I missed this when it happened in mid-September.
It’s not in McHenry County, but it’s close to the McHenry-Lake County border, so I thought you might be interested.
144 illegal aliens were arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Chicago metropolitan area, defined broadly enough to include Northwestern Indiana. You can read the full release here.
The closest arrests were in Round Lake.
The only raid I remember in McHenry County was at the Crystal Lake Holiday Inn.
We learned of it when a father walked into our legislative office on Manor Road behind the Shell Station on Route 14 with his infant and at least one other pre-school child. He had no idea how to cope. He had been told his wife was already on a bus to Mexico.
Separating a mother from her baby struck me as mighty poor public policy then and still does.
Fortunately my legislative assistant Pete Castillo was there to console and try to help him.
The raid apparently resulted from new management coming in who apparently called the federalies.
They threw a “Worker Appreciation Day” on a Saturday or Sunday, when most were not working.
As my legislative assistant Pete remembers the details,
“…quite a few who had arrived at that point when Holiday Inn was going to have to pay them severance and retirement benefits. (They) decided to give them the ‘cuffed behind your back, Greyhound Cruiser tour’ back to their homeland at the tax-payers expense. It was blatant corporate greed and nothing else.”
About the man I remember seeing with his children, Pete says,
“The man who came in had, if I am not mistaken, 5 children. When he came to the office he brought 3 youngsters. We helped him reunite his children with his wife who was taken in the raid. We set-up an escort (to Mexico) for him as well as for at least 3 other families. We had already helped this man relocate his wife’s stolen SS checks earlier in the year. We made a Mexican grocery store owner in C-Ville repay the stolen money.”
I then asked Pete about why she was receiving Social Security checks. His reply:
“I am not privy to that. All I know is that the checks were stolen from her mailbox by someone that was connected to the grocery store owner in C-ville. I checked with the SS guy you knew in Woodstock. I don’t remember his name. They were legitimate. She was entitled to receive them. It could have been that she was married before to an American. What do I know? I collected all the money that was stolen. I brought the statute which the store owner violated to C-ville and I promised him 10-years for each offense. He paid!”
From this description of what my legislative assistant did, all that comes to mind is he one amazing, not to mention effective, guy!
As someone has said, “The perception of power is power.”