President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of deporting gangsters, thugs, and drug-dealing criminals. Closing the border was the promise of keeping those threats from entering again. How is it working? We cannot know since those arrested and deported are denied access to the very truth-finding legal processes enacted into law by our representatives in Congress.

Information is being routinely withheld from the press by this administration that considers it a necessity and their right to operate without checks and balances by inspector generals, a law-driven Department of Justice, or a free press.

We’ve learned from experience in Iraqi and Afghanistan that the gap between traditional moral values and daily inhumane behavior demanded by corrupt leadership often leads to moral injury that can be extremely harmful, and sometimes deadly, to those behaving in ways they know are wrong.

Border czar Tom Homan directed his “troops” to arrest, transfer far from home, and detain a Columbia University graduate student who used his guaranteed freedom of speech for peaceful protest of inhumane treatment of Palestinians. Homan’s troops intercepted a Lebanese physician, a citizen of our country doing extraordinary and valuable medical care, at the airport and returned her to Lebanon. Neither of these two have been charged with a crime. There has been no effort to do so.

Objections by federal judges have been dismissed by Homan, to nobody’s surprise. The hidden casualties of these lawless and punitive apprehensions may be the decent “troops” of ICE who are realizing they are mired in the overthrow of the rule of law and the success of our 250-year-old experiment in democracy.

Their moral injury will not be easily managed, and their families are likely to also be victimized by the conflict between law enforcement and law avoidance.

Larry Cervelli

West Chesterfield