On the morning of March 16, according to a police report, a 14-year-old girl attending Rockville High School in the Maryland suburb was allegedly pushed into a stall in a boys’ bathroom and raped repeatedly by two males, Henry Montano, age 17, and Jose Sanchez Milian, age 18, who were also enrolled at the school. The details of the police report were horrifying. The Washington Post reports:
Both Montano and Sanchez Milian are illegal immigrants. They’re among the beneficiaries of a 2014 executive order from President Obama that has given more than 150,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America, a free pass when it comes to avoiding deportation, despite entering the country illegally. Montano had hiked up from El Salvador, and Sanchez Milian from Guatemala. Border Patrol agents turned them over to the Health and Human Services Department, and HHS arranged for them to fly to Maryland to join relatives there. The Rockville School District enrolled the two in the ninth grade despite their relatively advanced ages, because they spoke no English. As an immigration advocate told the Baltimore Sun, “The unaccompanied minors are overwhelmingly young people who are coming here fleeing horrific circumstances of violence in their countries.”
And so the Rockville rape case has turned from a particularly ghastly incident of alleged sexual violence into . . . an indictment for “racism” and “xenophobia” of anyone who dares question either why Rockville school authorities were so solicitous of a pair of illegals that they placed them in classrooms alongside 13- and 14-year-olds even though Sanchez Milian was already a legal adult, or, indeed, what the two of them were doing in the United States in the first place, importing their own version of horrific violence. The Obama program, which President Trump canceled on Jan. 26 to vast liberal outcry, was said by its advocates to involve “very extensive security vetting,” but obviously something went wrong in this case. Indeed, Sanchez Milian’s father, with whom he was supposedly “resettled” under the program, has turned out to be an illegal immigrant himself and was arrested by ICE agents on March 24 and faces deportation back to Guatemala.
Here are some samples of the current progressive mood:
Exhibit A: Montgomery County School Superintendent Jack Smith. His response to protests by outraged Rockville parents was an email that seemed to fret more over the public reaction to the alleged rape than to the crime itself.
“While many have chosen to engage civilly in the conversation, far too many have crossed the line with racist, xenophobic calls and emails. MCPS is working with law enforcement to identify those who are making threats toward our students and schools. This behavior will not be tolerated in our community.”
Exhibit B: CNN’s Brian Stelter. He blasted conservative Fox News and its commentator Tucker Carlson for treating the Rockville case as having national repercussions for Obama-legacy immigration policy instead of ignoring it as just another ho-hum local crime-blotter story unworthy of national coverage the way CNN and other major media have done. “Now on Fox, all roads lead back to media bias,” Stelter scolded.
Exhibit C: The Washington Post. On March 26 it gave prominent place on its Sunday editorial page to a letter from Rockville High School parent Beth N. Davis, who accused her fellow Rockville High School parents of “[U]sing a tragic attack on a child to fuel a xenophobic hate-filled agenda.”
Meanwhile, Sanchez-Milian’s lawyer, Andrew Jezic, is claiming that the 14-year-old’s sexual encounter with the pair was consensual, because she had allegedly sent Montano a text message the day before agreeing to have sex with him, apparently after an afternoon PE class. The silence from the left to this argument has been deafening. This is interesting: I’d thought it was a progressive and feminist mantra that consent to sex on one occasion doesn’t imply consent to sex on any other occasions, much less when the sex includes the consentee’s pal.
But it seems as though, just as feminists studiously ignored years of rape and sexual exploitation of teen-age girls in Rotherham, England, because the perpetrators were Muslim immigrants and thus rated higher than young women as objects of special progressive solicitude, progressive solicitude for illegal immigrants is currently trumping feminism, not to mention sympathy for an alleged rape victim, right here in America.
