Immigration and Customs Enforcement hordes are moving east across northern American from Minnesota to Maine like a winter storm of ice and snow, overspreading the land and freezing the lakes. The Lewiston Sun Journal reported that Safiya Khalid, a former city councilor from Lewiston, opened a demonstration of over 1,000 people, noting many area residents fear going to work, sending their children to school, grocery shopping and engaging in other aspects of daily life.
This anxiety and fear are the result of the behavior of the ICE and border patrol agents: racial profiling, randomly stopping people, taking people into custody without apparent cause, holding people in humiliating conditions, demanding identification from U.S. citizens, using unnecessary and sometimes deadly force, invading homes and seeking to discipline those who may speak out. The list goes on, daily snowballing to greater and harsher extremes.
Watching the growth of this storm of abuse is like reading Jonathan Freedland’s book, “The Traitors Circle,” about resistance in Nazi Germany. He wrote, “During the twelve long years of national socialism, some three million Germans had been in and out of prisons or concentration camps for crimes of dissent, sometimes punished for nothing more than a critical remark.”
Included in the narrative is a quotation by a person who has been in and out of incarceration several times during World War II. Lagi Ballestrem-Solf speaks of her experience of oppression, “The world has learned nothing from it – neither slaughterers nor victims nor onlookers. Our time is like a dance of death whose uncanny rhythm is understood by few. Everyone whirls confusedly without seeing the abyss.”
Today, U.S. government leadership and the actions of ICE and the Border Patrol may be taking us into that abyss. If ICE action remains unchallenged and continues to snowball, the country may be buried in injustice and a failed democracy, and be frozen out of freedom for all. However, it will be difficult to reform ICE without reforming immigration law and the attitude toward immigrants.
The American Immigration Counsel has reported, “The last time Congress updated our legal immigration system was November 1990, one month before the World Wide Web went online. We are long overdue for comprehensive immigration reform.”
Attitudinal change is key to developing a new comprehensive immigration policy and law. The narrative of our political leadership needs to refrain from promoting stereotypes, fear, and suspicion of people from other countries and cultures. The United States came into being with the conviction, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (sic) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” That means all people including, Native Americans, people of color, people from any nationality, holding any culture, history, or belief system.
It is indeed a cliché to say we are a nation of immigrants — one people. A new comprehensive immigration law will follow the attitude of the people. An immigration policy that is grounded in asylum for the oppressed and endangered and hospitality for all is an immigration policy that will serve democracy well and eliminated the aggressive posture of ICE and the Border Patrol. Of course, the policy will include the laws and regulations for all the people who live in the United States. Perhaps, contrary to the words of Lagi Ballestrem-Solf, we can learn this time. May love of neighbor, empathy and care for others thaw the ICE.
John Buttrick writes from his Vermont Folk Rocker in his Concord home, Minds
Crossing. He can be reached at johndbuttrick@gmail.com.