I feel constrained to post this after someone suggested that in the Bret Stephens essay I was bestowing Ethics Hero status on the Axis media’s top propaganda mouthpiece. The op-ed by professional illegal immigration romanticizer Isabel Castro (above) is a far more representative piece in a genre the Times is particularly fond of: demanding sympathy for individuals facing deportation entirely because of their own choices and conduct.

The title is a hoot: “How the ICE Raids Are Warping Los Angeles.” It is like a Chicago paper during the Prohibition and Capone’s zenith publishing a column called “How the FBI is Warping Chicago.” A sample..

In Boyle Heights, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in East Los Angeles, the streets were unusually quiet. In the early afternoon, a time when the neighborhood is typically bustling with activity, the sidewalks and stores were empty. I met Ceasar Sanchez, standing at the entrance of a barbershop on Cesar Chavez Avenue, one of the area’s main thoroughfares. Inside, every chair sat empty.

Mr. Sanchez, who works at the shop, hasn’t had a single client this week. “They’re just afraid to go anywhere — shopping, stores, even work,” he explained. …At a community center in South-Central, an undocumented street vendor — who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of facing deportation — spoke of how she’s become too afraid to go to work since the raids. She typically sells clothing and jewelry on the street nearby: income to support her two young children, ages 13 and 10, in the United States and another who is still in Mexico…

And yet, despite the proximity of the raids, people continue to show up to work. One undocumented worker from Mexico explained to me that with rent and a family, forgoing a paycheck isn’t an option. “I hope this doesn’t last long,” he said of the unrest throughout the city. “But I need to keep on working.”

I met Gabriela Aguilar, a documented flower vendor from Honduras, the day after ICE was spotted in the flower market. She shut down her business to keep her workers safe. Later that day, she came back with another worker to finish an order for an event. “The people we have an event with, they have no idea what’s going on,” she told me. “If I tell them we shut down, they’re going to look for another florist.”

It’s all like that. She concludes,

I’ve spent my career telling stories about undocumented people in America, particularly within the Latino communities that have been caught in the shifting tides of political change. I’ve interviewed and filmed undocumented families, immigration activists, ICE agents, and immigration attorneys — all cogs in a broken immigration system that puts the people caught up in it in increasingly precarious standing here. Each experience has deepened my understanding of just how fragile the promise of the American dream really is.

These people are not “caught up” in anything (and they are illegal, not “undocumented”). “Caught up” is passive, as if The Good Illegal Immigrants were just minding their own business in Mexico or Guatemala when a flying saucer’s beam transported them to Los Angeles. What puts these law-breakers—I’m sure many of them are very fine people—in precarious standing is that they deliberately violated our laws. Drug dealers, thieves and muggers are also in “precarious standing,” and they don’t deserve this kind of misleading sympathy either. The “dream” of sneaking into the United States and getting away with it should be fragile; if fact, it should be universally regarded as invalid as the dream of moving into the nicest house on the block when the owners are on vacation. Much blame belongs with the unethical U.S. politicians and elected officials who deliberately wink-winked at dissatisfied foreigners and led them to believe their border-jumping was virtuous and acceptable. Nevertheless, the choice to break our laws was theirs alone. They are accountable.