rogerlowenstein.substack.com - The united states of shame

Over the last year the President has orchestrated a harsh and mean-spirited attempt to undo the threads of American history, which is a melting pot, however, imperfect, of immigrants and their descendants and those of Native Americans.

Trump has betrayed his campaign promise to deport “violent” criminals. Fewer than 30 percent of people picked up in immigration raids have been convicted of any crime, much less a violent one.

The spirit of the Trump deportations violates democratic norms and everyday decency.

Veterans deported. Sae Joon Park, wounded serving in Panama in 1989, had to leave behind his children and ailing mother—“everything,” in his words—after receiving a deportation order.

Young adults raised in the U.S. deported. Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College, whose family fled Honduras more than a decade ago, after the cutoff of the “Dreamer” program, deported from Logan Airport in Boston when attempting to visit her parents in Texas.

Harassment for speaking. After Lopez Belloza spoke to the news media, immigration agents rushed the student’s father and forced open a gate and entered his yard. Lopez locked himself inside; after some hours, the agents left without declaring any purpose.

Abusive coercion. An Ecuadoran gold mine worker crossed the southern border, with his wife and 7-year-old daughter, after having been pursued by thugs after he threatened to publicize the plight of co-workers he said his employer had abandoned in a collapsed mine. In the U.S., the miner, Juan David Quichimbo Sumba, was fitted with an ankle monitor and subject to removal. He has appealed for asylum in the U.S. while he provides evidence against his employer. In August, his wife was detained in various facilities for three months, repeatedly threatened with deportation, often underfed and made to drink from communal toilets. According to his lawyer, Elizabeth Shaw, of Boston, his client has no criminal record in Ecuador or the U.S.—“not even a speeding ticket.” Shaw said the wife’s mistreatment was an effort to pressure her client to self-deport. “This is not immigration enforcement,” Shaw wrote in her client’s petition. “It is coercion. It is retaliation. It is the abandonment of every rule that distinguishes federal authority from raw power.”

Dairo Preciado, a 67-year-old man, was detained at a Massachusetts car wash where he had been cleaning cars without incident for 29 years. Preciado, released after a month wearing a black ballcap with a bald eagle and “USA” on the brim, said, “Jail is hard.”

ICE agents in masks throwing people to the ground.

Detained people, including children, made to sleep on concrete floors or in cells with water leaking through the walls.

Trump officials exhibit, rather, gleeful mockery, a kind of sadistic pleasure at the “harsh realities” faced by their targets. A post on X by Homeland Security shows armed officers—digitally altered so that they appear to be wearing Santa Claus hats—with the message, “YOU’RE GOING HO HO HOME.” What’s worse, their pathetically arrested intellectual development or their un-American meanness?

Anyway, the Administration has tossed the charade that its campaign is mainly about illegal immigration. They want to revoke birthright citizenship so that sons and daughters born here to immigrants will not be legal.

The Times reports that the Administration plans to accelerate efforts to strip previously naturalized Americans of citizenship. An especially grotesque indignity: the Administration has been pulling people out of line at naturalization proceedings—cancelling citizenship at the ultimate hour for people who fulfilled every requirement, violated no rule. Simply because they were born in a country deemed by Trump to be high-risk. As the Boston Globe observed, “They were ready to be Americans. Then the government pulled the plug. No explanation. Only silence.” So much for going legal.

Oscar Handlin was particularly concerned about the quota system enacted in the 1920s that discriminated against immigrants on the basis of origin. His testimony helped to persuade Congress, in 1965, to end discrimination based on national origin.

The Trump Administration is racing to undo the meaning of the American experience, in the process shattering the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and sowing fear among millions.

How can any American greet the holidays without a sense of shame? —Roger Lowenstein