This heartbreaking story is a national disgrace.
Via Pennsylvania’s The Morning Call:
Relatives of 82-year-old Allentown resident Luis Leon are headed to a Guatemalan hospital Saturday in hopes of reuniting with the man they say disappeared without a trace into the American immigration system a month ago — and who, for a time, they thought was dead.
The last time anyone in the family saw Leon was June 20, when he went with his wife to a Philadelphia immigration office to have his lost green card replaced.
There, the family says, he was handcuffed by two officers, who led him away without explanation. His wife, who speaks little English, was left behind and kept in the building for 10 hours until she was released to her granddaughter, the family says.
Repeated inquiries to immigration officials, prisons, hospitals and even a morgue yielded no information. Leon’s name was not in ICE’s online database of detainees.
A relative in Chile learned Leon had been taken to a detention center in Minnesota, then deported to Guatemala.
But why? Leon lived what The Morning Call described as “a quiet life” in the U.S. He had been granted political asylum in the U.S. in 1987 after being tortured in Chile by the Pinochet government. He raised four children in Allentown and retired after a long career at a manufacturing plant.
Not only was Leon seized when he was trying to do the right thing, replacing a lost green card, he “never had so much as a parking ticket,” The Morning Call verified.
The only explanation is that it’s not just cruelty that’s the point, but fascism, too.
