By Robert C. Koehler
As Trump and friends claim control over the country, celebrating their war on migrants – “the enemy” of the moment, whom they’ve created and dehumanized – much of America writhes in shock and irony as it looks on.
The president who hates criminals is also our criminal-in-chief. But fortunately (for him), he’s above the law! Court rulings don’t apply to him – not when he’s busy keeping America safe from the boogeymen. To be an exalted leader, you need to keep a serious percentage of the populace in a state of simple-minded fear: The enemy are very, very bad people. They belong to gangs. They eat our pets. But I will protect you.
I’ll reopen Guantanamo. I’ll reopen Alcatraz. And the electorate can sigh with a sense of relief and safety. He’s bringing back our greatness – that is to say, our racist certainty. He’s recreating a country that real Americans can understand . . . one that’s like them.
At least this is how it seems. But before I get too deeply immersed in Trump-inspired sarcasm, let me grapple with some deeper reality as well. American “greatness” has primarily been military in nature: us vs. somebody! The nation’s mainstream consciousness, be it Democratic or Republican, cannot stop playing war. At least this has been the case throughout my lifetime.
As Jessica Schulberg and Paul Blumenthal recently pointed out at Huffington Post, for instance, the Bush-era war on terror helped give birth to Trump’s war on migrants: today’s terrorists, the “invaders” of the present moment. They quote J. Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented Gitmo detainees under Bush. He notes that Trump’s initial plan to open Gitmo was “an effort to outsource detention and torture to avoid the constraints of U.S. law. It’s the natural consequence and evolution of what we’ve seen throughout the last 20 years, certainly with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and the use of black sites overseas.”
However, to Trump’s frustration, there was “too much rule of law” at Gitmo, making matters too difficult to turn the hellish site into a dumping ground for thousands of migrants. Trump’s waging war! The last thing he needs is rule of law. So his next step was to work out an agreement with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, allegedly paying El Salvador some $6 million to send American migrants to the country’s maximum-security hellhole, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. This would allow Trump’s war to continue.
As Schulberg and Blumenthal write:
“On March 15, shortly after ICE sent all migrants in Guantánamo back to U.S. facilities, Trump signed an executive order, claiming that Tren de Aragua had ‘invaded’ the U.S., and that any Venezuelan migrant age 14 or older with alleged ties to the gang could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime authority only previously invoked during the War of 1812 and both World Wars.”
Some good – or at least hopeful – news from all this is that the opposition to Trump’s war-gaming isn’t sheerly marginal. The opposition is also politically structural, such as, for instance the existence of sanctuary cities – whose governments refuse to cooperate, or allow their police departments to cooperate, with ICE, despite the risks they face for doing so.
For instance, a few days ago, the Trump administration sued Colorado and the city of Denver “for allegedly,” according to Truthout, “obstructing federal immigration enforcement. The suit objects to sanctuary policies — local initiatives to protect immigrant communities from federal deportation efforts — and argues that such policies encroach on federal authority.
“This move follows Donald Trump’s recent executive order instructing the DOJ to penalize sanctuary cities, including threatening to withhold federal funding.”
Obviously, this is no small challenge to face. Maybe Trump will wind up succeeding with his authoritarian agenda – God help the migrants, God help all of us – and if that happens, humanitarian opposition will have to continue nonetheless, no matter how difficult things get. But opposition is also present right now. So is political belief in a higher value than waging war and defeating an “enemy.”
In response to the federal lawsuit against Denver, a statement from the mayor’s office declared that the city “will not be bullied or blackmailed, least of all by an administration that has little regard for the law and even less for the truth.”
This is not simply an “us vs. them” confrontation between the Trump-MAGA world and progressives. The confrontation is both pragmatic and spiritual: What keeps us safe? Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz – depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life – will not keep us safe. What we must embrace and learn to understand, both individually and collectively, is what I call empathic sanity: the ability to live as one, to value everyone’s full humanity.
Turns out there are more than 200 sanctuary cities in the United States. As George Cassidy Payne writes at Medium, a sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. All people are equal.
“In this context,” he writes, “sanctuary cities offer more than a geographical claim. They challenge us to look past a person’s nationality and recognize their humanity. They call us to prioritize their place of residence, viewing them as global citizens, not by their place of birth. In the sanctuary, people are treated with radical respect; here, no one has the right to harm another without their consent, nor to judge anyone based on their skin color, accent, citizenship status, or nation of origin.”
This sounds like a first step in the creation of international security.
Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.
