Stripped and Shorn
It’s a scene out of pre-World War II Germany, or some dystopian movie about a failed American future. Agents, dressed in black, seize people from their homes, their workplaces, some even just off the street. They are taken to “detention centers”. (Isn’t it scary that aren’t called jails? But jails imply courts and lawyers and rights – something these “detainees” are denied). A few days later they are hustled on a bus, to an airport, and onto a chartered plane.
Their destination: a maximum security prison in El Salvador, far from their homes in the United States, or even their birthplaces in Venezuela. They are stripped, x-rayed, searched and probed, their heads shaved, and given white t-shirts, socks, boxer shorts and sandals to wear. Then they are placed in cells big enough for 140 inmates. Propaganda movies of their rough treatment are carefully edited for full effect. They are gone, disappeared: in a foreign land with no sentence, no end of punishment, no lawyer or courts or questions. It’s a “deal” by the deal-making Presidents; Trump fills the cells with “illegals”, Bukele of El Salvador gets $6 million. It’s a bargain at $20,000 a piece.
Some of them, I’m sure, are very bad men. Some, I’m sure, are members of Venezuelan gangs, and certainly up to no good in the United States. And some are not. They were all “convicted” by “gang sign”; tattooed ink that supposedly link them to criminal activity. And it’s on that “evidence” that these men are sent to one of the worst prisons in the world, the “Devil’s Island” of our modern time.
The Revolution
When the fledgling United States was debating the Constitution, one of the biggest arguments was about what would guarantee “rights” to the people of the United States. After all, there was (and is) no “Bill of Rights” in English Common Law, no listing of the personal and criminal rights of the people. It is simply based on the precedence of Court decisions. Why would the new United States need more?
The answer was in the very birth of the new Nation. While the colonists demanded the “rights” of British citizens, the British felt no need to allow them. After all, they were, “just colonists”, “Americans”, not British. The affronts that make up the majority of the Declaration of Independence are all about those exclusions. Those are what brought about Revolution.
So the Constitution was written, with an acknowledged “political” deal to get it ratified. The individual states would agree to the document, if (and only if), a “Bill of Rights” was added. The British “fooled us once”, using an excuse to deny rights. Americans would not be fooled again. And so the first ten amendments were added to the Constitution almost immediately.
(Actually there were twelve proposed. The first was “too technical” enumerating how many representatives in the House, and was not ratified. And the second controlled the salary of Representatives and Senators. It was not approved with the other ten, but ultimately became the 27th Amendment to the Constitution in 1992).
Citizens or People
The Bill of Rights does not include the word “citizen”. Instead, the rights are guaranteed to “the people” (of “We the people, of the United States” in the Preamble). From the beginning citizenship was not a requirement to attain “rights”. You could be a “person” without being a citizen, as far as rights were concerned.
What are those rights? The right to practice religion, exercise and publish political speech, to assemble peaceably, and to ask the government to fix problems. People in the United States have a right to have a gun, and not have the military takeover property in times of peace. They also have the right to privacy, to not have their persons or property searched and seized without probable cause.
They have the right to life, liberty and property, only restricted through “due process of law”. The people have the right to a trial with legal representation, a jury of their peers, and to not be tried twice for the same crime (double jeopardy). And they have the right to not be given cruel or unusual punishments.
It’s “the people”, not the citizens, that the Bill of Rights refers to. And yet, for those 234 men whisked away literally in the dead of night, there was no “due process”, not even a right to a “writ of habeas corpus”. (“Habeas corpus” is the requirement that the government tell in court, why someone is being held. It is so important that its written into the main body of the Constitution itself, Article I, Section 9, Clause 2).
Legal or Illegal
The “legal” justification of the Trump Administration is that these are “illegals”; bad men who have “invaded” our country from Venezuela to commit crimes. And now, they are swept away without any reference to their rights as “people” in the United States. Are they all Venezuelan gang members? Is it possible some are not? Our government isn’t proving anything in court, we are simply to take the word of “Immigration Czar” Tom Hohman that these are “bad men”.
What if there are some whose only offense was to come to the United States? They are all “disappeared”, like the dissidents dropped from Argentinian Air Force planes over the ocean, or the Mexicans stolen off buses who end up buried in trenches in faraway fields. These are the examples that OUR government, the United States of America, is following. And they are doing it in the name of the American people; OUR name.
Not mine.
Slippery Slope
Lutheran theologian Martin Niemoller wrote about the Nazi actions taking control of Germany:
First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me,
And there was no one left to speak out for me.
- First ICE came for Mamhoud Kahllil, and I did not speak out,
- Because I wasn’t Palestinian.
- Then ICE came for the Lebanese doctor, and the German engineer, and I did not speak out, because I wasn’t Lebanese, or German.
- Then ICE came for the Venezuelan “gang members”, and I did not speak out,
- Because I wasn’t Venezuelan.
We are on a slippery slope.
It’s clear where it ends.
What will “We the People” do to stop it?
