Late last week, Georgetown police executed a warrant on a Crestwood Gardens apartment building, where they discovered an illegal dentistry operation.
Two local Hispanic residents were arrested and charged with operating the unlicensed “office,” and had actually been doing so for a number of years before their alleged misdeeds were brought to the attention of the police.
And even then, it really only came to light because a sizable number of people – exclusively Hispanic residents – who had visited the unlicensed dentist, Carlos Ruben Ramos-Martin, had developed serious oral infections after having their teeth pulled by an amateur, who police said received his dental education while observing dentists in an office where Ramos-Martin had been hired to work as a janitor.
The whole situation really serves to drive home Georgetown Police Chief William Topping’s longstanding plea for any and all town residents to bring concerns to the police.
Police said many victims of Ramos-Martin’s operation were afraid to come forward due to their immigration status, and Topping has repeated time and again that his concern is enforcing the laws of the Town of Georgetown and the State of Delaware.
“We are not immigration,” he has said at numerous community meetings, stressing only a desire to keep everyone in town safe.
Which is not to say they are completely ignoring the immigration aspect: both Ramos-Martin and his roommate were served with immigration detainers, and chances are, they’re outta here.
It is too bad, though, that so many people had to suffer in fearful silence, essentially forcing their physicians to go out on a limb in reporting the abuse to police.
The immigration debate has been tossed, like an empty Burger King wrapper, into the national backseat, so to speak, as the country’s political drivers attempt to solve the economic crisis, so it’s no surprise that many illegal immigrants are still very much intimidated at reporting a crime when they have no idea what the potential consequences might be.
In Georgetown, though, the consequences appear to be clear: victims deserve justice, not an ICE detainer, and until the powers-that-be muddle their way to some sort of immigration solution, that’s the way it should be.
