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The Big Separation
As the folks in the PIT are well aware (because of my incessant yammering on the topic), over the last two or three weeks, other than keeping up with the news, I’ve watched almost nothing but classic episodes of Dragnet (nearly two hundred of them). Putting that together with the current situation at the border, I couldn’t help but think that Joe Friday would have that business whipped into shape in no time. What follows is 1970 Joe Friday, dealing with the current situation.
The Big Separation
Joe Friday (voice-over): This is the city… Los Angeles, California. Los Angeles is a modern city, a big postwar suburb with few visible traces of its long past. The buildings are new, the streets and roadways are new… even the people are new. Eight out of ten citizens of Los Angeles started out life somewhere else, drawn here by the opportunities to achieve the American dream. And those opportunities abound. Here you’ll find the most advanced aerospace technology, the rival of any nation on earth. Los Angeles has embraced the new field of computer technology, producing products and services that are the envy of the world. Mostly unseen, there is a thriving petroleum industry. Not all of the industry is new… with only 3% of the nation’s farms, California produces more than 25% of the nation’s table food. There are a thousand ways for an honest citizen to make a living here. Some people are looking for something else. That’s when I go to work. I carry a badge.
***
Dum-da-dum-dum. Dum-da-dum-dum-DUMMMM.
Announcer (v-o): The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
***
Joe Friday (v-o): Thursday, April 4th… it was warm in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out of Juvenile Division. My partner is Bill Gannon. The boss is Captain Ed Mercer. My name is Friday.
Bill Gannon: You see Joe, it’s just like I’ve been telling you.
Joe Friday: What’s that?
Bill Gannon: You need to watch what you eat. The body is a temple. You should pay attention to what you put in it.
Joe Friday: Like you do?
Bill Gannon: That’s right, Joe.
Joe Friday: I guess so. You sure did pay attention to those three hot dogs you had for lunch yesterday.
Captain Ed Mercer: Friday, Gannon!
Joe Friday: Yassir.
Captain Ed Mercer: You’re in early. That’s good, I’ve got a special assignment for you boys. I need you to get down to San Diego. They’re completely swamped, and they’re asking for help from all over the southern half of the state. Report to the captain at East Mesa.
Joe Friday: Yassir.
Joe Friday (v-o): 7:52 AM. We left the Georgia Street Juvenile Detention Center, heading to Interstate 5 for the trip to San Diego. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized the construction of forty-one thousand miles of controlled-access highways and freeways, creating a network of high-speed transportation facilities between all major cities throughout the nation. This had been particularly successful in California, allowing the connection of the major cities that run along the coastline with each other, and with the interior of the state. Using this system of modern, well-maintained roadways, we quickly arrived at our destination.
9:35 AM. We reported to Captain John Carter at the East Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility. He welcomed us, assigned us desk space, and then explained why we were there.
Captain John Carter: You’ve heard about the massive influx of asylum seekers we’re getting at the border, many of them family units with small children?
Joe Friday: Yassir
Captain John Carter: East Mesa is the juvenile facility closest to the border, so we’re working hand-in-hand with the Border Patrol and Immigration Service from the San Ysidro Port of Entry to process all the requests. We’ve set ourselves up as a triage center for the family unit cases, with all of the required facilities, whether that be medical, social workers… everything we need in one place. That’s why we sent out the call for Juvenile officers… we’ve put together case files; we need you folks to drive these cases through to resolution.
Joe Friday: Well, we’re here to help.
Captain John Carter: I assume you’re aware of the restrictions we’re working under. If they ask for asylum, we’re required to give them a hearing, even when it’s obvious there is no validity to their claim. Since the administrative courts are backed up, that means we either hold them until the hearing, or release them into the interior of the United State. If we release them, only 5% will appear for the hearing, which might take place years later. If they have children, we can only hold them for twenty days, meaning that virtually all of them will be released.
Joe Friday: Yeah, the courts have really boxed you in.
Captain John Carter: Maybe not. We’ve come up with a new idea.
Joe Friday (v-o): The captain laid out the plan. It was the kind of idea that seemed obvious as soon as you heard it. The captain gave us an assignment, and we got to work reviewing the file.
9:55 AM. Eva Batista, 25; Hispanic, female, foreign national of Honduras in Central America. In her file she was listed as coming from outside Tegucigalpa, the largest city in Honduras, but there was no way to verify that. Attempts to obtain records from the Honduran government had been unsuccessful. Whether that was due her using a false name, or just the poor record keeping endemic to the third world was impossible to determine. She had presented herself requesting asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, along with her four children; Maria, 10; José, 9; Hector, 5; and Juanito, aged 2. Mrs. Batista, along with the children had been brought to the East Mesa facility for processing, and a lucky thing they were. It was clear from the file that they were experiencing severe medical issues.
10:45 AM. We spoke with Dr. James Kildare, who had done the initial exams on the children.
Joe Friday: Doctor, what kind of medical issues are we talking about?
Dr. James Kildare: Just what you would expect to see among children after making a trip like that. The kids were malnourished and severely dehydrated. Their feet were a mess; covered in festering wounds from their feet repeatedly blistering over an extended period without any treatment. Another week and we would have been doing amputations. All four of them also had hookworm. But that’s not the worst of it.
We had to move the girl, Maria, to Central Receiving Hospital. Gentlemen, she had been brutally assaulted, sexually.
Bill Gannon: Dear God, she’s ten years old.
Dr. James Kildare: Indeed. Her injuries were too severe to deal with here, but I’ve had word that they expect a full recovery. That is, if anyone can truly recover from such a thing.
Joe Friday: Anything else you can tell us, Doc?
Dr. James Kildare: Just that this whole business turns my stomach.
Joe Friday (v-o): 11:05 AM. We thanked the doctor and left. Our next stop was to meet with the child therapist that had been assigned to the case, one Shirley Feeny.
11:35 AM. We met with Ms. Feeny, in the office of one of the administrators.
Joe Friday: Ma’am, we understand the girl was sexually assaulted.
Shirley Feeny: Let’s not sugarcoat the truth, gentlemen. She was raped, and by multiple assailants. And during that, she was beaten to within an inch of her life. She’s not even sure how many men were involved, and of course, since it happened across the border we aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. When she arrived, she had internal bleeding, as well as several fractures. You know, she walked across the border on her own feet. It was a miracle she was able to stand.
Joe Friday: Tough little girl.
Shirley Feeny: Well, she’d better be, if she’s ever going to have a chance to get past this.
Joe Friday: Yeah. Anything else you can tell us?
Shirley Feeny: The girl, Maria? She had been given birth control pills in preparation for the trip. Her mother knew she might be raped and didn’t want her to get pregnant.
Joe Friday: This just keeps getting uglier. Anything else?
Shirley Feeny: Oh yes, Sergeant. I’ve haven’t told you about José.
Joe Friday: That would be the nine-year-old?
Shirley Feeny: That’s right.
Joe Friday: What about him, ma’am?
Shirley Feeny: I had a feeling when I talked to him before that there was something he wasn’t telling me. I just spoke to him again and he admitted to me what happened. When those men attacked his sister, he tried to help her, tried to rescue her. They swatted him away like a fly and gave him a minor beating. But then one of the men raped him as well.
Bill Gannon: Jesus.
Shirley Feeny: Officer, I may never stop crying after this case. Anyway, I’ve just sent him back to medical for additional treatment.
11:55 AM. We thanked Ms. Feeny for her help. The noontime hour was lunchtime in the facility, so we knew we wouldn’t able to see anyone for the next hour. We arranged to have the suspect brought in for questioning afterward, and left the facility on foot, looking for lunch opportunities. Neither of us felt much like eating.
1:30 PM. We began our interview of Eva Batista. Present were the suspect, Officer Gannon and me, as well as the social worker Ms. Feeny. Mrs. Batista spoke fluent English, so there was no need for an interpreter.
At the start of the interview, Mrs. Batista stressed her desire for asylum. However, she repeatedly made use of certain phrases, phrases that happen to exactly match the text used in our immigration law and in the court decisions on the subject. It was clear she had been coached. When confronted with this, Mrs. Batista eventually admitted that her true intent was simply about finding a job in a place where she could make more money than at home. But she held firm to her asylum request.
Eva Batista: I have a right to claim asylum, and I have the right to a hearing on that. It’s not my fault your courts are backed up three years. With my children here, I have a right to wait for the hearing in the United States.
Joe Friday: Let me ask you something. If you walk out of here free today, what are you going to do? Are you going to look around until you spot a nice-looking house, and then walk through the front door, sit down at the dinner table, and demand that they let you live there?
Eva Batista: Of course not. But the government will take care of us. This is a rich country; you can afford to help us.
Joe Friday: Yes ma’am, this country is rich… now. But it didn’t start out that way. That took hundreds of years after the settlers and pioneers came here. Good, decent people who worked hard to build a life for themselves and their families, and sometimes had to fight to keep what they built. They built farms and ranches to produce food, not just for themselves but for a continent; towns and schools to educate their children and churches where they could worship; they built roads, and bridges to connect the wilderness; dams to control the waters, to prevent flooding and to store the water for the dry spells; they dug mines, and built lumber mills, stores and factories to make and sell the goods that created a system of commerce that benefitted all of society. No, this country didn’t start out rich. It was made rich by the hard work and sweat of generations of American citizens trying to make a better life.
Eva Batista: But that is what I want for me and my children too, to work hard and build a better life.
Joe Friday: The American people have a right to enjoy the fruits of those centuries of labor, and not have it stolen from them by a thief in the night. They have a right to not be overrun by people who feel they are entitled to a share, who come here after being told they are not welcome.
Eva Batista: We’re not thieves. I and my children trying to get into this country is more American than you trying to keep us out.
Joe Friday: More American? Let me tell you something. The American people have standards that they want maintained. They want their rights as free individuals protected, and they want laws that will help them create a peaceful and just society. They created a government, to represent them and their interests, and to make those laws. Want to start a business, build a home, own and drive a car? There are laws governing each of those things. Those laws cover every aspect of society, including how we expect people to treat and care for children. We have a lot of laws on that, and when people break them, we act, including removing children from their parent’s custody and placing them with folks who will look after them properly.
Do you understand how low that threshold is for American parents? I remember a case where children were removed from a home because some folks let their two children walk two hundred yards down their street and play in a public park unsupervised. There was even a case where it was nothing more than allowing a child to play alone in the front yard of their home. Now you say that what you’re doing here is an American thing to do. Well, another American thing is following our laws and the standards they represent. Let’s take a look at how you’re doing so far…
You took your four small children on a two-thousand-mile hike, much of it across desert terrain, including some of the most dangerous territory on the planet. You didn’t bring more than a single change of clothes for any of you, and you didn’t bring any reasonable amount of food, water or even money to pay for them. Instead, you counted on begging for help along the way. You hitchhiked with those small children, accepting rides from anyone who stopped; you even rode on the outside of railroad boxcars. You associated with known criminals and put your children in contact with them. As a result of all that, your children arrived here dehydrated and malnourished, covered in lice and with their feet in a dangerously damaged condition.
Worse yet, two of them have been sexually assaulted. They’ve been raped. How does that compare to the choices made by those American parents who lost their children?
Eva Batista (crying): But that’s why I gave Maria those pills. I knew something might happen, and those pills were to make sure that they didn’t make her pregnant.
Joe Friday: If you ask me, that makes it even worse. You gave your daughter those pills because you knew how likely it was that she would be assaulted, and even knowing that, you still chose to put her in that danger. And you put José in that situation as well. Where are the pills to make it okay for him?
Joe Friday (v-o): 2:15 PM. We booked in the suspect on four counts of felony child endangerment. Then we returned to fill in Captain Carter on the disposition of the case. 2:55 PM.
Joe Friday: And that’s it, Captain; all tied up with a bow. You know, this looks to be one of those cases that sticks with you. I’m glad to help you out here today, but I’ll tell you the truth; I’m looking forward to getting home and putting this one behind us.
Bill Gannon: That makes two of us.
Captain John Carter: I don’t think you understand; you fellas aren’t done. We’re working on 400,000 more case files.
Bill Gannon: I’d better call Loraine and tell I won’t be home for dinner.
***
Dum-da-dum-dum. Dum-da-dum-dum-DUMMMM.
Announcer (v-o): The story you have just seen is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
***
Announcer (v-o): On June 1st, a hearing was held in Juvenile Court for the City of San Diego. As a result of that hearing, the defendant was found unfit and her parental custody rights were permanently terminated. The children were placed in the custody of the California Youth Authority, who put the children in a temporary foster home, pending formal adoption proceedings.
On July 12th, a trial was held in Department 65 of the Superior Court for the State of California, in and for the County of San Diego. The defendant was found guilty on four counts of first-degree child endangerment. First-degree child endangerment is punishable by imprisonment in the county jail for not more than one year, or imprisonment in the state penitentiary for not less than one year, and not more than five years.
Eva Batista is currently serving her sentence in the California Institution for Women, Corona, California. Given the felony criminal conviction, her request for asylum was denied. The Immigration Service has requested a hold on her release so that upon the completion of her sentence, she can be deported back to Honduras.
***
Okay fine, it’s not a true story. But maybe it should be.
Published in Immigration
I’ve had days like that.
Wow, just wow. It’s a searing social indictment and an unbelievably perfect, well informed and brilliant parody of the actual Dragnet with the darkest humor imaginable. Like Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, an idiot might somehow totally misread it as approving or dismissive of the horrible things Judge Mental condemns. It makes his bitter wit braver.
Just one thing bugs me, and it’s endemic to all of Ricochet, but especially when Judge hits the keyboard. I’m goddamn sick and tired of computer programmers writing better, smarter fiction than we arts graduates who’ve spent decades wasting your time. Stay in your lane, pal.
Well, okay, not if you’re going to be this good.
Exactly. For the children.
Thinking of Dragnet reminds me of my oldest son as a toddler. He had just learned to walk and when the music at the end of Dragnet would play he would run to the TV and grasp the sides and do a little dance as long as it would play. Great post.
Among so many great parts of this post, the above was one of my favorites. We should be talking about this part over and over again. In addition to putting the lie to the Dems’ fake bleating about “the children,” it’s yet another way they show more leniency toward illegals -the citizens of a foreign power – than for our own citizens.
There’s only one part of this story that does not ring true. There’s no way a trip to San Diego on I5 would get you there quickly. Well, maybe at 3 am.
The appearance of Ms Feeney immediately raises the question of the whereabouts of Ms DeFazio. After all, she should get top billing.
Wait until Joe finds out that California is a Sanctuary State and that a 30 year-old MS13 gang banger with face tats can choose to be treated as a minor.
Even in 1970?
That was very intentional. One of the things that I laughed at over and over from the sixties shows is that no two points in L.A. are ever more than twenty minutes apart. Just figure 75 mph door to door.
And as dark as the story turned, I had some fun with the names. Every one of them is a fictional character from something.
Thanks Gary, I’m sure you’re too kind. I didn’t set out to write something that dark. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a “I Demand Family Separation” post for a few weeks now, highlighting the insanity of the double standard in play. No Democrat would ever argue in favor of returning children to abusive parents if they were citizens, but there doesn’t seem to be any behavior whatsoever that will make them condemn one of these parents.
As I wrote, Friday turned into the mouthpiece for my arguments in that would-be post. And then I also snuck in some Dem arguments as well. The line about trying to cross being more American than trying to prevent them came straight out of Nancy Pelosi’s mouth.
And Dragnet might well have been the most formulaic show in the history of TV, so all I had to do was follow the recipe.
Yes, exactly. The champions of children suddenly don’t give a damn what happens to them as long as they get their future voters.
Thanks, RA. The Friday speeches are interesting. When he gets going, he talks in bullet points, but runs them all together into one paragraph. I liked the rich country paragraph for that.
I thought Captain John Carter was of Virginia.
When you are good, you are very, very good. Thank you for this.
None of those people live in San Diego.
Thank you, ma’am.
One interesting note on those (nearly) 200 episodes. Joe Friday did not say, “Just the facts, ma’am” in any of them. Not. One. Single. Time.
If anything, he encourages them to blather on as long as they want. I don’t know how that ever became a trope of the show.
Jack Webb’s introduction to on-screen police work was 1948’s He Walks by Night, in which he plays the kind of cheerful police lab technician later parodied in Police Squad! Dragnet was part of a postwar wave of new radio programs that were realistic, or at least naturalistic, without the corny flourishes and organ music of the Thirties. Part of that realism was a Dragnet trademark, as Judge says, the odd rambles of everyday conversation.
I’ve enjoyed the radio series, every episode, on a podcast that became “Great Detectives of Old Time Radio.” The host has pointed out the pre-Miranda world reflected in Dragnet, and the changing society reflected over the long run of the radio and TV series. All true, and they are good, brief, entertainment.
The ads and PSAs in old time radio are great. This one could be played today. It should be played today.
Yes. And the petty gossip of neighbors, eager to say something but proving unreliable. And the long series of rabbit holes, before the big break.
The radio origins linger through the end of the series in 1970. The shows are mostly shot like silent movies, with a radio show playing over it. It’s entirely common to show characters talking, but rather than hearing them, you get Friday doing voice-over exposition, telling you what they are talking about. Jack Webb apparently never got the “show, don’t tell” memo.
Wonderful. Now I really understand the “I regret that I have but one “like” to give to this post” thing.
Absolutely Brilliant! Humor with good social commentary. Love it!
Only one quibble. I must agree with the good DrLorentz. No way in hell would Sergeant Friday be able to make it to San Diego near the border in an hour and 43 minutes. Not even at 3 am. Not even in 1956, particularly if you drive like the updated Sergeant Friday played by Dan Ackroyd in the 1987 movie, where he fastidiously obeyed the speed limit. Probably would need to add at least 2 or 3 more hours these days.
Two points.
All I did was eliminate several million other motorists.
Said HITLER!