In his State of the Union address, the president doubled down on his intent to rid this country of undocumented immigrants. When did immigrants become aliens? When did people seeking asylum, or simply a better life, become subhuman? When did the people of this country, this nation of immigrants, ask for detention facilities to hold people who are seeking what our own ancestors had sought? This is not a new phenomenon, as any student of history can attest, but it has reached a boiling point in our country in the past few years.
Viciousness toward people not born here has been escalating ever since the current president came down the golden escalator in 2015. On that day, he branded immigrants at our southern border as drug dealers, criminals and rapists. He stoked the fires of simmering resentment among Americans who legitimately felt passed over and left behind by our government. He identified immigrants as the scapegoat on whom they could pin their anger.
He was thwarted in his first term when people began to understand that immigrant “hordes” weren’t as he described them, that a wall wasn’t the solution to our drug problem, and that his family separation policy, with children confined to cages, only added cruelty to a broken system.
But he campaigned to return to office with renewed vengeance on anyone not born in this country. In his only debate with Kamala Harris prior to the election, he dehumanized Haitian immigrants, who had earned Temporary Protected Status under Biden, repeating the false claim that they were eating the pets of the residents of Springfield, Ohio. Sadly, when he stoked anger, many voters listened, and thought they understood where he was going with this. Most voters didn’t really grasp how malicious he could be.
Once elected, he appointed Stephen Miller to be his deputy chief of staff for Homeland Security and whisper in his ear. With Miller’s help, the president embarked on an all-out war against immigrants. It is hard to imagine, but it was just a year ago that he started using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to begin the wholesale deportation of undocumented persons in this country, labeling them “the worst of the worst.” We’re supposed to ignore the fact that persons in this country legally and persons with no history of serious crime were included in this operation and were deported to a nightmare of a prison in El Salvador.
Since then, with a massive infusion of cash from his Big Beautiful Bill, and a hastily recruited and poorly trained army of ICE and and Customs and Border Protection agents, he has been waging war on persons in cities throughout the country. If we were shocked by his attacks in Los Angeles, and laughed at his description of a “war zone” in Portland, Ore., we have been appalled by the subsequent government-sponsored terrorism in Chicago, Portland, Maine, Charlotte, N.C., and especially in a city the president has a special animus toward, Minneapolis.
With a quota system of arrests of 3,000 immigrants per day, ICE and CBP agents need to hustle, and people without criminal histories far outnumber actual criminals, despite assertions to the contrary. Against so many of these individuals, ICE’s tactics are brutal, their treatment inhumane and their excuses for excessive violence do not stand up to scrutiny. What is more, these agents treat American citizens who oppose them as enemies who need to be tear-gassed, shot at or killed in cold blood.
As the arrests have mounted, the number of facilities thrown together to house them has also grown. These facilities cram human beings together like they are trash in a trash compactor, feed them food we wouldn’t want to feed to our pets, and deprive them of legal protection or contact with friends or family, and due process of law.
Recently, the anti-immigrant policies of our president boiled over into our own back yard. The federal government was in the process of converting a warehouse into a detention center in Merrimack. The people of our state recognized that this effort to “streamline” the deportation of immigrants to parts unknown would bring no guarantee of benefit to the people of our state even as it does guarantee suffering for detainees. The town of Merrimack clearly and forcefully stated that it did not want this. Just this week, our Governor finally stood up to this administration.
It is a relief to see democracy at work in New Hampshire. We are seeing that if we call immigrants illegal aliens, we miss the fact that they are people with a past, and with hopes and dreams like us. They are our brothers and sisters. In our nation, they deserve due process under the law, and in any nation, they deserve to be treated with dignity.
The people of New Hampshire have spoken. They will not join in this all-out war on the strangers among us, those people whom major religions have enjoined us to care for and to love as ourselves.
Millie LaFontaine is a retired neurologist who lives in Concord.