Inasmuch as virtually every policy Donald Trump implements is grotesque, it’s a good thing he telegraphs his punches.
Last night, the Tweeter-in-Chief gleefully tweeted that his immigration goons would begin deporting “millions” of undocumented immigrants next week. The Supreme Three-Year-Old isn’t much for keeping secrets; be thankful he wasn’t president on the eve of D-Day.
Now that ICE agents are under orders to run amok again, that means they'll be once more separating parents from children—a practice not confined to families arriving at the border. They'll be taking exemplary as well as non-exemplary humans from their homes, workplaces, and communities, incarcerating and sending them to their countries of origin where their lives may not be worth the proverbial plugged nickel.
Which means that Americans of good will need to mobilize as well. Civilly disobedient blockades of ICE offices and the jails and concentration camps where detainees are held, police non-cooperation in sanctuary cities, attorneys on call to represent the detainees—all these and more need to go into overdrive, now that our president has tipped us off to another Trumpian assault on civil society. As concerned citizens and public officials in antebellum Northern states tried and sometimes succeeded in thwarting the Southern thugs—some of them federal officials—who kidnapped fugitive slaves to return them to bondage, so the concerned citizens and public officials in our immigrant-rich cities today need to go on high alert. In the 1850s, as I wrote last year, Northern states passed their own version of sanctuary legislation denying federal jurisdiction over escaped slaves, and citizens filled the streets to protest and occasionally stop the seizure of fugitives.
Today, another invasion of the body snatchers is set to commence. Americans, to the barricades!
