A
persistent and fair criticism of the current administration is that while it has made grand pronouncements of focusing its enforcement efforts on violent criminals and threats to the national security, programs like
287(g) and Secure Communities have scooped far more benign immigrants in their overboard nets. While the administration has put forward
numerous memoranda and made extensive public statements about focusing limited resources on the dangerous and the recidivist immigration violators, the reality has been that, as a result of Secure Communities, immigrants without status and without serious criminal issues encountered by the police either due to a minor offense, while reporting a crime, or while the police look for another individual have been swept into the immigration dragnet, detained and deported.
On December 23, 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who went on to become Russia’s greatest novelist, and several other members of the so-called Petrachevsky Circle were taken out into the courtyard of the Semonyonov Prison in St. Petersburg. The tsarist government had sentenced them to death. Men were blindfolded and tied to posts. The firing squad was locked and loaded when a cart with a reprieve from the Tsar himself commuted the sentence to exile and hard labor. 
