Justice is a Foreign Concept

At least to the bureaucrats of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as "ICE", which is also an indication of the temperature of their blood and of their souls.

The judge and the juvenile had grown up on the same mean streets, 40 years apart. And in fall 1996, they faced each other in a New York court where children are prosecuted as adults, but sentenced like candidates for redemption.

The teenager, a gifted student, was pleading guilty to a string of muggings committed at 15 with an eclectic crew in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The judge, who remembered the pitfalls of Little Italy in the 1950s, urged him to use his sentence — three to nine years in a reformatory — as a chance to turn his life around.

“If you do that, I am here to stand behind you,” the judge, Michael A. Corriero, promised. The youth, Qing Hong Wu, vowed to change.

Mr. Wu kept his word. He was a model inmate, earning release after three years. He became the main support of his immigrant mother, studying and working his way up from data entry clerk to vice president for Internet technology at a national company.

But almost 15 years after his crimes, by applying for citizenship, Mr. Wu, 29, came to the attention of immigration authorities in a parallel law enforcement system that makes no allowances for rehabilitation. He was abruptly locked up in November as a “criminal alien,” subject to mandatory deportation to China — the nation he left at 5, when his family immigrated legally to the United States.

This makes absolutely no sense at all. Sometimes the law is an ass. And so are the people who hide behind the shield of the law to perpetrate an unjust act. The people at ICE who are involved in this should be drinking themselves into a stupor each night so that they don't have to contemplate the evil that they are doing.

But they probably aren't. They are not among the righteous in this world. They are merely the cogs in an apparatus of evil. They are the ones who are doing nothing and letting evil prevail. Worst of all are the cadre of people known as "immigration judges", for they apparently judge nothing, only punch papers. They should be renamed as "immigration administrators", for "justice" is not part of their toolkit.