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Federal agents swooped in on dozens of unsuspecting peaceful folks who were minding their own business and doing their jobs and ripped them from their families.
They handcuffed them and dragged them from their workplace. They threw them in jail and then public officials had a press conference to boast about it. The raid on illegal artifact peddlers in San Juan County?
Nope. The one I'm talking about occurred at the Salt Lake International Airport in December 2001 when federal and state officials wanted to show the world how safe Salt Lake City was for the 2002 Winter Olympics and ended up scattering the families of non-threatening dishwashers, floor sweepers and cargo handlers. None of those arrested had committed a crime other than being in the country illegally.
And Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett didn't say squat about the heavy-handed tactics of law enforcement in that raid. Nor did they complain about the raid that broke up the families of dozens of workers at the Champion Safe Co. in Provo, which eventually led to that company's move to Mexico.
Nor did they complain about the Gestapo-like tactics that netted dozens of harmless workers at the Swift meat packing plant in northern Utah.
The people arrested, wrenched from their families and eventually deported in those raids, were breaking the law because they had come into the United States illegally.
But it is reasonable to assume that many of the folks in
Hatch and Bennett are concerned about those arrests. They demanded answers from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Local Republican officials go further. Rep. Mike (laws-should-be-strictly-enforced-except-for-laws-I-disagree-with) Noel, R-Kanab, suggested during a talk-radio program at the State Republican Convention earlier this month that the raid was an Obama administration orchestration to appease the environmentalists. He pointed to the press conference announcing the arrests attended by top administration officials. Others on the radio program hinted that the administration shared partial blame for the suicide of James Redd, one of those arrested.
But Noel and the others had no concern about the dog-and-pony show that accompanied the charges filed against accused oil-and-gas bid rigger Tim DeChristopher because, well, he's a liberal and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Hatch's and Bennett's inconsistent outrage about the way lawbreakers are treated has more to do with who they need to impress at the GOP conventions when they are running for re-election than any real sense of justice. I doubt you'll find a lot of sympathy at those conventions for undocumented workers with brown skin.
There was another tragic death recently in southern Utah.
Brian Cardall, a promising scientist and young father, who was acting irrationally while having a psychotic episode near Hurricane this month, died after being shot twice with a police Taser.
Hatch and Bennett have not asked for an investigation into that incident, even though Amnesty International reports that since 2001 more than 350 people in the United States have died after encounters with police who shocked them with Tasers.
But that doesn't resonate with Utah's right wing like the federal government enforcing the law in southern Utah.
This politicalization of justice may be seen in the case of Kenneth Trentadue, whose brother has argued for years that he was murdered in a federal prisoner transfer center in Oklahoma in 1995. Officials at the center claimed he committed suicide.
Hatch called for a Senate investigation when Democrat Bill Clinton was president and Janet Reno was over the Justice Department. But his concern quieted considerably after the election of 2000 when Justice came under Republican George W. Bush's administration.
