John and I walk past the National Guard Armory in our neighborhood every day. Yesterday morning, we noted that the parking lot was full, which meant that the soldiers were assembling. We saw uniformed personnel readying communication trailers; beside it a truck with a big Red Cross on the side. Today, those vehicles are gone. The vast fenced in space ordinarily full of sandy yellow trucks and jeeps is empty.

 

I’ve been following the current news since Trump has sent ICE out like a herd of vicious attack dogs–multiple reports of people being terrorized, detained, interrogated, citizens and non-citizens alike.

Sure, over the past decades I’ve been exasperated and angry beyond words with with the Federal Government’s inaction on immigration. Why not establish a guest worker program for seasonal farm workers? Why not establish a pathway to citizenship for those born here to undocumented parents? Why not shut down baby farms for wealthy foreigners who fly in just to give birth?I always thought back in 2001 that instead of invading Iraq, GWB should have sent soldiers to the southern border. Even before that: Why has Congress done nothing to pass legislation to address this complex issue? More recently, why did Trump convince Republican legislators to block the legislation that nearly passed in the spring of 2024? Did he envision/want the chaos we’re seeing now? I can’t help wondering: If you voted for Trump, is THIS what you wanted to happen?

Many of those being deported have been here for years, some for decades. They have been working, running businesses, paying taxes, toiling in the fields, building houses, cleaning houses, caring for children…and the elderly, cleaning houses. If you look at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Statistics online you see that contrary to what Trump claims, there are very few murderers and violent criminals amongst then. The crime that thousands criminals is have been evicted of: entering the country illegally.

https://www.cbp.gov/…/criminal-noncitizen-statistics

It’s very convenient for Trump to create a fantasy world via social media. And make claims of “Fake News” whenever reality is in conflict with the facts on the ground. It’s a tragedy for this country that Fox News is rife with propaganda. It’s incumbent on all of us to peruse multiple news sources so we can discern for ourselves what is happening. I trust the New York Times as a counterbalance to Fox. And for old school reporting of “just the facts” I often turn to the Associated Press (now banned from the White House press pool), the BBC, and … you might be surprised to note: Al Jazeera.

This morning’s front page of the Los Angeles Times featured stories about protests against ICE raids which have been unnecessarily violent and cruel: all employees in a workplace rounded up and locked in a basement with no effort to differentiate U.S. citizens from documented and undocumented immigrants, with parents hauled off leaving young children behind with no adult present to care for them. The list of outrages are long.

Meanwhile a second underscores the irony of our current situation: the violence that so many from Mexico and Central America are fleeing has been for decades fueled by guns that have been manufactured in the United States and flowing across the Mexican border in massive numbers. Today’s news: the U.S. Supreme Court has thrown out Mexico’s law suit that seeks to stop that flow of guns. What insanity! Much of the horrifying violence that has driven people to flee their homes in Central America has been empowered/enabled by weaponry from the U.S. Now we victimize those who fled.