By Baldemar Velasquez
It was sad to witness the five-county board of the Corrections Center of NW Ohio (CCNO) near Stryker, Ohio, on February 26, 2025, vote to enter into an agreement with Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and turn our jail into a detention center for undocumented people. The 8-2 vote was done with no comments except from Lucas County Commissioner Pete Gerken and Sheriff Michael J. Navarre, the only two opposing votes. Their remarks were pragmatic and humane, and we should be grateful for their attempt to inject some sanity into what NW Ohio is unwittingly or maliciously implicating us, which is the mass deportation hysteria created by the current Trump administration.
Since the Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s (FLOC) inception in 1967, we have witnessed many ICE raids in NW Ohio, and there has never been one that did not include the detention of US citizens based on the color of their skin. In the Corso Flower Garden Center raid near Sandusky in 2018, over 100 people were arrested by heavily armed agents who knew the worker population was unarmed. With many of those arrested being U.S. citizens!
The terror created by this intimidating tactic on family members in homes near the Nursery has caused many to leave their homes and seek refuge in churches and elsewhere. Some children were traumatized for extended periods, and to this day, they don’t know if they have or will ever recover. In addition, there is already a protocol for detaining the hard criminals that President Trump speaks of, i.e., murderers, drug gangs, and rapists. Why cry for more detention space unless they expect to detain those who are here, law-abiding residents whose only crime is being present without authorization?
I remind people that crossing the border without authorization is a misdemeanor and not a felony.
This cries for exercising due process and sane immigration reform as President Reagan did and ushered in the amnesty of 1986. He adjusted those who fit this description and over 3 million undocumented people were processed. His rationale was practical and reasonable, we needed the workers in agriculture and many workplaces that citizens did not find appealing.
It is the same reality today. To see this as purely a financial transaction which is possibly what the other commissioners might have thought seeing that the compensation appears to be lucrative. I can’t judge the other commissioner’s motives as I will leave that to God, but none of them defended or spoke their piece, even in response to Commissioner Gerken or Sheriff Navarre. In addition, they voted down a motion to suspend the rule of a 5-day notice for citizens’ comments. So, no one in the packed meeting room was allowed to speak that day. Lastly, this adds to the moral degradation that is enveloping our country. On this issue, we might as well deport the Statue of Liberty!
The most caustic phrase used to describe these human beings is “illegal alien.” In doing a word study in my Bible, I found 119 references to the word “alien,” and if you read them all they have 3 themes. I will use just three of them to address what Sheriff Navarre was alluding to: 1) Exodus 22:21: Not to mistreat or oppress the alien; 2) Numbers 15:15: Govern the alien with the same laws as yourself; 3) Ezekial 22:29-30: Warns us that God would destroy us if we did not turn from extortion, robbery, oppressing the poor and mistreating the foreigner denying them justice. We have much to do as a country to get right with God.