My story functioned just to affirm the police action, and didn't come close to telling the truth or exposing the mechanisms of power at work.
There's more than one story I wrote as a journalist where I feel like I wasn't able to get anywhere close to anything like the truth, and more than one where, frustratingly, I acted as a cog in a machine that made helpless people more helpless. This is one of those, and one that bothers me.[...]It's basically impossible to get the public to think about whether or not they really want to be a people or a society that treats people this way -- whether, for instance, they want to be a society that benefits from the labor of undocumented workers while punishing those workers if and only if they encounter some problem or need some help, making it so there's an invisible underclass accepted and rewarded so long as they stay out of sight and trouble, don't need anything like medical help or police protection, but then they're punished to an extreme degree if they can't remain invisible, a system which the middle class and the corporations greatly benefit from without having to take any responsibility for. It seems impossible to call attention to, at least to me.
Please read the rest of it.
Then, if you haven't already, you should check out "The Borders Within," a year-long, award-winning series by Chase Purdy and Tony Gonzalez.
