N&R reports Juana Ortega, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who has taken refuge in Greensboro’s St. Barnabas Episcopal Church after being ordered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to leave the country by the end of Wednesday or be deported. As you can probably imagine, the N&R has thrown its full support behind Ortega—today’s lead editorial says:

A resolution should be simple. The government should reverse its decision. Ortega should be allowed to return to her home in Randolph County and go back to her job. She should be able to live freely with her family. Agents should focus their efforts on apprehending dangerous illegal immigrants so that their work actually makes us safer.

…While ultra leftist columnist Susan Ladd
says “if we are known by our hate instead of our love, we have shamed ourselves not only as people of faith but as Americans.”

Of course this is all on the evil Trump administration and his evil Republican supporters. But let’s take a closer look at Ortega’s 24 years here in the U.S., right there in the N&R report:

Ortega applied for asylum and was denied in 1998 as was a later appeal.

In 2001, she was granted “voluntary departure,” which required her to leave the country but would have allowed her to return on visits or apply for citizenship formally. But she never left.

Ortega is among thousands of people whose deportations were not enforced under previous presidential administrations. She checked in with immigration officials once a year starting in 2011 after ICE agents showed up at her job. But on April 20 at the ICE office in Charlotte, the grandmother was ordered to leave the country by May 31.

So it seems to me that Ortega was treated more kindly by the Republican Bush (the younger) administration than she was by either the Clinton or Obama administrations. The bottom line is given her history with immigration officials in this country, Ortega should have known this day was coming. As for her liberal supporters at the N&R, it’s typical that they support the breakdown of the rule of law when it suits their political purpose.