Why are 34,000 people being forced to wear orange Crocs?
A federal mandate that requires a minimum number of undocumented immigrants be detained each night.
A dumb federal rule strikes again!
Law enforcement officers are forced to arrest undocumented immigrants thanks to a congressional mandate that requires 34,000 be held in detention centers every single night. A person can commit no crime other than not being here legally and be arrested and detained simply to fill a quota. So every day, 34,000 people are sitting in detention centers, wearing jumpsuits and orange Crocs that you paid for.
And it's a $2 billion problem.
Every year, 2 billion of your tax dollars are spent holding those undocumented immigrants and illegal border crossers, many for no reason other than their undocumented status. Almost 400,000 are detained every year. And guess what? That's twice as many as five years ago.
It causes extreme hardship.
Besides life being difficult for the person detained, their family also suffers. It's hard to visit a detained person because most detention centers are remote and require travel. And the family loses the detained person's income.
We're not talking about murderers here.
Barbie is married to an undocumented immigrant who was detained. She couldn't believe how much weight he'd lost and how he'd changed when she first saw him. And, as she says, it's as though they're imprisoned for murder. Except they're not.
So why is this happening? Oh, that's right! Follow the money.
Make no mistake. These quotas weren't implemented to keep us safe. No. They're the result of a profit-making system — one that pays private companies up to $120 a night per detainee.
Those 34,000+ pairs of orange Crocs are, well, a crock.
I don't think anyone would deny that dangerous criminals need to be kept off the streets. But gathering up hundreds of thousands of people to make a buck — costing you and me 2 billion bucks a year — isn't right.
How do we fix this?
First of all, we need to change the federal mandate. There's no reason to detain people for the sole purpose of filling beds (unless you think lining the pockets of private companies is a reason, which I'm sure you don't). Like Janet Napolitano said, detainment should be directly related to the threat to public safety and the offense. If someone is not a threat to public safety and hasn't committed an offense beyond being undocumented, detention doesn't make a lot of sense.
Others suggest securing the borders so that fewer undocumented immigrants come to the U.S. Because while the number of people detained annually has doubled in the last five years, the number of apprehensions at the border has dipped 50% in the same period. Is it possible that it's more profitable for certain companies if we detain people once they're here versus preventing them from coming in the first place? I dunno. But it's worth considering.
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.