\u201cI have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.\u201d \u2014 Abraham Lincoln<\/p>\n
Without context, the image of a bicycle ditched on a sidewalk is innocuous. Nothing in the frame suggests that shortly before the photograph was snapped by an alarmed neighbor, a 44-year-old single father was riding the bicycle to work when he was cornered by five masked strangers.<\/p>\n
The father, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, fled on foot. The masked strangers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, caught and arrested him. Concepci\u00f3n Castro-Delcid was swiftly deported.<\/p>\n
So was his daughter, Allison, who until Wednesday was a sixth grader and a cheerleader at Dunmore Elementary Center. There are no photographs of the girl being removed from the school by Dunmore police who thankfully stepped in to keep the masked ICE thugs from terrorizing students and teachers.<\/p>\n
The local officers handled the ugly situation professionally and as quietly and compassionately as possible. As a result, students like Caitlin and Jack Holmes didn\u2019t know what happened until they came home.<\/p>\n
Breeda Cronin Holmes was shaken by the arrests, and knew her kids would be, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen everything went down I had to meet Caitlin at the bus and I was like, \u2018What did you see?\u2019\u2009\u201d Breeda told me Monday. \u201cShe told me kids were crying and teachers looked very sad. And then she looks at me and her face drops, and she goes, \u2018What?\u2019 She thought somebody had died.\u201d<\/p>\n
Breeda explained what happened and assured Caitlin, 11, that Allison, also 11, and her father were safe but being deported to Honduras. Sources said they landed safely, but Castro-Delcid\u2019s name was not in the ICE custody database, which doesn\u2019t allow searches for minors. I reached out to the ICE Philadelphia field office to confirm the pair\u2019s status, but received no response by deadline.<\/p>\n
Nasario Damian Contreras, the beloved Moscow restaurateur arrested by ICE on July 15, remains in custody in the Pike County Correctional Facility, according to the database.<\/p>\n
Breeda said Caitlin and Jack, 9, were already familiar with the word \u201cdeportation\u201d and its meaning. That elementary school students are aware of such things is a sorry reflection of how mean-spirited, punitive politics has saturated every level of our snarling society.<\/p>\n
So was the joyful reaction of MAGA Republicans who cheered the arrest and deportation of a single father with no criminal record and a little girl who was wearing a Dunmore Bucks sweatshirt with her name on it when she was taken into custody. The \u201crules for thee, but not for me\u201d crowd howled in approval of the removal of two \u201cillegal aliens.\u201d Many gloated on antisocial media, braying, \u201cI voted for this, and I want more of it!\u201d<\/p>\n
In the MAGA Cult, hypocrisy is gospel. The same \u201claw and order\u201d congregation singing self-righteous hymns in praise of punishment for the powerless fell stone silent when it was reported that \u201cBorder Czar\u201d Tom Homan was recorded accepting a $50,000 cash bribe from undercover FBI agents in 2024. Homan denies any wrongdoing. The truth is in the tape, which the Trump Justice Department buried when it dropped the case citing \u201cinsufficient evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where is the MAGA outrage over the Homan affair? Or Team Trump\u2019s countless broken promises to release the Epstein files, which surely contain evidence incriminating some of the worst creeps and criminals on the planet?<\/p>\n
Never mind all that. It\u2019s more important to snatch up a single father on his way to work and pull his young daughter out of school and the community that embraced them as neighbors. Shame on anyone who thinks America is a safer, fairer place because this tiny family was swept away.<\/p>\n
Breeda and Caitlin befriended Allison and her father two years ago during a free summer program at the Dunmore Community Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cAllison was sitting there by herself one day and she asked Caitlin if they could be friends,\u201d Breeda said. \u201cIt was the cutest thing. The two of them were inseparable that summer going into the fall, and that\u2019s how I met Allison.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I\u2019ll never forget the first time I met her father. He would ride his bicycle and she would walk alongside him. So he would ride his bicycle from their house, and I would see her walking next to him. And he would drop her off, and then he would ride away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Castro-Delcid made a bad choice. His decision not to show up for a 2023 immigration hearing led to removal orders for him and his daughter. It\u2019s possible he was unaware of the hearing, or that he was afraid to appear over Allison\u2019s welfare. Whatever his reason for not appearing, it was Castro-Delcid\u2019s responsibility to manage his immigration status. Strict justice says he and Allison deserved deportation. Mercy says there has to be a better way.<\/p>\n
Castro-Delcid paid taxes, so it\u2019s possible ICE located him via his mailing address. It\u2019s also possible someone tipped the government to his whereabouts. However he was found, he and Allison are gone and unlikely to ever return.<\/p>\n
That breaks Breeda\u2019s heart. The proud daughter of Irish immigrants who crossed an ocean in search of the \u201cAmerican Dream,\u201d she is appalled by the callousness and cruelty of other descendants of immigrants who were greeted with \u201cIrish Need Not Apply\u201d signs and the denigration of Italians as \u201csubhuman.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you see these people who are Irish and Italian and they\u2019re like, \u2018My family came here legally \u2026 ,\u2019\u2009\u201d Breeda said. \u201cThose Irish and Italians were treated like garbage. They came here because they suffered, and that\u2019s why you are able to turn around and say that a little immigrant girl deserves to be in Honduras suffering? It just makes me sick.\u201d<\/p>\n
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, is sick over this, too. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.\u201d \u2014 Abraham Lincoln Without context, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1590,2136,201,182,139,1559,1560,28,178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-25139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-chris-kelly","9":"tag-dunmore","10":"tag-lackawanna-county","11":"tag-local-news","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-opinion","14":"tag-opinion-columnists","15":"tag-pennsylvania","16":"tag-scranton","17":"tag-scranton-headlines","18":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}