I mean, really -- treating lawbreakers like lawbreakers! What could they have been thinking?

By the time he tugged on a pair of jeans and walked toward the living room, he could hear nearby voices shouting. He saw his mother on the couch, being peppered with questions by four immigration agents — questions about her papers, questions about his, questions about two single men who rented rooms from them. In his entire life, all 18 years, Alex had never seen her so close to crying.

In the end, the agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement accepted the proof that Alex and his mother, who has permanent resident status, were legal. The two renters, Roberto and Augustine, were led away in handcuffs, Roberto wearing only his boxer shorts.

Then Ms. Sorto discovered how the agents had apparently entered her apartment; the window of the locked side door, intact the previous night, was now broken.

Even after all the tumult, Ms. Sorto insisted that Alex go to school. Even though it was 8:30, and he had no classes for another hour, she drove him there. He watched her hands quake as she tried to steer. In art class, his favorite, he could not get his pencil to move. All he could think about was what would become of him if his mother were taken away.

Such was the triumph of Operation Cross Check, the federal raid against illegal immigrants that went on for four days last month in this community of about 18,500 people. To the Department of Homeland Security, the operation was a success, catching a convicted sex offender and several welfare cheats among its 49 arrests. In a news release announcing the toll, an immigration enforcement director for Minnesota said, “Our job is to help protect the public from those who commit crimes.”

Yet more than half of those arrested had committed no crime other than being in the United States illegally, doing the jobs at Jennie-O that prop up the local economy. And, as the experience of Alex Sorto demonstrates, the aggressive, invasive style of the sweep instilled lasting fear among WillmarÂ’s 3,000 Hispanics, many of them students born or naturalized in the United States. These young people are the political football in AmericaÂ’s bitter, unresolved battle about immigration.

“All of us are scared,” said Andrea Gallegos, a junior at the high school. “When you go to school, you don’t know if your parents will be there when you come home. I don’t feel safe anywhere — walking to the school bus, walking outside the school building.”

I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of all these sob-stories about the poor persecuted border-jumpers and their kin, forced to live with the threat of having the law enforced. What next? Articles about how the children of drug dealers live with the daily threat of their parents being arrested?

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