-By Warner Todd Huston
At a town hall-styled meeting held at St Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, members of the Obama administration were forced to apologize for not informing local residents that they intended to warehouse hundreds of illegal immigrants in the community.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had made plans to ship hundreds of illegal immigrants to the small farming community from facilities overflowing with illegal aliens in the south and southwest. But officials made no effort to discuss the issue with local residents ahead of time.
The town hall was called when residents found out about the government’s plans.
“Absolutely, we feel we didn’t do it right here,” Mark A. Weber, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an AP report. “We’re here to listen to the community. We’re here to sort this out.”
“An overflow crowd packed the 900-seat Brunswick High School auditorium in the farming town of nearly 1,500,” AP reported.
Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, many of them minors, have flooded federal holding facilities in the south and southwest and officials attempted to portray the relocation of hundreds of these illegals into Virginia as a “humanitarian” effort.
But when local citizens got wind of the plans, outrage followed.
The plan was quickly put on hold and the town hall meeting arranged to discuss the issue.
“During the meeting,” the AP noted, “one federal official after another apologized for the missteps.”
Officials pressed the hostile crowd with going ahead with their plans to warehouse thousands of illegals in the facilities vacated by the closing of St. Paul’s College. The college, once one of America’s oldest black colleges, lost its accreditation and closed its doors last year leaving the facilities empty.
But residents were cool to the plans and one even said that they would not be “strong-armed by federal officials” into being forced to host the illegals.
Officials promised not to go ahead with the plans if residents were firmly against them.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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