Jasmine Mooney is a Canadian actress and sometime entrepreneur. The thirty-five year-old woman from British Columbia, while born in Canada, has spent the last several years working in the United States, in California to be specific.
Then they arrested her.
They being federal U.S. agents — U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents — as she attempted to renew an expired work visa.
Her previous visa was now invalid since the health beverage she was promoting contained hemp, and that’s verboten in America, where they cling to the notion that cannabis and its derivatives are threat to national security. This in a nation where you can buy milk, guns, and ammunition at the same store.
Jasmine persevered though, getting another job, this one located as well in the United States, and representing another health beverage of some sort, this one hemp-free. With optimism at what she considered to be a routine visit, she arrived at U.S. Customs with the job offer and her visa paperwork to get herself a revised and up-to-date visa. Piece of cake.
No such luck.
She was arrested as being in the country without proper authorization, part of the new crackdown initiated by Donald Trump and his Magic Sharpie Signing Stick. And into the clink went Jasmine Mooney.
For twelve days.
The information I have says that she was arrested trying to cross into the United States from Mexico, which if true, was probably her biggest mistake, since that’s the border they want to build the wall on, but to catch Mexicans and other Latin Americans, not Canadians. If true, I haven’t been able to learn why she was in that country, but regardless of reason, it’s not the best look. Nevertheless, despite her existing paperwork and the fact that she approached them for a visa renewal, she was detained, then arrested, then slapped in chains before ending up in a detention centre, in a detention cell with some 30+ other women, almost all of them speaking Spanish.
She was held that way, in a common cell, fluorescent lights permanently on, a Dixie cup to pee in, and a lunch menu that didn’t offer much in the way of food, more in the way of gruel. She wore ill-fitting prison clothes and ill-fitting men’s shoes after they took her own clothing and footwear.
She was moved around several times, to several different locations, all the while shackled, sometimes held in a cell or on a bus with several male prisoners.
For twelve days it went like this until she was finally released on the understanding that she would take the very next dog team back to Canada, to her home province of British Columbia.
All this happened to a Canadian woman, who had the support of friends and family, the attention of the Canadian government, and extended coverage in the national Canadian media. It made her wonder what it would have been like had she not had that level of support. It also made her realize that the other prisoners caught up in the dragnet did not have this level of support coming to their aid. This includes to Spanish-speaking American pastors who strayed too close to the border in their vehicle while getting lost navigating somewhere. They turned their vehicle around when they saw the border coming up, but were promptly pulled over and arrested. Their crime was that neither one of them had their passport on them, on their person, as if that’s something everyone does. Most people I know keep their passports in a safe place, often a locked or in a secure safe place. What we don’t do is carry it out with us when we’re picking up milk at No Frills. But then again, our political leaders don’t use Sharpies.
It’s been a lesson for Jasmine Mooney, to be sure. She’d like to go back to work in California but now she’s not allowed back into the States for five years, which I suppose will throw a bit of wrench into her acting career.
There’s the saying that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is permission, but I don’t think that holds with the US. Border Service in light of Trump’s Sharpie attack. I don’t think, by the look of things, that you’d want to be asking them for either. No wonder anyone in that country with questionable resident status is now hiding under a rock. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that farmers and ranchers in the U.S. midwest and southwest are reporting a mass disappearance of workers who are likely heading for the hills, leading to the prospect of several of these American farming and ranching operations going bankrupt.
With all of this crackdown, the illegals are on the run, to be sure. But I’ll bet the folks running fentanyl into the country from Mexico aren’t impacted one little bit, since they make no attempt to follow rules or seek employment. And so the fentanyl, and everything else, flows while hard-working honest people are clapped in irons and held in less than pristine conditions.
One final point as to border security.
That blowhard Trump and his light-saber-sized pen were frothing at the mouth over all the fentanyl and illegal immigrants pouring across the border into the U.S. from Canada, despite the fact that the notion was ludicrous. Yet in the past week, two tractor-trailer trucks were stopped by Canadian border agents in Ontario and found to contain millions of dollars worth of cocaine. Plus, every day,. More and more American guns find their way across that very same border and into the hands of gang-bangers and ne’er-do-wells in the Toronto area, killing and maiming Canadians, innocent and guilty, and making our urban streetscape a more dangerous place for all of us.
It’s we, the Canadians, that need protection from them, the Americans.
No Sharpie in the world is going to change that.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 