OUTRAGEOUS: Saving lives is less important than stopping illegal immigration

The outrages from the ironically named Department of Homeland Security just keep coming.  Now, it's been revealed that in the event of a major hurricane heading toward the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, citizenship documents will be checked by the Border Patrol before anyone gets on the buses in place like Brownsville, McAllen, and the other cities and towns in the Valley.  And the Border Patrol will maintain its checkpoints on the roads heading north, presumably to assure that those who are evacuating themselves and their families in privately-owned vehicles aren't harboring illegal aliens:

"It's business as usual at the checkpoints," said Dan Doty, spokesman for CBP's Rio Grande Valley sector. "We'll still check everybody."

I've been through those inland checkpoints, and they create traffic jams even when there's NOT a mass evacuation going on.  One can only imagine what will happen when there is the heavy traffic that would be produced by a major evacuation.

The Border Patrol explains that maintaining the checkpoints really isn't so bad:

Document checks are not mandatory at the checkpoints; it's up to an agent to assess travelers and determine whether to ask for papers. Doty said that even with the checks, 120,000 people could be evacuated within 80 hours.

"Our agents, they do it so often, they know what to look for," he said.

In my personal experience, here's how they "know what to look for:"  They check the documents of everybody with brown skin, but nobody with white skin.  My wife and I had spent the Christmas holidays one year with my parents, who had retired to McAllen, TX.  There had been several days of heavy fog in the entire lower Rio Grande Valley that was predicted to continue for several more days, and our flight home had been cancelled.  So overnight on January 2nd (which happened to be our first wedding anniverary), we found ourselves sitting near the back of a Greyhound bus heading north to Houston when the bus stopped at one of these checkpoints.  Border Patrol agents got on the bus and demanded to see the papers of everybody with brown skin (all of whom were apparently American citizens or legal resident aliens, since they didn't remove anybody), but didn't ask to see ours or those of the handful of other non-Latino people on the bus.  My wife was sufficiently outraged by the obvious discrimination that she asked if the Border Patrol agent didn't want to see our papers.  "No, that won't be necessary," he replied.  Whereupon my wife DEMANDED that he look at them.  This was back in the 1970's, and for all he knew, we might have been Soviet spies, but since we obviously weren't part of the "brown horde" on which our border security efforts still seem to be disproportionately focused, they didn't much care.

Not surprisingly, Texas officials of all political persuasions don't seem to think this policy makes a great deal of sense:

Krista Piferrer, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said Thursday the state's stand on the issue had not changed.

"The governor's office prefers that the Border Patrol not use checkpoints during times of evacuation for obvious reasons," she said. "It will slow down traffic and create problems. ... During times of emergency our priority No. 1 is safety and we continue to hold on to the same belief."

And what happens if they find an illegal alien during these checks?  They'll send them to a detention center outside the path of the hurricane.  What happens if, as will surely happen in many instances because the situation is very common in the lower Rio Grande Valley, all of the members of the family are citizens except for an elderly grandparent, or if the children are citizens and the parents aren't?  DHS officials won't say.

A local minister described the inevitable consequences of this incredibly wrong-headed decision when a major hurricane hits the area (and it's a question of when, not if):

"We can't wait to see the helicopter photos of us sitting on roofs," said the Rev. Mike Seifert, a priest and activist based in a colonia outside Brownsville. The many area families with one or more undocumented members would just refuse to evacuate, he said.

"Imagine," Seifert said. "We're all in an uproar, everybody's in an enormous hurry, there's just a narrow window of opportunity and you get to the place with the buses and the Border Patrol's checking people. You're not going to go."

So to protect our "security," our government has adopted a policy that will, in the event of a major hurricane in that area, almost certainly lead to the deaths of American citizens, either because of traffic bottlenecks or because they're unwilling to leave a perhaps elderly member of their family behind.  But I guess that people with brown skin in the lower Rio Grande Valley are no more important to our government than those with black skin in New Orleans.  For those who thought the shocking photos of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina would change our priorities, think again.