in an ideal world...

in an ideal world, the indy star wouldn't have to publish stories like this one. in an ideal world, the facts and ideas expressed in this article would be so mind-numbingly obvious to all that there'd be no reason for kevin o'neal to spend the hours gathering quotes from ICE and law enforcement, writing the story, and filing it.

but this isn't an ideal world; it's indiana, and we have wingnuts like john hostettler representing us in congress:

While some Hoosiers, including an Indiana congressman, have questioned why illegal immigrants weren't arrested at last month's immigration protests, local and federal officials say they have neither the staff nor the jail space to do it.

U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., was among those questioning why law enforcement didn't make mass arrests at the marches.

so while it saddens me that kevin o'neal had to waste his time writing this article, i understand why he did. still, it would've been nice if this article had appeared a month ago, back when hostettler first made his ridiculous statement. after all, i expressed pretty much all the ideas in this article in a single parenthetical expression back on april 14:

(as just one example, indiana's own john hostettler was upset that la migra wasn't out in full force during the protests, checking everyone's papers and arresting immigrants en masse. how that could have worked, i'm not sure: does IPD have the capability to run background checks on 20,000-50,000 people in an afternoon? if, for the sake of argument, half of those protesters were undocumented immigrants, where would we put these 10,000-25,000 arrestees while they awaited processing and deportation? and that's just indianapolis, one of many cities to see large rallies.)

sure, i didn't get quotes from ICE or the sheriff's department, like o'neal did, but i didn't need to. a few seconds of rational thought was all i needed. but even assuming the story needed the quotes, how long did it take to get those? why didn't this story appear around april 12th? this stuff should have been included in the original story, rather than appearing 39 days later. it's not like it requires a lot of research to realize we don't have the means to arrest and hold thousands of people in one swoop. ¶