Maria Bonilla was living her version of the American Dream. She had a job, was able to provide a home for her four children, and her daughter, Magali, was working as a medical assistant and had plans to go to nursing school in the fall. It may have been a thin sliver of the Dream, but the picture they ran with the story showed Maria smiling, at the center of her family, and cockily wearing the mortarboard just earned by her daughter. It was a picture of the sort of thing we all aspire to: that our children have a better life than we do.

Then one day in May, Magali drove her mother to the ICE field office in Atlanta. It was a routine check-in. Maria had entered the country without documents in 2001, but had worked hard, followed the rules, and had obtained a work permit. The rules said that she had to check in periodically to prove that she was employed and allow the agency to check for arrests. She had no criminal record, either here or in her home country.

The routine check-in became a nightmare when Maria Bonilla was ambushed by ICE, taken from her family, sent to a detention center and then to El Salvador. According to an Atlanta immigration attorney, this is a tactic frequently used by ICE to meet their quota of 3000 arrests a day. The fact that the people they’re hauling off are in this country legally and have no criminal record doesn’t seem to matter. Another story reported that ICE is doing the same thing in immigration courts across the country.

It was the picture that caught my eye. I’m always looking for something in the morning paper that makes me believe that there is still good and happiness in this world, even if most of the ink is spilled over conflicts. However, I was wrong. It was not a happy story or even one that inspired pride in our country. It showed just how callous we can be.

As I sat in my house with my coffee and newspaper, I was enjoying what was probably a larger share of the American Dream than Maria Bonilla could have imagined. I’m white enough, male enough, and straight enough to ensure that I didn’t have to crawl over racial barriers, crack glass ceilings, or defend my sexual preferences. I was not a part of any group whose history the Trump administration wants to distort or erase.

Trump is not the first to target people who are not  white, male, and straight. This  country has a long and sorry history of dealing with those we define as “other,” a history dating back to years before this was a country. We imported and enslaved Blacks. With lies and treaties that were worth no more than our word, we took the land away from the Indians. We interned the Japanese during World War II and ignored the German American Bund, who had openly campaigned for this country to join the Axis powers. We created the Chinese Exclusion Act so we wouldn’t get overrun by people with a skin color different from ours.

This is, of course, the sort of history that the Trump administration is attempting to erase, commanding that the Smithsonian“ celebrate American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud.” To them, that means scrubbing references to Black and female heroes from government monuments and web pages, including the Arlington National Cemetery web site.

But that sort of historical ignorance has become so commonplace in this administration that it’s no longer remarkable.

The thing that struck me hardest was the difference between the story about Maria Bonilla that the reporter tried to tell and the one that was promised in the headline.

The story, written by Lautaro Grinspan, appeared in Sunday’s Journal-Constitution. Grinspan led with Maria Bonilla’s backstory, her detention, and the family’s efforts to get her due process. It mentioned that she had spent two decades in the poultry processing industry in a job that was described as 3-D: dirty, dangerous, and demanding.

However, in large newspapers, the story and the headline are not usually written by the same person. After Grinspan filed the story, an editor was faced with the task of reaching out to the reader in about 40 characters: the headline. The headline in this case was “ICE’s new tactic a worry for state’s poultry industry.” A smaller subhead mentioned that Maria Bonilla had been detained and deported.

And that’s what I find wrong with the story we tell. It seems that—intentionally or not—the editor who wrote the headline considered the possible damage to the poultry processing industry a greater story than a mother who had her small slice of the American Dream yanked from her, despite the fact that, just as with the previous 24 years, the US government had no reason to worry about her.

Economically, that may be the case. Gainesville, Georgia is known as the “poultry capital of the world.” There are more than a dozen poultry processing plants there, employing some 3000 people. They are an important part of the economy.

But even with that, I can’t worry a lot about the poultry processing plants, I did some quick research on just one of them, probably the largest. It’s a company with a market cap of $8.5 billion. It pays its president nearly $4 million a year, including bonuses. And it pays its line employees an average of $17.84 an hour.

To me, the story here is not that the poultry industry is going to have a difficult time replacing someone who is as willing to work for the wages they pay at the pace they require as it is that this country made a deal with someone, telling them if they came here, obeyed the laws, worked hard and paid their taxes, they could have whatever share of the American Dream they could carve out. Maria Bonilla was never guaranteed a result; that was up to her and her efforts. But she was promised a fair shot at success as she defined it.

Then this country lied to them.

The story says that ICE had no comment. Can’t blame them. But I’m very ashamed of what this country has done to Maria Bonilla, her family, and all those who have been detained and deported even though they were in the United States legally.

I wish I could say that we are better than that. But, right now, we’re not.