By Matthew Holt

I don’t go off topic on THCB much these days, but I do so after reading about the arrests of illegal immigrants at a meat-packing plant in Iowa and the treatment of those arrested.

The “war on drugs” was ramped up in 1986 after a basketball star allegedly died from a cocaine overdose and has since been perverted into a budget-busting bonanza, going largely after marijuana users who are doing little harm to themselves or anyone else. But they are still being arrested in their hundreds of thousands, and contributing massively to the budgets of law enforcement and prisons nationwide.

It was entirely predictable that the same thing would happen to the “war on terror.” In order to justify the huge and growing budget of the Department of Homeland Security’s biggest agency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), illiterate illegal immigrants who are doing nothing more than trying to support their families are now being charged and jailed for laughable offenses using legislation put on the books to stop terrorists. The “war on terror” is now taking on the vital stronghold of rural Guatemala, via Postville, Iowa. The aim is clearly to justify ICE’s budget by pretending that illegal immigrants are serious criminals.

Just in case you thought the callous indifference of this Administration couldn’t get much worse, you should read the whole account from the interpreter who was at the court cases at Postville, Iowa. Hundreds of immigrants are being jailed for up to 5 months — at your and my expense — on the insistence of the DOJ and the ICE.

Here’s the whole account from interpreter Erik Camayd-Freixas, and I urge you to read it.