Word: raid
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...legitimately claim that Lazaro's family never gave any sign that it was prepared to meet either of her chief demands: to turn over Elian immediately, as her legal order required; and to travel to Washington for a transition period. The closest the family came to averting the raid was with the Friday-night fax, which said, "We understand that you have transferred temporary custody of Elian to his father." But lawyers close to the family acknowledge that this was a concession in theory only; the family intended to share custody during the transition period and perhaps beyond--hence...
That seemed to be the family's message from the moment the raid began. When the agents approached the front door, they first had to get past a few self-styled sentinels who, somewhat pathetically, tried to wrap up the feds in a TV news camera's cable. Then the agents banged twice on the door; when no one answered, they pushed in the door with a battering ram and moved quickly through the six-room house to find Elian. The rest is etched into the American imagination...
...feds had other reasons to go in fully loaded. INS agents, who spent a week planning the raid, had observed from 10 to 30 self-appointed bodyguards who mixed with the crowd outside at any given time. Several were camped out in a tent in the backyard of the house behind the Gonzalez home; four others, members of Alpha 66, a radical anti-Castro group, often patrolled the crowd conducting surveillance, the INS said. Record checks showed that three of the four participated in a 1995 incident in which a band of Alpha 66 members took a boat to Cuba...
...hold while Podhurst tried to get the family lawyers to wake up Lazaro and change his mind. Reno later explained that even at this late hour she wanted to go the extra mile. "She's always looking for consensus," observed a longtime Reno watcher a few days before the raid. "She wants Lazaro to be happy, Juan Miguel to be happy, the Justice Department to be happy. She wants everybody to be happy, and you can't have that...
...Elian, but also Senate majority leader Trent Lott and Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch. Undeterred by George W. Bush's lack of enthusiasm for such partisan theatrics, Lott boasted he would get to the bottom of where the obviously hopeless negotiations stood at the time of the dawn raid. And House majority whip Tom DeLay went ballistic over the government's "jackbooted thugs." He was far more publicly incensed by U.S. marshals using guns to forestall the threatened violence of the Miami crowd than he ever was over guns used by children to slaughter their classmates...