Fifteen years ago, when Arizona
enacted a notorious anti-immigrant “show me your papers” law, I wrote an essay in The Times that began: “I’m glad I’ve already
seen the Grand Canyon. Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it
remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that
Governor Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.”
The essay provoked a variety of
reactions, most supportive but some vituperatively negative. One angry reader,
noting that the newspaper identified me as teaching at Yale Law School, wrote
to the school’s dean to demand that he fire me.
The dean and I had a good laugh
over that letter. But rather than dismiss it as the product of an eccentric
crank, I realize now that I should have understood the letter as a window on
the toxic brew of anti-immigrant sentiment that led a state to pass such a law.
The Obama administration
challenged Arizona’s law, and after the Supreme Court invalidated most of it in 2012, the harsh anti-immigrant
wave subsided. But now my letter writer and like-minded people have a friend in
the White House — or friends, actually — among them, Stephen Miller. The deputy
chief of staff appears to be giving President Trump his marching
orders for the arrests and deportations now shredding the civic fabric of
communities across the country.
I have a home in the Los Angeles
area, and my recent weeks there encompassed the deployment of the Marines and
the federalization of California’s National Guard. I steeled myself every
morning to read the granular reporting in The Los Angeles Times of scenes that
I could never have imagined just months ago: people snatched up while waiting at a bus stop in peaceful
Pasadena; the undocumented father of three Marines taken at his landscaping job,
pinned down and punched by masked federal agents before being thrown into
detention.
People whose quiet presence among
us was tolerated for decades as they paid their taxes and raised their American
children are now hunted down like animals, so fearful of even going grocery
shopping that Los Angeles nonprofits have mobilized to deliver food to their doors.
I was taking an early morning
walk in my neighborhood when a black S.U.V. with tinted windows slowed to a
stop a half block ahead. I considered: If this is ICE coming to take someone,
should I intervene? Start filming? Make sure the victims know their rights? Or
just keep walking, secure in the knowledge that no one was coming for me? The
car turned out to be an airport limo picking up a passenger, and I was left to
ponder how bizarre it was to feel obliged to run through such a mental triage
on a summer morning on an American city street.
Something beyond the raw politics
of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is
this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked
agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not
only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of
connection that defines human society. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s
border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as “the gotaways,”
the ones we didn’t catch.
In a lecture at Loyola University
Chicago in April, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso observed that the current
immigration crisis “is driven by the deeper crisis of public and social life.”
He continued: “On a fundamental level, these are signs that we are losing the
story of who we are as a country. This is a crisis of narrative. Are we no
longer a country of immigrants? Are we no longer a country that values the
dignity of the human person, individual liberties and with a healthy regard for
checks and balances?”
An adaptation of Bishop Seitz’s
powerful lecture was published
by the Catholic magazine Commonweal, which is where I read it. Another
bishop, Alberto Rojas of San Bernardino, Calif., 60 miles east of Los Angeles,
took the rare step last week of informing the 1.6 million
worshipers in the diocese by letter that they were excused from attending Mass
if they were afraid of immigration enforcement if they came to church. The
Catholic Church has distinguished itself by the moral clarity of its critique
of the president’s deportation obsession.
I wish I saw the same powerful
advocacy from major Jewish organizations, which I’d argue have a particular
responsibility and interest in addressing this issue. Aren’t
antisemitism and anti-immigrant cruelty two sides of the same coin? Both spring
from viewing members of a group as “the other.” The focus of these
organizations, naturally enough, is antisemitism, and the Trump
administration’s exploitation of the real problem of antisemitism for its own
purposes seems to have thrown some of them off-kilter.
I’ve been wondering when the
moment will come when ICE goes far enough to persuade more people outside
Los Angeles that it must be reined in. Maybe it will look something like the
military invasion of the city’s MacArthur Park the other day, when soldiers and
federal agents on horseback and in armored vehicles swept in for no obvious
purpose other than to sow terror. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup,”
Mayor Karen Bass, who rushed to the park, said later.
Can New Yorkers envision such a
scene in Central Park? Is anywhere safe now for someone who can’t show the
right papers?
People of a certain age might
remember the songwriter Jimmy Webb’s weirdly compelling “MacArthur Park,” with its refrain that begins: “MacArthur’s
Park is melting in the dark.” Growing up in the East, I had never heard of
MacArthur Park when the song hit the charts in 1968, and I wasn’t sure it was a
real place. All these years later, something real is melting for sure. It is
the glue that holds civil society together.
- Linda
Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the
Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008.
-NYTimes
