Please review and accept my application on the Customs and Border Patrol app for self-deportation. I want to engage in your new self-deportation offer. I am ready and grateful to accept the $1,000 stipend and a plane ticket to London, England. My family has been a conclave of illegal aliens with criminal ties for 356 years and by any measure of good conscience, it is time that I self-deport to my ultimate country of origin.
In 1656, three of my relatives, one named Richard Stockton, broke out of a London debtors’ prison to escape the Royal Crown’s justice and illegally enter the American colonies by sailing to New York. As described in The Stockton Family of New Jersey: And Other Stocktons, that Richard Stockton immediately fell in with the criminal element: “Richard Stockton arrived at Flushing from England in 1656, when his name appears in a petition requesting the release of William Wickenden, who had been fined and imprisoned for preaching without a license.”
Associations with felonious groups by Richard Stockton’s descendants continued when, in 1776, one Richard Stockton signed the Declaration of Independence, a treasonous act against the King of England. For this crime, punishable by death, Richard Stockton was thankfully apprehended and jailed by British troops. By subterfuge, outlaws like Benjamin Franklin and his cronies managed to spring Richard Stockton of New Jersey from his jail cell. Never expressing remorse, he ultimately expired from the British peacekeepers’ advanced interrogation techniques.
Our family conclave of criminals has continued operating through the centuries and by any sense of right and wrong, it is time for us to self-deport. If those three early Stockton brothers, no doubt bad hombres, had done the right thing and stayed in debtors’ prison in London, my family would not have borne the stain of 369 years of hiding from the law. Perhaps with Department of Homeland Security guidance, I can return to my native land of origin to deal with the consequences that we must have brought on ourselves.
I will accept your $1,000 offer for my self-deportation and look forward to your free commercial airline ticket—first class would be nice—nonstop from San Francisco to London.
Patriotically yours,
Richard Stockton
Good Times writer Richard Stockton has just launched his first Substack, titled Weekend Sedition. NOTE: Street Talk is on summer hiatus, but fear not. It will return soon.
