Will Bunch writes:

When the day New Orleans had feared for weeks finally came on Wednesday, it began with a lie as wide as the meandering Mississippi River.

A port city somehow dubbed the Big Easy despite its centuries of big trouble woke up to a frigid blast of Arctic air and a claim from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that local immigration raids it’s named the “Catahoula Crunch” would narrowly target “criminal illegal aliens roaming free thanks to sanctuary policies …”

Within a couple of hours — in raids that were, in fact, wildly untargeted — SUV caravans bearing masked, green-uniformed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stormed into parking lots and at suburban Home Depots and Lowe’s, blitzkrieged Latino restaurants and a car wash on a busy strip near the airport, and cruised neighborhoods looking for roofers to arrest.

On a hunch, I drove to a Home Depot here in Kenner at lunchtime and found them: a platoon of maybe 15 masked Border Patrol officers in olive-drab uniforms and dark baseball caps wrapping up a sweep of the parking lot, strutting past the piled-up orange shopping carts and ignoring a film crew shouting, “Why are you here?”

Ricardo Ramírez, a 50-year-old construction worker and a U.S. citizen, had just pulled into the Home Depot lot to return some items when, as he told me a few minutes later, one of the officers came up to him and barked, “Which country? Are you a citizen?” Ramírez carries his passport because “it’s so crazy what’s going on that I have to, just because I look Spanish” — and was surprised when the officers moved past without asking to see it. [Continue reading…]