It’s about cruelty. The sweeping new take from the poor and give to the rich budget bill, just passed by both Houses of Congress by the slimmest of majorities and signed into law by the recurrent guy, shows us just who matters in our vanishing democracy.
The once-supreme court last week decreed that deporting eight men with criminal convictions to South Sudan is just fine with them. And that’s just what the recurrent guy did. No matter that they had served their prison terms or were still doing so. And no matter that South Sudan is currently “in the midst of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis driven by ethnic conflict and climate” and “more than half the population is facing extreme hunger.”
Why work so hard to make this happen? Cruelty, of course.
Hard-working people who have lived in this country for decades are being grabbed from their homes, their immigration court hearings, or snatched off the streets while doing their jobs, by masked, unidentified ICE militia agents bearing no warrants, and then detained and deported for no other crime than lacking the correct papers. Correct papers? Even visas and green cards are not good enough these days.
And there is no out-of-control immigrant crime wave. “Research by the American Immigration Council looked at FBI data over a 23-year period and found that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans.” So why is our government doing this?
Perhaps those being detained are the wrong color or speak the wrong language or worship the wrong god. They sure don’t look like the white South Afrikaners that the recurrent guy invited to immigrate to our country this past spring.
Last month, Narciso Barranco, a 30-year immigrant and the father of three U.S. Marines, was beaten and kidnapped by ICE agents. Narciso was working at his day job landscaping outside an IHOP restaurant in Santa Ana, California when he was attacked. His son, Alejandro, a Marine veteran, described his father as “the hardest-working man I know. The fact that this happened while he was working is disastrous. All these people that are getting detained or attacked are just trying to provide! They are not criminals. They are hardworking people with families.”
The recurrent guy has stated quite clearly that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation.” And that “They’re not people, in my opinion.” And has referred to them as “animals.” Those poisonous statements comes right out of Adolf Hitler’s Mien Kampf. I’ve tried very hard not to mention Hitler and fascism while writing about the recurrent guy, but it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid.
In that one big cruel bill that just became law, there is at least $170 billion for hiring another 10,000 ICE agents and for building more detention facilities, more aptly called concentration camps. These new camps are primarily owned and run by for-profit corporations, who were awarded these lucrative contracts without the required competitive bidding.
One of those companies, CoreCivic, is trying to reopen a large facility in Leavenworth, Kansas, but is meeting with resistance from the town due to past mismanagement there. The town’s lawsuit against CoreCivic opens with a past quote from U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson: “The only way I could describe it frankly, what’s going on at CoreCivic right now is it’s an absolute hell hole.”
The recurrent guy will make sure that facility gets handed to CoreCivic as soon as possible. He could care less about what happens to the detainees after that.
And then there’s Alligator Alcatraz in Florida’s protected Everglades. In just eight days, built of aluminum fencing and tenting on a site that some building experts note is a “High-Velocity Hurricane Zone,” it will expose detainees to mosquitoes, excessive heat, potential flooding and, of course, hurricanes. And according to Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, it will cost $450,000 that FEMA will pay for the first year of operation alone!
Watching this cruelty to mostly innocent people take place in our country is heartbreaking and terrifying. I’m left with the feeling that we have been here before. In the 1930s Hitler and his Nazi party worked, just as the recurrent guy is doing, to convince the German people that some people were not quite human, not like them.
Back then it was people of the Jewish faith, primarily, who were poisoning the blood of the Aryan people of Germany and must be removed. And the removal began — the taking of Jews from their homes and work and disappearing them, just like what’s happening to our immigrant neighbors today. But Jews weren’t just deported, they were deported and then gassed and incinerated in places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald,six and a half million of them, murdered.
Can that happen here? Did you ever think that what we’re seeing now would happen here? Will we turn our eyes away from what we know is morally and ethically wrong as did so many German people back then?
At a recent protest rally in our area a few weeks ago, I saw a man standing silently while holding a handmade sign written on a large piece of brown cardboard. The more I see what is happening here in our country, the more I think about that sign.
“It’s 1933: Do you know where your conscience is? Smell the Reichstag burning?”
Karen Gardner of Haydenville can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.