American Shame

Violent Encounter

A car stops on an open road, blocking both lanes.  Armed occupants leap from the vehicle, and race back to the car behind them.  Inside that blocked vehicle, a woman confronts masked, unidentifiable armed men surrounding her, ordering her out of the car.  She doesn’t give in.  She videos the encounter, she calls the police, the real police, for help, and she tells them she is not violating the law, just observing.

But the armed men open the driver’s door, and drag her from the car.  Her husband arrives. He sees the car being searched, and demands to know where the warrant is. The two sides bicker over the US Constitution, and whether unidentified men can take a person into custody for the offense of “following their car”.  It’s tough to make a real obstruction charge, when she physically wasn’t obstructing.  The true charge would be “annoyance of so-called Federal agents”.  But that one isn’t written in the books.

Detention Facilities

This story is not from an apocalyptic movie of the 1970’s, about a dystopian future when armed thugs wander the streets.  This scene is actually from yesterday’s news.  It’s happening all over America.  Federal “agent” brutality is only one side of the what America looks like today.  The “Big, Beautiful Bill”  that Congress passed last year, allocated $165 Billion to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).   That’s almost 20% of what the Department of Defense gets to run all of the Armed Services:  Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy and Space Force and build ships and planes and a “Golden Dome” defense system that Ronald Reagan dreamed about.

They’ve more than doubled the number of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) agents, to 22,000.  And they are contracting for detention facilities (camps, jails, areas) throughout the US, to the tune of $45 Billion.  To put that into some perspective:  our local school district recently built a big, beautiful new high school designed for 1500 kids.  It cost around $100 million (and it’s already at capacity).  Homeland Security is building detention facilities that are the equivalent of 450 of those big high schools throughout the country, to house “detained” migrants.  And I’m sure they aren’t worried about keeping a “three foot interval between desks in a classroom” that the new school has.  

A Million a Year

The Trump Administration leaders (Stephen Miller at the fore) are interested in deporting a million people a year. They want to wipe America clean of what they call “illegals”.  (Note:  illegal implies that they are criminals, which the vast majority of undocumented are not.  Crossing the border without permission is a “civil” offense, akin to getting a traffic ticket.  Many entered the United States with permission, and even the help, of the government. We don’t call speeding or even serial parking violators criminals, do we?).  But Miller is going farther than that.  With little notice, he has ordered DHS to revoke the “Temporary Protective Status” (TPS) from Haitian immigrants.  That’s in spite of their homeland being ruled by ruthless, murdering gangs, and still suffering from the twin economic disasters of earthquake and hurricane.  

Those Haitians have lived for years in the US, built lives, and powered the economic re-birth of American towns like Springfield, Ohio.  Now they will be uprooted.  And if they do not leave the United States immediately, then they will be considered “criminal”.  While a Federal Judge has granted a temporary reprieve, soon, ICE and CBP will start wandering the back roads of Springfield, looking for a black man at the wheel, or a black woman in the grocery line, and demanding “papers”.  If they don’t produce the papers, or are “revoked” TPS Haitians; they could end up in one of the camps, jails, areas, facilities that DHS is building.

History Remembered

We’ve been here before in America.  Soon after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, many Americans looked at people of Japanese ancestry as “the enemy”.  And it wasn’t just folks with Japanese citizenship, it was US citizens who were descended from Japan as well.  On Hawaii and the West Coast, these AMERICAN CITIZENS were placed into custody, and taken to remote “relocation camps”; far away from their homes and properties.   Men, women, children and the elderly were under armed guard, behind barbed wire, held without due process for years.

The euphemistically named “Japanese Relocation” during World War II has been a source of American shame ever since. None of the “relocated” were ever convicted of espionage.  And, there were no German or Italian descendants “relocated”, even though war was declared on those nations as well.  It was done purely on a racial, and racist, basis.  

Revisiting Our Shame

 I once had the son of Japanese immigrants, born an American citizen in Los Angeles; speak to my eighth grade classes.  He was the shortstop on his high school baseball team one day, a regular American kid.  The next game was his big concern. But the next day, he was “interned” as a possible enemy.  He ultimately earned his way out of the camp. He joined the US Army to fight in one of the most highly decorated units of World War II.  But he never forgot how it felt to be “a US kid” one day , and “the enemy” the next.

The Trump Administration will argue; “they aren’t citizens”.  But the world has seen what camps: relocation, concentration or refugee, really means.  A majority is trying to “contain” a minority.  And it’s happening here, again.  The shameful acts of the Japanese Relocation have become the current blueprint for the Department of Homeland Security.  And they’ve got all the money they need to do it.  

I love America, but I am ashamed of what we are becoming.