To the editor:

I recently watched a video of a young woman being accosted by six unknown masked individuals as she walked from her university to a café to meet some friends. They grabbed this rightfully frightened and confused young woman and shoved her into the back of a waiting vehicle where she was taken to an unknown location several states away from her home.

What I just described wasn’t a kidnapping; this was supposedly a lawful arrest. This is also happening all over the country and not just to criminals. It is happening to law abiding visa holders and even American citizens, people the government now categorizes as “collaterals.” These are ordinary people who have families and jobs. They are our friends and neighbors, but they are being swept up in a frenzied effort to make a political point regarding illegal immigration.

I know we have a tendency in this country to shrug our shoulders when we hear of situations like this and console ourselves with a quick “mistakes happen” and then move on with our lives. Is that the kind of treatment we will now accept from our government? Is that really the country we want for ourselves and our children? To live in fear that a social media post might offend a thin-skinned politician justifying being whisked away to some secret prison, deprived of due process, disconnected from everyone we know and held for an indeterminate amount of time?

Growing up, those were the kinds of stories I was told about Soviet Russia. When did the people of this nation become so spineless that watching our neighbors being deprived of their freedom and dismissively labeled as “collaterals” become acceptable at any level, regardless of political affiliation? The colonists were moved to action and threw shipments of tea into Boston Harbor because of a three-cent tax, so I’m left wondering if our Constitutional liberties are now worth much less?

Brian Volansky

Mehlville