Last week, the brother of a member of our Ogle County community was taken by ICE during a raid in Chicago, then was swiftly transported to a detention facility in Louisiana, far away from his wife and three children.

Andres Rojas-Fuerte has been running a successful business for 20 years, serving over 300 commercial and residential clients. He has worked hard, paid his taxes and has employed several staff, who were also taken by ICE.

Andres’ brother, Eric Rojas, and sister-in-law, Melissa Nicholson Rojas, are members of the Trinity Lutheran church in Mt. Morris. While I don’t know either Melissa or Eric, I was made aware of this from a friend.

I hope everyone who reads this letter will take the time to imagine how you would feel if a family member of yours was taken off the streets by masked ICE agents and whisked away to another state. I don’t know the details of this particular raid, but I have seen video and photos of other raids in the Chicago area and the brutality is really hard to watch.

The message from the Trump administration is that these are the “worst of the worst” being “removed” to “protect” all of us. Yet reality shows that is not the case. In the last several weeks, young children have been dragged out of their beds and zip tied together for hours, away from their parents. American citizens were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night after their doors were broken in, they were detained for hours, and their homes were ransacked.

For those of you who voted for Trump, did you really vote for this? For terrorizing and brutalizing human beings and treating them like animals? I don’t believe that there are people in our community who are alright with this, but I do believe that many are closing their eyes to what is happening outside of our bubble called Ogle County.

Just because it isn’t happening here today, doesn’t mean it won’t in the future as the administration gets bolder and bolder. They are targeting people and detaining them without any evidence. This is unconstitutional behavior, and all of us should be very concerned. We need to stand up for our representative democracy before it slips away from us.

Is our immigration system broken? Absolutely. And we should expect our members of Congress to finally work together and enact a solution. It has been far too long since they have tackled and resolved this problem. But – that doesn’t give any agency the right to brutally hunt down people using the excuse that they are “animals”, “the worst of the worst” or other lies.

Just imagine if your sister, brother, mother, father or child was treated like Andres Rojas-Fuerte. What would you do? And if you were caught up in a raid because an agent believed you looked like “the worst of the worst”, who would stand up for you? Just think about that. Look at the history of what has happened in other countries when people, citizens, were treated this way.

You might say, “But this isn’t who we are”. And yet, right now, it is who we are.

-Linda Pottinger, Oregon