Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the Miami Herald on April 23, 2000.
Armed with automatic weapons and firing occasional rounds of tear gas, federal agents seized Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives before dawn Saturday.
About 30 agents arrived at the home in white vans shortly after 5 a.m. and used rams on the chain-link fence and on the front door. A short time later, a woman brought Elian out of the home and put him in a van that drove away.
Some of the approximately 100 protesters gathered at the home climbed over barricades to try to stop the agents. The agents, wearing Immigration and Naturalization Service shirts, shouted, “Everybody move out of the way. Everybody get out of the way.”
They fired tear gas in front of the home and behind barricades, before departing with the boy.
“The world is watching!” yelled Delfin Gonzalez, the brother of the little boy’s caretaker and great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez.
“They were animals,” said Jess Garcia, a bystander. “They gassed women and children to take a defenseless child out of here. We were assaulted with no provocation.”
Carlos Saladrigas, a community leader in the home trying to negotiate a peaceful transfer of the boy, said the raid came as “we were on the phone talking to [Attorney General Janet] Reno.”
“We were in the house negotiating in good faith when we heard a noise and everyone started saying they are here,” said Saladrigas, chief executive officer of ADP Totalsource, an employer-services company.
“They pointed guns to our heads and released pepper spray. I’ve never felt so betrayed in my whole life. When the agents came in, everyone in the house started screaming and they couldn’t believe this was happening.”
Some threw rocks, garbage cans and chairs at the agents…
Elian Gonzalez’s mother had a dream of taking her son to a new life in America. They undertook the perilous journey through shark infested waters. Unfortunately their boat capsized and his mother and ten others perished.
Elian then became a pawn for Bill Clinton in negotiations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
He was seized by A.G. Reno’s storm troopers and sent back to the shithole island paradise of Cuba where he was re-united with his Father, joined the Young Pioneers, and later hailed as a socialist hero.
I’m sure that Bernie and Jeff approved.
Unlike the thousands of  “dreamers” illegal aliens that the democrats want to turn into citizens democrat voters Cubans tend to be self sufficient and vote Republican.
Because the democrats want political control…Forever.