Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

The headline of a certain story was alarming. According to a story published by Associated Press on Nov. 14, 2012, government agents were moving to a certain place near Boulder, Colorado, with a plan to remove hundreds of illegal residents from that city, just 30 miles northwest of Denver.

Without reading any further, I could see in my mind similar operations, such as the one that took place in six states in December 2006 at a certain meatpacking Factory, or the raid at a Postville, Iowa, in May 2008. I was not present at any of those places at the time of the events, but I interviewed several people and families affected by the operatives. Many of them are still recovering from those events.

I also thought about similar, but smaller incidents. For example, in June 2011, a few persons were arrested during the Strawberry Festival in Colorado’s Western Slope, or more recent arrests of undocumented worker at a dairy farm in eastern Colorado. I am sure the readers could add their own stories about similar events in other places.

With those ideas in mind, I hurried to read the rest of the story to learn the details. A year ago or so, non-Colorado natives were illegally transported to a place near Boulder. Nobody knows who provided the transportation. However, we know that there are more illegal residents today than a year ago.

For that reason, agents from several government agencies decided it was better to remove the unauthorized residents and to implement some measure to avoid their return.

So far, the story about the operative that took place last week in Boulder was quite similar to many similar stories I read or wrote about raids to arrested undocumented residents. In fact, I was thinking about chaotic scenes; mothers and children crying, fathers resigned to their fate, and families living an uncertain present and future.

However, all those horrifying scenes existed only in my imagination, as I soon realized when I kept reading the story. It is true that a year ago hundreds of unauthorized residents arrived to the area of Thunderbird Lake in east Boulder. And it is true government agents wanted to capture and remove those unwanted residents, hoping for them not to return.

But this operation had nothing to do with immigration, I as mistakenly assumed after reading just the beginning of the story. In fact, the Colorado Park and Wildlife Division led an operation to capture and remove hundreds of koi fish that somebody illegally transported to a lake near Boulder a year ago.

There was never an immigration raid. Nobody was arrested and no family was divided. A few multicolor fish were moved to a different location to protect local fish, because, according to the AP story, koi fish leave few resources for local fish, displace the local population, and bring unknown diseases.

The story was about non-native fish using local resources. I am not so sure it was wrong to see parallels with immigration.