Get a Backbone

Who in the Democratic Party decided that Trump gets to set the narrative on immigration?

I was walking along the Tel Aviv beach today when a plaque caught my eye:

First of all, this plaque is not using euphemisms for the Jews who fled Europe in search of safety in what was then British Mandate Palestine. They were — and are referred to here — as “illegal immigrants.” Still, who today would say that they were not right to save themselves from a fate that would have ended in the ovens of Auschwitz just a few years later?

On the eve of World War II, after Germany had already stripped its Jewish population of citizenship and instituted other laws that were soon to spell doom for European Jewry, Britain suspended all Jewish migration into Palestine. So the people who broke the blockade just over a month later on the SS Parita were, in fact, illegal immigrants. It did not matter that they were fleeing for their lives. They were taking on what was then the world’s most powerful empire by landing north off the ancient port of Jaffa.

Meanwhile, back in Donald Trump’s America, Republicans are moving to block all immigration from countries where some of the world’s most oppressed people are living. And it’s not just “illegal immigrants” who are being deported — to places like Libya and El Salvador, where their lives will once again be in great peril. It is also legal immigrants who played by the rules, who came in the front door and who have spotless records. Many of them are now being summarily kicked out. CNN reports that:

The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday told hundreds of thousands of migrants that their permission to live and work in the United States had been revoked and they should leave the country, according to a copy of the notice obtained by CNN.

Ok, look. I was going to spend this week taking a break from a daily political newsletter and write an occasional travelogue instead. But seeing what is happening back home and stumbling upon that plaque on the beach today made my blood absolutely boil. Yours should too.

I don’t know who in the Democratic Party decided that Donald Trump gets to set the narrative on immigration and that we don’t try to change it. When government thugs get into scrums with members of Congress in Newark, New Jersey or manhandle a United State senator in Los Angeles for daring to perform oversight responsibilities, we owe it to our fellow human beings to get a backbone and stand up for basic decency. And if you fear that Americans are not with you on what should be an issue of absolute moral clarity, then that is a failure to communicate effectively — nothing more.

Good God, are Democrats so paralyzed that they can’t say, with absolute clarity, that this administration is consigning millions of men, women and children to harm if they are deported?

Does no one remember what courageous Afghans did for our military for two decades, risking their lives to help us against the Taliban, only to be deported straight back into the arms of the Taliban, which will surely punish them for helping the United States?

Do you know why corporate media constantly bleats on about how much the American people are behind Trump on immigration? It’s because he is unapologetically advancing his monstrous policies, while too many congressional Democrats and the consultants who got the party into this mess are cowed, brainwashed by the same media about how the American people are behind Trump on immigration — until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I don’t even really care if Americans are with Trump on this right now — although I am not convinced that they are. It is our job to change their perception on this. That’s what leadership is all about. That’s what it means to lead a movement with righteous indignation, to convince your fellow Americans that we are better than this, that the men, women and children whom Trump is sending straight back into harms way are human beings and not some nameless, faceless horde that Fox News trots out right around election time every year.

Senator Alex Padilla stood up for justice today and showed the world how far this administration will go in service to the fascism it so desperately wants to foist on the United States.

We should have seen this coming when they came for undocumented Venezuelans and shipped them off to a dystopian hellhole in El Salvador.

We should have seen this coming when they came for the legal immigrants from countries that Trump likely considers shitholes.

We should have seen this coming when they came for Rep. LaMonica McIver and indicted her on trumped up charges after she insisted on performing oversight of an ICE facility in her city.

We should have seen this coming when they deployed United States Marines against American citizens, on American soil.

We should have seen this coming when they threw a United States senator to the ground and handcuffed him for daring to ask a question of an executive branch official.

First they came for all of them. History tells us what will happen next.

And if you don’t know, a plaque on a busy beach in Tel Aviv will remind you.

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Maybe I am so deeply upset because I spent the day around the Sea of Galilee, including atop the Mount of Beatitudes where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. You don’t have to be Christian (I am not) to understand that the message of that particular sermon sums up how we should think about our fellow human beings, including the least among us who are fleeing death, persecution and poverty like so many before them.

Here is a photo of the view from what some religious traditions consider the location of where the sermon took place. It is a serene, beautiful spot, especially on a late spring day.

And here is the sun setting over the western shore of the Sea of Galilee last night.