luck that reared its head in Jakadrien's care happened to my hypothetical sister getting her hair hooked up.
Jakadrien is back in Dallas now, but what happened to her highlights the fact that this is not just a Latino problem in terms of the ICE deportations breaking up and separating families.
We need to as a nation come to a common sense solution to deal with immigration policy that everybody can live with. Probably isn't going to happen this year, but we definitely need to be discussing it with our Latino/a allies
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