Doom Report (Week 16: Give Process Where Process Is Due)

Way back in Week -4, I said this in regards to the Trump regime’s plans to deport more people than there are illegal aliens in America:

Will some of those rounded up end up being Americans who actually voted for Trump, possibly screaming “wait, wait: I didn’t think you meant me!” the whole time?  Maybe.

(And then I referenced the classic “I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party meme.)  Well, in this week’s Friday edition of Even More News, Katy and the gang talk about the Argentinian family who voted for Trump and now their son is detained by ICE.  If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s pretty horrific.  The son came to the country as a toddler, holds a green card, has two children who are American citizens, and also was charged with a misdemeanor in 2020, for which he served 3 years’ probation and the case was closed.  The parents discussed it like this:

The couple is now reeling from what they call a betrayal.  They say they supported Trump under the belief that his policies would target undocumented border crossers and violent criminals—not legal immigrants who made a single mistake.

“We feel tricked,” said Verdi.  “If we had known this would be the reality, we never would’ve voted for him.”

So now I get to say “I told you so.”

Except ...

Except I don’t want to.  I know a lot of people get some pleasure out of that—my father is certainly one of them—but it’s never really made me feel better.  Basically, whenever there’s the opportunity to say “I told you so,” it means that your prediction about something horrible that no one would listen to actually came to pass.  And that, in turn, means something horrible has happened.  I guess some people find that basking in having been right all along reduces how shitty you feel about the terrible thing, at least somewhat.  And, hey: if you’re one of those people, I’m not here to make you feel bad about it.  It’s a human instinct that we all have.  And I have it too, which is why I brought it up.  I’ve just found, for me personally, that my instincts in this case are faulty.  Because it doesn’t make me feel better.  Because, regardless of whether I was right all along or not, there’s still something horrible going on here.  This guy may end up having to leave his parents and his children behind, to get sent back to a country that he has no memory of.  And some people seem to be having fun telling his parents what terrible people they are and what idiots they were—many of them right there in the comments of that article I linked, in fact—but that wouldn’t make me feel better.  Yes, it’s quite frustrating to see brown people voting for a white supremacist, believing him when he says he’s going after the other brown people and certainly not you ... but, look: Trump is a scam artist.  I’ve talked before about how we shouldn’t be blaming the victims of the con man.  Let’s keep the blame squarely on the grifter.

And, it might be a bit of a tangent, but can I just ask, what the fuck is the point of all this immigration policy anyway?  Democrats keep saying they don’t want to look “weak on the border.”  Well, why the fuck not?  A couple of weeks back journalist Kara Swisher appeared on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown.  Now, I don’t often recommend that show in this series, partially because it’s focussed on mental health more than politics, and partially because, while I agree with Mayim on many things, we diverge on the legitimacy of Israel’s actions in Palestine.^*  But politics and mental health are kind of colliding lately, and Mayim did this interview with Swisher, who I quite like, and I couldn’t help but be struck by this discussion:

I think we didn’t listen to people who live in our border states enough to—in terms of the difficulties they were facing, as much as I thought it was cruel for Southern mayors to send immigr—er, migrants up North, it does make you, like you have to, we have to figure this out as a country, to understand—I thought it was a cruel way to do it, but I understood—I have a lot of friends living in those border states—a really difficult situation.  And it’s not because immigrants are more prone to crime: they’re not; it’s not because we don’t have jobs: we do, like that need to be done; it’s that we have to, like, figure out a way to be ...

Now, most of the time when you see a quote from someone and it includes ellipses, it indicates that the quoter (that’s me in this case) cut something out of the quote.  But not this time: as you might guess from all the hemming and hawing, she just trails off and then changes the subject.  Because how else was she going to end that sentence?  Once you’ve already pointed out that the complaints of people in border states regarding crime and job loss are just straw men, you really have nothing else to talk about but racism, and I suspect Swisher just didn’t want to call out her friends.

So immigrants don’t commit more crimes than American citizens—because, you know, they don’t want to get deported—and they only “take” the jobs that citizens don’t want to do anyway.  Every time some Southern state cracks down on immigration, we see stories about construction jobs not being able to be finished and fruit rotting on the vine.  Immigrants come here, pay taxes but never get any of the services that those taxes pay for, subsidize your Social Security because they certainly can’t collect any; they don’t vote (because, again: they don’t want to get deported) so they change absolutely nothing about who gets elected, they open small businesses and contribute to the economy ...  I keep on hearing people on television say “yes, obviously immigration is a problem and we need to solve it” but I never hear them say why it’s a problem.  We’re just all supposed to know, I guess.  Well, I fucking well don’t know.  Tell me.  Seriously: if you live in a border state—or anywhere else, for that matter—and you are adamant that people coming into our country is a big problem, please try explaining why, using logic and words that you wouldn’t be ashamed to say out loud on national television.  Because, at the end of the day, much like Kara Swisher, I don’t want to believe it’s all racism ... but I’m having a hard time completing this sentence.

But, as many before me have pointed out, the cruelty is the point.  (If you’re up for a longer illumination of that point, check out the Some More News episode “The Right’s War on Empathy.”)  When you read about the Oklahoma family woken up in the middle of the night, forced to stand on the lawn in the rain in their underwear by ICE agents, with all their phones, laptop and life savings stolen from them with no clue when—or if—it will be returned, and the whole thing turned out to be a mistake because the person ICE was looking for had moved out weeks ago and had no connection to this family whatsoever ... yeah, the cruelty is the point.  (Jonathan and the Even More News crew have a great discussion on this story as well.)  When you hear Stephen Miller claim that “Due process guarantees the rights of a criminal defendant facing prosecution not an illegal alien facing deportation” and you wonder, even if that’s true—spoiler alert: it’s not—but even if it were true, how could you possibly know that the “illegal alien facing deportation” was, in fact, illegal?  The Oklahoma family were citizens.  The child with cancer who was deported a few weeks ago was a citizen.  The Argentinian son (and father) whose story started out this post was not a citizen, true ... but he was also NOT an illegal immigrant, because he had a green card.  That makes him, by definition, a legal immigrant.  Likewise, Mahmoud Khalil, who we’ve been talking about here since way back in Week 8, was also not an illegal immigrant, nor was Rumeysa Ozturk, whose story broke in Week 10.  Ozturk was finally released after six weeks; Khalil is still in jail and has missed the birth of his child.  The Argentinian family’s son is still in detention, and the Oklahoma family’s life savings still have not been returned.  But, sure, it’s probably fine to just skip the due process.

Other things that you should be aware of this week include Seth Meyers finally catching up to my last week’s view on the “30 dolls” quote on Monday’s “A Closer Look,” and More Perfect Union’s excellent explainer on how tariffs actually work (or at least should work).  The first is quite funny, and the second is quite informative.

And, finally, I continue to try to find lights in the darkness, no matter how faint.  On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse showed a clip of a woman named Emily Feiner being forcibly removed from a town hall held by her Congressman, Mike Lawler.  Now, you might be shocked to hear that a sitting Congressperson had state troopers pick up a 64-year-old woman and bodily carry her out of a town hall meeting, but he had to: she asked him when he was going to start upholding his oath to the Constitution and refused to take changing the subject for an answer.  No choice, really: what else could he have done?  Certainly not answer the question!

But the truly uplifting part is how the rest of the crowd responds to this somewhat insane act: they start with chants of “Let her stay!” and end up just yelling “Shame!” at Lawler over and over, as if he were a Game of Thrones escapee.  If Lawler thought he was silencing opposition, it really does seem to have had the opposite effect.  And, as far as the Coffee Klatch goes, stay after the clip, because Reich and Lofthouse interview Feiner herself, and her reports of the positive support she’s received since her clip went viral reminds us all that, like her, any of us could make a difference.

And that’s something we all need to keep in mind, I think.

__________

* Nope, it’s not her stance on vaccines.  She’s actually way more reasonable on that topic than she’s generally given credit for.