The way we see things often determines the stories we remember and tell. Those remembered and repeated stories in turn often influence the way we see things. Consider, for example, the stories presidents tell.
In his State of the Union address President Donald Trump chose to tell the story of an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent who bravely arrests and sends back home bad gang members who are in this country illegally. It is the kind of story Mr. Trump tells over and over, so often that he apparently really believes it is the only ICE agent story that is true.
To drive his point home he introduced the grieving parents of children who had been killed by bad gang members who were in this country illegally.
One might think that the only murders committed in the USA are at the hands of bad gang members who are in this country illegally. It is no surprise that Mr. Trump did not put on display the grieving family of one of the tens of thousands of Americans killed every year by good old, true blue, born-in-the-USA Americans. Because if he does not hear, tell, and internalize that story, it will be as if it never happened. It will not stand in the way of the conclusion he wants us to make.
Here are three more stories of undocumented people living among us which Mr. Trump might have told…
1) A Kansas chemistry professor who has been in the US for some 30 years, who has three children and a cleaner police record that most people reading this blog, was picked up as he took one of his kids to school, and is being detained 150 miles from his home. Apparently ICE hopes to send him back to Bangladesh. Yes, he is “in this country illegally,” but by all accounts he is neither a gang member, nor all that bad.
2) In Youngstown, OH, over the past couple of months there has unfolded the story of a businessman, also in this country for decades illegally but by all accounts an otherwise decent man – a family man and respected in his community – now sent back in Jordan.
3) And then there is the woman, the mother of four children, now being given sanctuary in a church just a few miles away to try to keep her from being sent back to her native Mexico.
What if President Trump had had the courage to tell those stories to those assembled in the House chamber and to the world? What if he had effusively praised the courage of heavily-armed ICE agents arresting, detaining, and deporting people such as they apparently are? One dares hope the entire chamber would have sat on its hands.
How hard is it to tell the difference? Two people are in the US illegally, and have been for years. One is raising a family, contributing to our economy and culture, and earning the respect of respectable people around them. The other is a thuggish gang member willing to kill a stranger without a second thought. How hard would it be to distinguish between the two? It’s the kind of discrimination between good and bad that is apparently too subtle for ICE under the thumb of Donald Trump.
I have resisted calling the kind of America Donald Trump’s ascendency is creating, “Nazi,” or its agents, “Gestapo.” But now I see it: all Jews were arrested, detailed, and sent to the camps because the Nazis were incapable of distinguishing between Jew and Jew. Now, Gestapo-like, all who “are in this country illegally” are being arrested, detained, and deported because an illegal is an illegal. Who is next? What category, what class, what kind of person is next?
One good thing may come out of this horror. Perhaps there are enough members of congress who still have hearts that some legislation can be passed to create a more humane way of dealing with the undocumented among us. Maybe Congress will have to give the President his damned wall in order to get the job done, I don’t know. But let’s do what is fair and just before the generous compassion that we Americans show at our best is completely torn out of us.
In the meantime, is there no room for mercy in the Trump administration’s enforcement of our immigration laws?
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