Like slimy gutter rats, Britain’s ICE agents slid through 
the back fence targeting a chic Indian restaurant,
its owner embodying “British values,”
employing competent people disregarding 
their ethnicity: meritocracy at its best

Mandira, lauded by Britain’s culinary finest—
Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver and Channel 4—
was on holiday, delegating management
to those in whom she believed
to those in whom she trusted

the ICE rats with two pit bulls and Surrey police,
who think modus operandi is an Indian side dish,
began questioning the hard-working
student staff, who were supplementing 
their paltry education grants,

about their studies and asking for identification.
“When was the last time you went to class?”
“What grades did you get?”  
Questions only for the “sun-kissed” staff.

With no crime having been committed,
satisfied with the answers given in mime
and subtitles for the hard of thinking,
ICE supinely melted away
into the gutter they had come from
without paying the legal parking fees,

That this is happening in Britain is causing 
consternation among some citizens
sixty years after the 1965 Race Relations Act,
this hostile environment policy used 
to target all minority-run businesses—
1939 anyone?

The oxymoron “intelligence-led” is used
to vindicate a “tip-off” as sufficient, 
needing no corroboration,
to instigate spontaneous raids

Mandira’s Kitchen, and other businesses
run by those whose skin color that interior
designers refer to as “hickory bronze,”
remain on the menu of the UK’s ICE agency