trump – Ben Jacques Stories

They Love America, but …

They love America, but America doesn’t love them back. “They” are the millions of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers facing deportation.

Built by immigrants, America has now turned its back on them, thanks to Donald Trump and his MAGA followers, who for decades have demeaned and dehumanized them, especially those with skin darker than theirs.

Ironically, many immigrants and asylum seekers have come here legally, through government programs granting them the chance to live here in safety. Others, like Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a Milford high school student taken by ICE while on his way to volleyball practice, have grown up among us and know no other life.

Marcelo, who came to the United States from Brazil when he was six, is an honors student. A junior, he plays in the band and would have performed at Sunday’s graduation. According to a friend, he was shackled feet and hands and shoved into a holding cell with 25 older men.

Here’s what’s happening. Trump wants Homeland Security and ICE to roundup 3,000 “illegal” immigrants a day. They haven’t been meeting their quota, though they’ve tried. To make it easier to find bodies to deport, Trump changed the rules. Now a half million immigrants—families, parents and children who were here legally—have had the rug, no, the ground, pulled out from under them.

Fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, they were granted “humanitarian parole” or “temporary protected status.” They were fingerprinted and documented. By revoking these programs, Trump has made them easy to find.

ICE has also found other easy targets, immigrants who show up at courthouses for hearings. They’ve been nabbed in hallways and stairwells. A judge was arrested and accused of helping one immigrant leave by a back door.

Masked ICE agents are raiding factories and farms, bodegas and restaurants. They are grabbing people off the streets, taking mothers and fathers from children and children from siblings. The word has gone out. No place is safe, including churches, hospitals and schools.

All this is going on while the Trump administration is calling on Americans to have more babies to counter the declining birth rate. He wants more babies, more young families, yet the clear message is that he wants white families, not black or brown. How else to explain the counter-intuitive break-up and deportation of families already here–those who want nothing more than to live in a safe and free country. Those who love America, even if America doesn’t love them back.

If ICE can meet its 3,000 per day quote, over a million of our neighbors will have been arrested and deported this year, one big step towards the deportation of the 15 to 20 million Trump has threatened.

To millions of Americans, sadly, that is a good thing. They voted for someone to do just that. To millions more, however, it is a travesty. It goes against everything they believe in and stand for.

The largest segment of Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 were Christians, especially white Christians. They put Trump in office. They could be the ones, now, to stop him. Leaving their pews, they could pick up the phone, march in the streets, demand an end to the cruelty, whether to our immigrant neighbors, or to the millions of poor who will lose their health insurance if his budget goes through.

Last Friday in an interfaith rally, some 70 clergy did just that. Marching from the Lexington Green to the Boston Common, they protested the cruel treatment of immigrants and international students.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D. C., a group of ministers praying in the Rotunda of the Capitol were cuffed with zip-ties and taken out, arrested for protesting against cuts to Medicaid and the harm it would cause millions. They were led by the Rev. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.

These faith leaders, like the prophets of old, are calling us to action. It’s time we pay attention.

Protect the Babies We Have

Let’s see if I get this right. The Trump administration wants us to have more babies. What with Covid and a declining birth rate, we need more young people to offset those of us with gray hair. We need them to replenish our communities and pay our bills. Trump recently talked of giving a bonus of $5,000 to each new mother.

At the same time his administration is deporting mothers, fathers, and, yes, babies. He is rounding up immigrants, including those who are paying taxes and contributing to Social Security and Medicare. He is breaking up families.

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ICE recently took a mother away from her 1-year-old girl and deported her to Cuba, separating them indefinitely. ICE also deported three children ages 2, 4 and 7 along with their mothers to Honduras. The children are U.S. citizens. The 4-year old has a rare form of cancer.

It’s become clear that Trump’s pro-baby, pro-family approach is meant for one type of family, one type of baby–white families and white babies. And that all this talk about encouraging women to give birth and to stay at home to raise their children is rooted in white nationalist ideology.

What is white nationalism? White nationalism is “advocacy of or support for the perceived political interests of the white population within a particular country, especially to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups.”

White nationalism, along with white supremacy, has always been around. It was behind the enslavement of millions of African Americans. It was behind the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was behind the “separate but equal” Supreme Court decision that affirmed racial apartheid in Southern states. It was given new energy with the re-election of Donald Trump.

Consider the makeup of Trump’s cabinet and advisors. Consider his history of demeaning comments and slurs. Consider the attacks on DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—and the government’s punitive policies directed towards racial and ethnic minorities. Consider Trump’s revoking of “temporary protected status” for asylum seekers from Haiti and Venezuela.

Consider his shutting down of our refugee resettlement program, stranding thousands of already approved refugees from Africa and the Middle East. At the same time, he has put out the welcome mat for Afrikaners in South Africa, whom he claims are victims of “white genocide.”

Last week 59 white South African “refugees” arrived at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D. C. A photo of them shows young families holding babies in their arms. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told them: “We’re excited to welcome you here to our country where we think you will bloom.”

All this, while Trump denies a haven to black and brown families fleeing famine, war and persecution.

So what do we do about it? First, we need a stop to the deportations of non-violent immigrants—full stop—and the affording of due process to all. And we need a resumption of our long-standing refugee-resettlement program, applied fairly to everyone.

Second, we need immigration reform. For too many decades, we have let Congress off the hook. The last significant immigration reform came during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when millions of immigrants were granted pathways to citizenship. The failure of Congress and past administrations to legislate common-sense reform has victimized millions of our neighbors, who want nothing more than to build lives for their families in a safe and free country.

As for the Administration’s push to have more babies, I say let’s protect the babies we have, and their parents and siblings–refugees, asylum seekers, DACA enrollees, immigrants. They are part of our communities. We need them. Diverse, multi-cultural, hardworking, creative, they, with us, can build an American future based not on white-nationalist ideology, but on equal opportunity for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or religion. A future aligned with our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Let’s hold the babies we have.

A Song for our Time, too

Woodie Guthrie wrote the lyrics. Martin Hoffman set them to music. Since then, It’s been sung by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and a dozen others, including Arlo Guthrie.
The ballad tells of an airplane crash in California’s Los Gatos Canyon. On board were 28 migrant farm workers from Mexico.

The year was 1948, six years after the start of Operation Bracero, a government program which recruited Mexican laborers to work in American fields. Now the braceros were being rounded up and flown back to Mexico. At the same time, to keep prices high, the government was paying growers to leave their crops in the field. Peaches were rotting and oranges piling up in dumps.

The song is called “Deportee.” Guthrie wrote it after news reports listed the names of the pilots, attendant and immigration guard, but referred to the farm workers only as “deportees.” Unlike the four Americans, the braceros were buried in a mass grave without names, marked
“Mexican Nationals.” As the song goes,

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

The roundup of the Los Gatos laborers was just one episode in several government campaigns to remove Mexicans from American soil. Mass deportations began during the Great Depression and continued through the 1940s. Then in 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brought out “Operation Wetback.” Under this federal program, officials used military-like tactics to arrest tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. Caught up in the raids were farm and factory workers, including some American citizens.

In July of 1955, several thousand deportees were found wandering the streets of Mexicali, a desert town bordering California. Yanked from their jobs and families, they had simply been dumped across the border. According to one account, 88 died of heat exposure in the 112
degree heat.

In Texas, thousands of deportees were crammed onto boats bound for Mexican ports in conditions comparable with those on slave ships. Others were packed into trucks. By the end of Operation Wetback, the INS claimed it had “repatriated” 1.3 million Mexicans.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

Accompanying the mass deportations were media depictions of Mexicans as dirty, disease- bearing and irresponsible. News coverage focused on border and immigration officials planning and conducting raids. Only in time did most Americans come to see this as something shameful. In 2012 the state of California formally apologized for its role in deporting hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.

On Labor Day in 2013, United Farm Worker President Arturo Rodriguez joined hundreds gathered at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, to memorialize the 28 farm workers, 25 men and three women, killed in Los Gatos Canyon. This time, inscribed in the headstone, was each person’s name.

Next week American voters will choose a new president. One of the candidates has promised to resurrect Operation Wetback, only under his plan the government, in a military-style operation, will deport 11 million undocumented immigrants (Trump put the figure at 18 million).

Trump would also end deferrals for children (DACA) and temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Such a massive deportation would throw our country into financial, legal and social chaos. As Slate authors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander have written, “To return to the era of Operation Wetback would be to return to an America ruled not by law but by terror.”

Perhaps worst of all, it would perpetuate the big lie that immigrants, asylum seekers, migrants and refugees are not like us, that they are less than human. That they don’t deserve names.

Once that lie is believed, we become silent to the cruel treatment of others.

Photo: Lance Canales & the Flood

An Unholy Convergence

By Ben Jacques

In the fall of 1919, just three months after the Versailles Treaty marked Germany’s defeat in World War I, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to a fellow army soldier. It is considered the first printed expression of his antisemitism. Composed most likely on an army typewriter, the letter lays out Hitler’s belief that Jews are not just people of a different religion. Rather, they are an “alien race,” intent on destroying society.

To counter their influence, Hitler proposed a “rational antisemitism,” a political movement to systematically take away their “privileges,” culminating in their “irrevocable removal” from Germany.

In time, their “irrevocable removal” became the “final solution,” the murder of six million Jews throughout Europe.

It’s not difficult to see in the candidacy of Donald J. Trump a similar convergence of nationalism and racism. Substitute the word “immigrant” for “Jew,” and you see the same calculated dehumanization of a sector of the population.

Trump’s targeting of immigrants is built on racism. In 2018 he complained about “having all these people from shithole countries come here,” that is, from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. Then he added, “We should have more people from Norway.”

In following years, Trump has ramped up his attacks. In 2023 he said “illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation,” echoing Hitler’s statement that “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood.”

At the 2024 Republican Convention, Trump promised the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants—a figure he put at 18 million. In September he said the mass roundup would be a “bloody story.”

Since then, Trump’s attacks have intensified, including the assertion, repeated by his running mate and other followers, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.

Targeting immigrants, legal or otherwise, is not new in America, nor is “white nationalism.” The nation that opened its doors to European immigrants also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, denying citizenship to Chinese workers who built our railroads.

During World War II we imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. In the 1950s we deported a million Mexicans, legal and undocumented, who had harvested our crops. From 2017-21 under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, 3,900 children were taken from their parents.

We are also the nation that in 1939 prevented the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, from docking in Miami. Anchored offshore, the ship waited. On deck that night, children joined parents to gaze at the city lights sparkling in the distance.

When permission was denied, the St. Louis returned to Europe. For many it was a death sentence. Two-hundred-fifty-four perished in Nazi concentration camps.

As November 5 approaches, we again see an unholy convergence of racism and nationalism. A nation of immigrants, we are told to fear immigrants. We are urged to accept slander and misinformation as truth.

How we vote this year will affect the safety and well-being of millions. It will also determine our character.

Note: In 2012, the United States Department of State apologized to the survivors of the St. Louis. In 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did the same.