Jonathan P. Baird

Anyone who is waiting for a credible federal investigation into the Minneapolis murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is going to be disappointed. The rule of law we previously took for granted is gone. There will be no federal investigation into these crimes. The whitewash narrative was already written by Stephen Miller. It is “blame and smear the victims”.

We all saw the videos of the outrageous and entirely unjustified murders of Good and Pretti. Both were murdered by federal agents and it would appear lifesaving medical care was delayed or denied. Now there is a cover-up by the federal government. They are not allowing state investigators access to evidence as would have normally been the case in the past. They pretend the videos we all have seen don’t exist.

It is time to recognize new realities. The Department of Justice has been replaced by the Donald J. Trump Department for the Protection of Criminality and Corruption. Things change and the old Department fo Justice is gone. It has been replaced by an entity that covers up crimes, protects criminals and pursues political enemies of the regime.

There should obviously be a prosecution of the Good and Pretti murders and I do believe Minnesota will pursue it whatever the legal difficulties. It is telling that Trump’s first move since the murders was to replace Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino with Tom Homan. Homan is the “border czar” who was caught taking $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents. The Trump Department of Justice declined to pursue that case against their political ally even though he was caught red-handed on tape. Homan has received no discipline. He got promoted.

Because the scope of the criminality is so vast and reaches so many parts of the Trump regime, I wanted to highlight an aspect that has received insufficient attention. That is, the state of those captured and disappeared by the regime as well as the living conditions in the network of concentration camps the regime has created. Trump officials have blocked the public from gaining information about these conditions. They don’t give reporters access to the concentration camps nor do they allow video coverage. What happens in detention facilities behind locked doors and barbed wire is invisible to the public.

The ACLU described conditions at the California City ICE detention facility where they have filed suit over the conditions:

“The facility holds people in small concrete cells the size of a parking space for hours on end without adequate clothing, food or water. They deny people basic medical care, disability accommodation and access to their lawyers and loved ones. Sewage bubbles up from the shower drains, and insects crawl up and down the walls of the cells in the decrepit facility. Officers threaten people who speak out against the abusive conditions with violence and solitary confinement which they use excessively. Temperatures are frigid. Some wear socks on their arms as sleeves to stay warm.”

People land in these hellholes because a dictatorial president has unleashed a secret army of masked and unidentified thugs into the streets of American cities. They shoot, beat, gas, detain and kidnap U.S. citizens and non-citizens. They focus on blue states that did not vote for Trump.

Many have been detained without charges. Others get disappeared into the concentration camps with zero transparency. The regime first talked about going after “the worst of the worst” but their actions have been indiscriminate, often going after those with no criminal record. ICE strives to meet Stephen Milller’s quotas for arresting the maximum number. Bypassing courts and denying due process so they can speed up deportations is their way.

Federal immigration officials have shot 13 people since last September. Four have died. In many of the shootings, officers fired into cars, an extremely reckless and dangerous practice. Officers have said they shot because a car was moving and they believed it posed a threat. That is what they said about Renee Good.

In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody. It was the agency’s deadliest year since 2004. Among other medical conditions, those incarcerated died of heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure and suicide. The great majority of those who have died were under 50. It certainly raises questions of medical neglect. Their families and lawyers have alleged they died after repeatedly trying and failing to get medical care. Since the start of 2026, another six have died in ICE detention. There are hundreds of reports of human rights violations, including physical and sexual abuse, in U.S. immigration detention facilities.

One 55 year old Cuban national, Geraldo Lunas Campos, who died on January 3 while in ICE custody at a facility in El Paso Texas had his death officially ruled a homicide by the Medical Examiner. Cause of death was asphyxia due to neck and torso compression. A witness told the Associated Press that five guards held Lunas Campos down and one put an arm around his neck and squeezed until he was unconscious. Campos was handcuffed.

ICE sent 600 immigrant children into the detention system in 2025. This was more than in the previous four years combined. It would appear a new family separation policy is going on. Earlier litigation addressed separations at the border. These are occurring inside the U.S. after encounters with ICE. The agency is oblivious to the category “childhood”. They are hellbent on inflicting trauma that will last a lifetime.

I believe someday there will be accountability for all these depraved and unconstitutional actions by the federal government. When rationality returns, we will look hard at the massive destruction done to so many lives in pursuit of a racist agenda. How many lives have been ruined by federal agents and for what? The harm is almost unfathomable to contemplate. How many are languishing in concentration camps right now?

The regime wants Americans to be good Germans – uncaring, unthinking collaborators. The concentration camps need to be deconstructed. The absurd amount of money ICE has been allocated needs to be clawed back by Congress. Efforts toward rectification of the harm inflicted must be made.

A truth commission is needed so that we can all learn what has happened in the name of the federal government. They hide their crimes. Along with that, the Trump regime leaders will need their own Nuremberg trials for their crimes against humanity.

When I first heard Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett describe federal immigration raids as modern-day slave patrols, I was surprised. I had never heard that comparison. It made me wonder about the accuracy of the comparison since slave patrols are a part of history that has largely escaped notice.

From 1704-1865, slave patrols were organized government-sponsored groups of armed white men in the Southern states who monitored and enforced discipline on enslaved blacks. In South Carolina, slave patrol membership was limited to white men who either owned 50 acres or were 40 shilling taxpayers. There were slave codes that controlled almost every aspect of the lives of enslaved people. The slave patrol often rode on horseback in groups of four or five.

The slave patrols were a first line of defense against slave revolts. They had several explicit functions. They searched slave quarters and local communities for escaped slaves and for weapons of assault. They safeguarded the areas around plantations. They dispersed meetings of any group of slaves.

Like ICE now, they were based on racial profiling. They existed to round up black people who escaped or were trying to escape the chains of slavery. While we no longer live in slavery, there is a similarity to ICE’s mission as ICE is currently practicing it. ICE targets Latinos. They round up people based on skin color, ethnicity and accent. ICE has been given this permission by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his shadow docket decision authorizing racial profiling.

Like slave patrols, ICE has been entirely indiscriminate in whom they pursue. Under President Biden, ICE had a priority to go after people with vicious criminal records. Now, under Trump, ICE goes after any immigrant without restriction. This includes 5 year old Minnesota pre-schooler Liam Ramos who was wearing a bunny-shaped winter hat and a Spiderman backpack. His photo made national news. ICE used the boy as bait to knock on his door so they could arrest more of his family.

ICE described Liam’s father as an “illegal alien” but Liam and his father had come to the U.S. in 2024 from Ecuador seeking asylum. They were legally following required immigration procedures. Their lawyer said Liam and his father are now being held in a detention center in San Antonio, Texas. His lawyer said he was trying to contact his clients.

The superintendent of Liam’s school, Zena Stenvik, said ICE had recently detained four students in her school district, including a ten year old and two 17 year olds. She said:

“The onslaught of ICE activity in our community is inducing trauma.”

Just like slave patrols, ICE is also asserting authority to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant completely contrary to 4th amendment protection. Supreme Court rulings prohibit law enforcement from entering a home without judicial approval.

The Associated Press obtained an internal ICE memo that authorizes ICE agents to enter residences based on an administrative warrant from the Executive branch. That is not a judicial warrant and it is contrary to Supreme Court authority but ICE continues to wrongly break into homes. This is essentially a conspiracy within ICE to deprive people of their constitutional rights. They have even publicized their extreme behavior using battering rams to smash doors and enter homes. They have been using spectacle as a means to engender fear.

Their approach is designed to frighten immigrants into self-deportation. They want to make people so miserable that they will choose to leave the United States. The slave patrols also used terror and punishment to keep slaves in line. The Ku Klux Klan was a later iteration of this approach. They did not have the benefit of the media to show their night riding but beatings, whippings, and murder were public events designed to set an example and scare slaves into submission.

I would suggest that ICE’s behavior is similar both to pre-Civil War slave patrols and post-Civil War Klan terror. ICE argues its agents have “absolute immunity” so they can rampage and murder without consequence. Before the Civil War and for almost 100 years after, Southern racists had their own version of “absolute immunity”. They lynched people without consequence. No crimes against black people were ever punished. ICE is shooting people. They argued that Renee Good’s murderer committed no crime and they will do the same for ICU nurse Alex Pretti.

Like the Klan used to do, the federal government will make up a story that flies in the face of evidence. Invariably people like Kristi Noem tell a story completely at odds with video of the event. Slave patrols and the Klan were never held accountable because a racist power structure protected them. The same thing is going on now. ICE has no rules prohibiting the use of excessive force and violence. Neither Good nor Pretti deserved to be shot. ICE has been viciously assaulting and pepper spraying in the face people who are already pinned down.

We have largely forgotten the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That law created federal authority over the states so that all escaped slaves had to be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. ICE is trying to go around courts and effectuate deportations as soon as possible. Both the Fugitive Slave Act and ICE have tried to exercise unbridled power to detain and dispose of people. ICE has demonstrated about as much discipline as the Klan did. They just have to deal with the reality that video can capture some of their crimes.

Like the southern racists before and after the Civil War, ICE has a white supremacist agenda. The Klan wore sheets to disguise themselves. ICE masks and hides identification. ICE wants to remove as many people of color from the U.S. as possible. That is the Stephen Miller vision. I don’t know if Trump shares that vision 100%. He only cares about money and himself. I suspect he gravitated to anti-immigration when he saw how much response he got to his racist demagoguery in campaign speeches. He correctly saw it as his ticket to power.

Jasmine Crockett was right. ICE is the modern day slave patrol. Achieving accountability over a rogue agency like ICE is part of the battle we are facing against fascism in America.

What has been happening in Minneapolis is a federal invasion where the constitutional rights of the people are being stripped away by federal agents acting like militarized thugs. ICE and Border Patrol have been conducting a campaign of terror that is wholly inconsistent with the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

Hordes of armed masked men, almost 3000 now, have descended on that community against the wishes of most people in the city as well as against the wishes of the state and local government. Obviously untrained and undisciplined federal agents are creating havoc. They have no defined mission other than harassing people in a blue state who voted against Donald Trump.

ICE and Border Patrol are randomly stopping people, pushing them around and asking: “where are your papers?”.They go door to door breaking into homes without judicial warrants. They constantly use chemical agents, flash bang grenades and physical violence against citizens exercising First Amendment rights. They treat Minneapolis residents as enemies. Many residents are afraid to leave their homes.

ICE has been racially profiling the Minneapolis community, especially Somalis and Latinos. White residents are being offered money or “protection” in exchange for informing on neighbors labeled as non-citizens or protest leaders.

Patty O’Keefe, a 36 year old U.S. citizen, publicly described a recent encounter she had with ICE. She received a report that legal observers in her Minneapolis neighborhood were being pepper sprayed. She and a friend went out in their car and found the agents. They began following them in their car, honking their horn and blowing whistles to alert others about ICE’s presence in the area.

ICE agents subsequently stopped, got out of their vehicle and surrounded O’Keefe’s car. They pepper-sprayed into it, smashed the car windows and dragged out O’Keefe and her friend. After detaining O’Keefe, the agents taunted her. One agent said:

“You guys got to stop obstructing us, that’s why this lesbian bitch is dead.”

The agents took O’Keefe to the Federal Building in St. Paul where she was put into leg shackles. She was held for eight hours. She described inhumane jail conditions, saying:

“I saw holding cells with over a dozen people each, and a large holding cell of between 40 to 50 people. Most of the people there were Hispanic or East African, both men and women. Some cells had no room for people to sit or lay down. Most people I saw were staring straight ahead, not talking, despondent and grief-stricken. I know I’ll never forget their faces.”

ICE has staked out high schools and college campuses. Their agents position outside churches, retail and grocery stores, yelling at and intimidating residents. They have no standards of conduct. It is not clear they have any idea how to deal with protesters. Based on their actions, they have no rules that address the use of excessive force.

The murder of Renee Good powerfully illustrates ICE’s lawlessness. Having looked at the videos from every angle, I observed an execution. Good died for nothing. Various conflicting demands appear to have been shouted at her but I believe she was simply trying to depart the scene. The agent who shot her calmly walked away with no seeming fear of any consequence. The idea he had injuries is laughable. Tha gaslighting by pro-ICE partisans has been Orwellian.

It was bad enough Good was murdered in cold blood but then ICE apologists had to slander her as a domestic terrorist. Good luck with the slander. Good was an award-winning poet. Then we heard J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller claim “absolute immunity” for the agent who shot Good. That is a misstatement of the law. States can arrest federal agents who violate their laws. It ia admittedly difficult to obtain a conviction but federal agents only have “qualified immunity”.

Instead of investigating Good’s murder, federal authorities have been pursing an investigation of Good’s wife. It is notable that federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis resigned their jobs when asked to do that. That was a bridge too far for anyone with a shred of professional ethics.

In his recent interview with the New York Times, Trump said there was no limit to his power except his own morality. That would indicate he sees the Constitution as a dead letter. It doesn’t figure as any limit on his power. And that is the way his regime has been acting in so many contexts whether it is international law, using the Department of Justice to prosecute his enemies or to hide the Epstein files.

We have reached a scary place. We are witnessing the demise of law as Trump reaches for dictatorial power. Amazingly, a federal court judge in Minnesota issued an injunction barring federal agents from arresting or detaining people who are peacefully protesting but it is hard to be optimistic in the long run when the Supreme Court has been almost a rubber stamp for Trump. As Chris Hedges has said:

“Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lips service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible.”

I have to say that I have been very disappointed by the passivity of the legal profession in responding to this unprecedented state of affairs. Where are the voices calling out the fascism? I thought as Americans that we loved liberty more than this. It should be clear by now that no court will save us. As has been true in Minneapolis, the future of our democracy depends on the power and actions of the people.

While the deportation-industrial complex is a business based on making profit and maximizing the incarceration of bodies, that entity could not function without an ideological justification. It has to be able to say why it is necessary.

In trying to understand its self-justification, I would begin by looking at statements made by White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller. Miller is generally acknowledged to be the brains and major mover and shaker behind Trump’s immigration policies. As a guest on Fox News in April 2024 before the last presidential election, Miller said:

“If you import the Third World, you become the Third World.”

After the election, about Trump, he went on to say, “This was a country on the verge of dying and you alone saved it”. He has viewed immigration as an “invasion” by a hostile force. Before Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race, Miller said re-electing Biden would represent “the assisted suicide of Western civilization”. With no basis, Miller assumes that immigrants to America hate the country and want to promote its demise.

The Miller world view sees nothing positive coming from immigrants unless they are white South Africans or from Scandinavia. Trump himself has repeatedly argued that the U.S. should accept more immigrants from Norway. At the same time he calls Somalis “garbage” and he bemoans migration from “shithole” African countries and Haiti.

Trump officials are only accepting 7,500 refugees this fiscal year (down from 125,000 under President Biden) and they have reserved the majority of slots for white Afrikaners. This appears to be partially based on the false narrative that there is a white genocide going on in South Africa. They are also entirely short-circuiting asylum claims.

The refugee and asylum policies are consistent with the white supremacist outlook embedded in the Miller/Trump perspective. This outlook harkens back to a longstanding American nativist tradition that has divided newcomers to our shores into good and bad groupings. The nativist tradition has long been negatively inclined toward immigration from Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere. It is nothing new in American history although as a society we suffer historical amnesia about it.

In her book, America for Americans, Professor Erika Lee brilliantly dissects this history. She shows the roots of our xenophobia. We have both welcomed millions from around the world and deported more migrants than any other country. Lee says we have deported over 55 million people since 1882. She writes:

“Americans have been wary of almost every group of foreigners that has come to the United States. German immigrants in the eighteenth century; Irish and Chinese in the nineteenth century; Italians, Jews, Japanese and Mexicans in the twentieth century; and Muslims today.”

One key insight that Lee offers is that “xenophobia has helped siphon working class resentment away from corporate greed and economic inequality and direct it toward immigrants”. As she notes, the ruling class benefits when workers are divided along racial lines. Workers become less able to challenge the worst corporate abuses by the billionaire class.

In the early twentieth century, American immigration opponents relied on a pseudo-scientific racism that categorized humanity into a strict hierarchical order based on intellect, ability and morality. Thinkers like the eugenicist Madison Grant saw race as a central determinant in societal fitness. He and other eugenicists wanted to protect the allegedly superior breeding stock of the Anglo-Saxon race and exclude immigrant races they saw as inferior or undesirable.

I would suggest that the thinking of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump is not far removed from these racists. Grant was utterly opposed to the notion of America as a melting pot of different cultures. He believed in the superiority of so-called legacy Americans. Miller shares Grant’s disdain for multiculturalism. The Trump policies opposing diversity, equity and inclusion follow from that.

Miller is on record praising the 1924 Immigration Act signed by President Calvin Coolidge. That law froze immigration at extremely restrictive quotas based on the ethnic composition of the U.S. prior to 1890. The law highly restricted the level of immigration into the U.S. The intent was for “whites only” immigration. The law was also intended to tremendously narrow Jewish immigration. A wide range of Americans indulged antisemitic stereotypes and saw Jews as an inferior race.

Ironically, Miller, who is descended from Russian Jews, was praising a policy that prevented many thousands of Jews from escaping the Holocaust in Germany. Miller’s own cousin, Alisa Kasper, posted a devastating take down on social media saying both sides of his extended family had mostly disowned him. She wrote Miller had become the “face of evil”.

The same racism and xenophobia that constrained immigration to the U.S. in the 1920’s is at play now. The strength of nativism is remarkable. Immigrants still seem to be perceived as competitors for jobs, depressors of wages and a burden on public services. This combines with the racist scapegoating of the “they eat dogs, they eat cats” variety. It would appear that many Americans project their fear and anxieties onto the undocumented and irrationally blame them for their troubles.

Unverified allegations of fraud such as in Minnesota are giving license for ICE to run wild and terrorize communities. Because of the ICE gestapo many many people are afraid to leave their homes.

Yet, undocumented workers typically labor in jobs like agriculture, construction, and care-taking. These are jobs that most Americans will not do. The undocumented are not causing the affordability crisis crushing American workers and there is no logic behind blaming them.

It is time to call for the abolition and defunding of ICE. Not only are they not protecting the public, they are out-of-control, using excessive force. They apparently think they are James Bonds’ with a license to kill. Executing American citizens is not their mission. ICE has disappeared due process and become a lawless perversion. They are the domestic terrorists.

This is the first of a two part article about the deportation-industrial complex. This part outlines the components of the complex. Part two will look at the ideology behind it.

Back in 1961 as he prepared to leave office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell address warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower saw a danger in the alliance between the military establishment and defense contractors. He believed, wisely as it turned out, that excessive military spending promoted war, threatened democracy and individual liberties.

Now, as we head into 2026, we face the risk of a new menace: the creation of a deportation-industrial complex. The Trump regime is engineering the birth of a vast new system involving government agencies, private contractors, and financial interests that profit from mass detentions, mass surveillance and mass deportations.

It is a network designed to lock up thousands without due process while making money off their misery. Many caught in the jaws of this system will have committed no crime and have tried to follow immigration rules and legalize their status. The desire for maximizing profit drives increasing mass incarcerations and mass deportations. They need bodies to make money. Any sense of justice is irrelevant to ICE. They are trying to meet quotas set by Stephen Miller.

Our new danger is the alliance of ICE and private prison companies. Public policy is reduced to greed intertwined with lawlessness and racism. ICE moves detainees around like pieces on a chessboard. Access to counsel is not factored in as a consideration. People disappear into their system and become unreachable. It is no accident that the major criteria for rounding people up is that they have a brown skin and are Latino.

Congress made this possible when it passed Trump’s budget bill. It created the material underpinnings so this massive expansion project could go forward. Congress more than tripled ICE’s annual budget, making it the largest federal law enforcement agency with more than $170 billion allocated over four years for border and interior enforcement. The stated goal is to deport one million immigrants each year.

ICE received $45 billion to build more detention camps to house adults and children. It received $30 billion more for arrests and deportations. The plan is to add 10,000 more ICE detention officers and 50,000 more detention beds. As of late 2025, ICE holds 68,400 people in detention.

ICE contracts with private companies that build and run detention centers. The two largest companies are GEO Group and CoreCivic, two private prison companies. 80% of detained immigrants are being held by privately-run prisons. ICE pays these companies $165 a day for each prisoner held in detention. More arrests means more money for these companies. ICE currently has 180 detention facilities. Many are concentrated in Louisiana and Texas.

Whether the creation of this gulag is a good idea and serves the national interest is not up for discussion. That train already left the station.

On December 24, the Washington Post reported on ICE’s current efforts. They plan to renovate industrial warehouses to hold 80,000 immigrant detainees. Their plan is to greatly increase detentions and to speed up deportations. It is the Stephen Miller white nationalist fantasy put into operation.

ICE is creating a feeder system. Detainees will be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven larger scale warehouses. Each warehouse will hold 5,000-10,000 people. ICE has 16 smaller warehouses. The larger warehouses will be ;located in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Mississippi. They are a staging ground for deportation.

The ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons said that their goal is to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages. To quote Lyons: “Like Prime, but with human beings”.

The private prison companies also plan to cash in by doing more than filling beds. Once they maximize detention capacity they plan to use electronic monitoring devices to expand digital surveillance. ICE is hiring private contractors to track and locate immigrants in a model akin to bounty hunting. Once the contractors locate immigrants and provide addresses, federal agents arrest. The private prison companies complete the process by providing ground and air transport.

There have been many lawsuits filed against the private prison companies for inhumane conditions including inadequate medical care, overcrowding, physical abuse, forced labor, freezing cell conditions and unsanitary facilities. In August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reconsider a lower court ruling that held state minimum wage laws applied to all private employers. GEO Group had been paying immigrant detainees $1 a day rather than the state minimum wage for jobs like kitchen and janitorial work. The Court said no.

The Trump regime has sought to reduce oversight of detention facilities. They eliminated the Office of Immigration Ombudsman and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Previously these offices had been watchdogs. They also have often been denying Congress access to detention facilities when Congresspeople seek to see for themselves what the conditions are. Over 30 people have died in ICE facilities. Rep. LaMonica McIver was arrested and charged with assault when she tried to visit an ICE facility in New Jersey.

There is a revolving door between ICE and the private prison companies. This is parallel to the relationship between the military and defense contractors in the military-industrial complex. People slide back and forth drawing huge salaries when they move from ICE to the private side. It is a blood money pipeline that engenders self-perpetuation.

Americans need to consider whether this racist monstrosity is what they want to continue. It follows the sadistic and cruel concentration camp model pioneered over 80 years ago. Whatever happened to the Emma Lazarus tradition inscribed in the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants?

This is one of my favorite Bertolt Brecht poems. I just wanted to share it. It seems especially apropos now.

To those born after

By Bertolt Brecht

Truly I live in dark times!

A trusting word is folly. A smooth brow
A sign of insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrifying news

What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!
That man calmly crossing the street
Is he not beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true: I still earn a living
But believe me: that is just good fortune. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I am spared. (If my luck runs out
I am lost.)

They say to me: eat and drink! Be glad that you have the means! But how can I eat and drink when
It is from the starving that I wrest my food and
My glass of water is snatched from the thirsty?
Yet I do eat and I drink.

I would like to be wise
In ancient books it says what it means to be wise:
To hold yourself above the strife of the world and to live out That brief compass without fear
And to make your way without violence
To repay evil with good
Not to fulfill your desires, but to forget them
Such things are accounted wise.
But all of this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times!

2.
I came into the cities at a time of disorder
When hunger was ascendant.
I came amongst mankind at a time of uprising
And I rose up with them.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

I ate my meals between battles
I laid myself down to sleep with the murderers
I made love heedlessly
And I looked upon nature with impatience.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

All roads led into the fire in my time
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers
There was little I could do. But the powerful
Would sit more securely without me, that was my hope.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

Our powers were feeble. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible even if, for me
Hardly attainable.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

3.
You who will emerge again from the flood
In which we have gone under
Think
When you speak of our faults
Of the dark times
Which you have escaped.

For we went, changing countries more often than our shoes
Through the wars of the classes, despairing
When there was injustice only, and no indignation.

And yet we know:
Hatred, even of meanness
Makes you ugly.
Anger, even at injustice
Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

You, however, when the time comes
When mankind is a helper unto mankind
Think on us
With forbearance.

It has become routine to watch White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller call immigrants “monsters”. Miller is a professional name-caller. It is like he thinks the name-calling gives him permission to void other humans’ constitutional rights and sentence them. Miller did it again in his comments about the Venezuelan migrants who were wrongfully deported to CECOT prison in El Salvador. He said, “..these are monsters who got exactly what they deserved”.

The great majority of the 240 Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador had no criminal record and had violated only immigration laws. They were deported and sent to be tortured at one of the worst prisons in the world without trials, convictions or any due process. In the 60 Minutes episode that CBS spiked, Luis Munto Pinto, a Venezuelan college student who had legally sought asylum in the U.S., described how he had never gotten even a traffic ticket. He had spent six months in custody before he was deported.

The experience of the Venezualan deportees and others arrested by ICE is reminiscent of what happened to Japanese-Americans in 1942. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, fear gripped America. Demagogues came forward, making racist arguments against Japanese-Americans and questioning their loyalty.

Then Japanese-Americans were singled out for mass removal and deportation based entirely on their race. Now Latinos are being targeted for their race. In both cases, people were dehumanized by America’s leaders as a way to justify mistreatment. We are not putting people into concentration camps on the scale done during the Japanese-American internment but ICE is now terrorizing communities all over the U.S. On NPR on Christmas morning, they said 65,000 people are currently being held (the largest number ever) and we know that ICE has the money for large expansion of its operations.

People are being abducted, pulled from vans, cars, work sites, and homes and being disappeared. ICE’s actions are lawless, more consistent with a fascist regime than a democracy. Many immigrants are afraid to leave their homes and this goes far beyond the undocumented. The Trump regime has been going after anyone with a brown skin who looks like they might be an immigrant and the U.S. Supreme Court has let them even though lower courts have objected.

In her new podcast Burn Order, Rachel Maddow documents parallels to our past and revisits the Japanese American internment. Maddow showed how the government invoked the Alien Enemies Act to arrest citizens of the countries we were fighting. That is the same law Trump has invoked even though we are not at war. At that time Japanese-Americans were barred from applying for naturalized U.S. citizenship.

The U.S. government placed two men, Gen. John DeWitt and Karl Bendetsen, in charge of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Both were racists and they devised the program of forced removal and imprisonment. DeWitt didn’t want African-American soldiers under his command and he was opposed to Asian-Americans serving in the military, even in segregated units. DeWitt said:

“ The Japanese, I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever. I am speaking now of the native-born Japanese (by which he means U.S.-born American citizens)…A Jap’s a Jap.”

Bendetsen held similar views, stating:

“The Japanese race is an enemy race. Racial affinities are not severed by immigration…The vast majority of those who have studied the Oriental mind assert that a substantial majority of Nisei bear allegiance to Japan and will engage in organized sabotage.”

Maddow shows how others in the government had real intelligence about Japanese-American communities on the West Coast. She cites one man, Naval Intelligence Officer, Ken Ringle, who spoke Japanese and who had immersed himself in Japanese-American communities. Contrary to the views of DeWitt and Bendetsen, Ringle found Japanese-Americans were intensely loyal to America.

Ringle tried unsuccessfully to reach Bendetsen and other government officials. He then wrote a formal report in which he argued the Japanese problem “has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people”. Ringle wrote that mass incarceration was ’not only unwarranted but very unwise”.

But Ringle did not win out. He had some support in the Department of Justice but the Attorney General Francis Biddle went along with Bendetsen and President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. As a result, an estimated 120,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated and held until 1944-45. They lost all their property and freedom without trial.

Bendetsen wanted to strip citizenship from Japanese Americans who were born in the U.S. but he could not do it because of birthright citizenship (sound familiar). To avoid that likely losing issue, the military got a legal opinion in February 1942 saying it was constitutional to round up and lock up U.S. citizens on the basis of nothing other than their race. There always seem to be amoral lawyers who will say anything as long as they are paid.

The government moved Japanese-Americans into horse stalls at Santa Anita racetrack. There was hay, horse urine, and horse feces in the stalls which had not been cleaned and prepped to be living quarters. People were initially housed there behind barbed wire and armed guards for six months until they were sent to permanent government camps in places like Arkansas, Utah and Wyoming.

Not all states went along. Maddow tells how Ralph Carr, a conservative Republican governor of Colorado heroically opposed the Japanese American internment. He was a lone voice and it cost him elected office. Gov. Carr welcomed Japanese Americans to come to Colorado in complete contradiction to the federal government policy. Japanese-Americans streamed into Colorado. Carr’s story is remarkable and should be much better known because he almost alone had the courage to go against the tide.

While the U.S. Supreme Court did the wrong thing in its infamous Korematsu decision and upheld the internment, Maddow shows how the efforts of ordinary citizens led to ultimate repudiation of that decision and recognition of its racist underpinnings.

Learning from that experience, Americans must do everything in our power to oppose ICE now and tell them to get the hell out of our communities. America doesn’t need a racist repeat of where it went horribly wrong 83 years ago.