In today’s culture everyone is victim. It doesn’t matter how responsible one is for getting themselves into a situation, the fault always lies elsewhere. The following WaPo article pulls out all the stops in trying to get readers to sympathize with the criminals (illegal aliens) instead of law enforcement.

Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, where hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families gathered, hoping to avoid arrest.

What a terrible plight for this family man who, if this opening is anything to go by, is guilty of nothing more than trying to work in a country run by a bunch of fascists!

“I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa,” said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. “Are they mad because I’m working?”

Yes, that’s exactly why they’re mad. Don’t ask me why they don’t arrest all those millions of people working while legally in the country, though. I’m sure that’s just coincidence.

Monday’s raid on the Agriprocessors plant, in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration’s largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself “Hometown to the World.” Half of the school system’s 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.

Cry me a river.

Current and former officials of the Department of Homeland Security say its raid on the largest employer in northeast Iowa reflects the administration’s decision to put pressure on companies with large numbers of illegal immigrant workers, particularly in the meat industry. But its disruptive impact on the nation’s largest supplier of kosher beef and on the surrounding community has provoked renewed criticism that the administration is disproportionately targeting workers instead of employers, and that the resulting turmoil is worse than the underlying crimes.

“They don’t go after employers. They don’t put CEOs in jail,” complained the Postville Community Schools superintendent, David Strudthoff, 51, who said the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town’s population of 2,300 “is like a natural disaster — only this one is manmade.”

He added, “In the end, it is the greater population that will suffer and the workforce that will be held accountable.”

“Disproportionate” is a favorite cry of liberals when they want to try and evoke the issue of fairness in situations where it is entirely irrelevant. Criminals do not get to cry that it’s not fair that they got caught while other criminals did not. Yes, the administration should go harder after businesses that knowingly hire illegals, but those cases, due to the necessity of proving what they knew about their employees, are much more difficult to build than those against individuals illegals, whose very presence in the country is all the evidence necessary. That not enough effort is being put into going after these businesses is not a reason to sympathize with the criminal behavior of illegal aliens, as the author of this article so desperately wants the reader to conclude.

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