Attorney General Eric Holder could hardly contain his tears when he explained his program titled “Justice AmeriCorps” to provide emergency legal representation for the tens of thousands of Central American minors illegally swarming through our southern border.

“How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings, many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking – goes to the core of who we are as a nation,” Holder said while detailing his program to provide 100 lawyers and paralegals for the minors.

President Barack Obama, flanked by Attorney Holder Eric Holder, left, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, left. AP Photo/Susan Walsh

And yet it was (then) Deputy Attorney General Holder who concocted the “legal” cover for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to mace, kick, stomp, and gun-butt their way into the home of Elian Gonzalez’s legal custodians (legal U.S. citizens, all).

On the morning of April 22, 2000, they wrenched a bawling 6-year-old child from his family at machine gun point and bundle him off to Fidel Castro’s terror-sponsoring fiefdom, leaving 102 people (all of them legal U.S. citizens and residents) injured, some seriously.

Even as the mace dispersed and Gonzalez’s custodians and protectors sought medical help for their injuries, Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano had Holder’s number:

"Tell me, Mr. Holder,” Napolitano asked on April 23, 2000, "why did you not get a court order authorizing you to go in and get the boy [Gonzalez]?"

Holder: We didn’t need an order.

Napolitano: Then why did you ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for such an order if you didn’t need one?

Holder: [Silence]

Napolitano: The fact is, for the first time in history you have taken a child from his residence at gunpoint to enforce your custody position, even though you did not have an order authorizing it. When is the last time a boy, a child, was taken at the point of a gun without an order of a judge… Unprecedented in American history.

Holder: He was not taken at the point of a gun.

Napolitano: We have a photograph showing he was taken at the point of a gun.

Holder: They were armed agents who went in there who acted very sensitively…

Thanks to the ritual mainstream media-Castroite collusion most people forget (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of the Gonzalez circus/tragedy - which were mostly established during the first week after the boy's rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning.

The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the mainstream media-Democratic complex) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.

Delfin Gonzalez, Elian Gonzalez great-uncle, gestures as he recounts the events that took place fourteen years ago in Miami, Wednesday, April 23, 2014. On April 22, 2000, federal agents raided Elian Gonzalez uncle's home, background, in Little Havana and seized the boy from a closet at gunpoint. He returned to Cuba two months later. The photo on the fence is Elizabet Broton Rodriguez, mother of Elian, who drowned when the overloaded powerboat she and her young son were traveling in sank during the 90-mile crossing to Florida.(AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

The evidence - frantically buried by the mainstream media-Democratic complex - was overwhelming.

Mauricio Vicent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited the Gonzalez hometown of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States. Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!

Elian’s Miami uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, explained it repeatedly and best:

“I always said I would turn over Elian to his father, when Juan Miguel would come here and claim him. But I knew such a thing was impossible. He couldn’t do that. I knew it wasn’t Juan Miguel requesting Elian - it was Castro.”

The legal-weasels forgot (or missed) that on Dec. 1, 1999 the Immigration and Naturalization Services (ostensibly under the jurisdiction of former Attorney General Janet Reno’s and Holder’s Justice Department) asserted that his Miami-based uncle Lazaro was indeed Elian’s legal custodian and Florida’s family court was indeed the place to arbitrate further issues.

Then on Dec. 5, 1999, Castro clapped his hands and his mainstream media minions snapped to attention.

Within weeks, President Bill Clinton’s INS had turned its initial decision on its head. Within months, the INS was kicking down Lazaro’s door, pummeling camera men and elderly ladies to the ground with jackboots and wrenching a screaming Elian from his legal custodians in a blaze of pepper gas and machine guns. When asked for the legal authority for this, they brandished either a search warrant to seize evidence that didn’t exist (and would not have been hidden anyway) or an arrest warrant to seize someone who no one claimed was a criminal or even a lawbreaker.

“They never made it clear just what kind of warrant” it was. And neither would it have been legal,” patiently explained Alan Dershowitz (no less).

AP Photo/Alan Diaz

So why did Elian’s father change his tune?

Remember "Godfather II"? Remember the Senate hearings where Frankie Pentangeli, under FBI protection, was prepared to testify against Michael Corleone? The stage was set. Looked like a done-deal for the Feds. Then Frankie looks up and sees his bewildered brother Vincenzo from Sicily, sitting next to Mikey.

Whoops! Frankie sure changed his tune, didn’t he?

Think of Juan Miguel as Frankie Pentangeli. The gun Castro held to Juan Miguel’s head was as invisible (to those without experience with Communism) as the one Mikey held to Pentangeli’s head was to most spectators at those hearings.

All that stomping, macing, and firepower in the dawn hours of April 22, 2000 horrified and enraged many people for sure – it also amazed. Why such overkill? Why such shock and awe, many wondered?

Well, it appears that those INS agents genuinely feared that they were on a mission fraught with deadly peril from massive firepower. Castro himself, you see, had confided to Clinton via his lawyer friend Gregory Craig that the Gonzalez house was crammed with typical Cuban-American right-wing maniacs, all heavily armed, foaming at the mouth, and ready to rumble.

Given that American liberals pretty much share Castro’s view of American citizens of Cuban heritage, the Stalinist dictator’s warning was warmly received – and scrupulously acted upon.

But it turned out that the only blasting that morning came from mace and tear gas into the faces of ladies holding infants and rosaries.

A U.S. Justice Department that accepted the word of an official U.S. State Department Sponsor-of-Terror whose lifelong dream is to nuke the U.S. (Castro) over that of lawful U.S. citizens (Cuban-Americans who claimed that from day one Castro was the one orchestrating Elian’s return, but who mostly register Republican) - is an action that should really give more U.S. citizens more pause.

Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University and is the author of five books including his latest, The Longest Romance; The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.

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