There was a deeper meaning in what took place. It was intended to demonstrate the difference between undocumented individuals arrested in a civil disobedience scenario with high publicity and the case where individuals were arrested without the high publicity. The two mentioned here, Isaac Barrera and Jonathan Perez managed to get into the detention center and where quickly processed. There were going to be more involved in different locations but my understanding was that a car broke down and an ICE agent recognized one of the occupants in the car ruining the plans for the other participants.

The 13 undocumented immigrants that were detained in the highly public case did not get ICE holds because according to ICE and as they quoted the governor of Alabama in the news, they are actually permanent residents (they are not, I know this for a fact, one of those arrested is a parent of two active IYJL members). The new tactic that ICE seems to be employing is to call those arrested in highly public civil disobedience cases permanent residents and in some cases eligible for citizenship in order to avoid placing a hold on them and releasing them right away (it sort of happened in the Chicago 6 case over the summer).

This was truly an interesting development.

Something else of importance, those that were arrested managed to collect the stories of other undocumented individuals in the detention center, some of whom had been in the facility for 6-12 months without any contact with the outside world. In one particular touching case, there seems to be a couple who where caught by ICE after dropping their child off at school, they did not know what happened to their child.

What is of particular interest for Alabama, this Civil Disobedience was the first one in many decades, and hopefully it will ensure that they will rethink their actions.

The people that came back, they were talking about the southern hospitality they observed, yes, there was some pronounced racism in public, but for the most part there were many people that were supportive.