Last week, there was a federal immigration raid on a leather-goods factory in New Bedford, MA. Here is a timeline of the raid .

Jeff Jacoby:

SUPPOSE YOU LEARN that a New England manufacturer is exploiting its
employees, many of them illegal immigrants, with wretched working conditions. It
fines them for talking on the job, refuses to pay overtime, and penalizes them
for bathroom breaks of more than two minutes, all in addition to low wages, long
hours, and squalid facilities. What do you do?

Well, if you’re the United States government, you send armed agents to haul
the workers off in shackles to a military base 100 miles away, then fly scores
of them more than 2,000 miles to a holding pen in Texas. You provide the
frightened detainees with little information and no access to lawyers. You act
so rashly that many of those you seize are separated from their children and
can’t get word to spouses or babysitters. You display such ineptitude, in fact,
that babies end up in the hospital, dehydrated, after their nursing mothers are
taken away.

The company’s owner and managers, meanwhile, you arrest, charge, and release
on bail. They reopen for business the next day.

That pretty much sums up last week’s federal immigration raid on Michael
Bianco Inc., a leather-goods factory in New Bedford, which has been deservedly
condemned as a humanitarian fiasco. But it is more than that. It is also an
object lesson in the incoherence of American immigration policy, and in the harm
being caused by the national obsession with, and hostility toward , illegal
immigrants.

snip

If tens of millions of drivers consistently break the interstate speed limit, do
we assume that they are all criminals who should lose their licenses and be
banned from the highways? No: A more plausible explanation is that the speed
limit is too low for safe highway driving and ought to be raised. By the same
token, if hundreds of thousands of immigrants come here illegally each year, is
it realistic to conclude that we have a massive crime problem for which a
ferocious crackdown is the only solution? Perhaps it is the case instead that
America’s immigration quotas are simply too low for the world’s most dynamic
economy. And perhaps the persistent influx of industrious workers is not a
plague to be cursed, but a blessing to be better managed.

Cardinal O’Malley, in today’s Globe:

The other issue that demands attention is the fact that, while immigration
reform is urgent, the needs of the women and children in New Bedford are
desperate. Their condition is partly the result of a "broken system," but the
concrete, crying needs of the most vulnerable people impacted by this raid must
be addressed before we set out to fix the system.

It is good that steps have been taken by federal and state agencies to
respond to the needs of the families that were impacted and that the courts are
reviewing this matter. But I am concerned about some of the principles guiding
the response. For example, in order to be released from custody those arrested
in New Bedford had to assert that they were "the sole caretaker" of their
children. The question is intended to guarantee one parent or caretaker for each
child, but reports indicate that this goal has not been met.

More important, the question fails to produce an acceptable humanitarian
policy. Mothers can be separated from their children, and perhaps deported, as
long as there would be a caretaker for the children remaining in Massachusetts.
Immigration law and policy are complex, but a test of "sole caretaker or parent"
as the determinant of being able to remain united with one’s children fails the
test of humane response. That failure is all too well known by the families
impacted by the events of last week.