For the past few weeks we have been enthusiastically counting the caterpillars munching on the native milkweed we planted in pots along our driveway—doing our best to support the declining population of Monarchs butterflies, worldwide. Since time immemorial our California Monarchs have followed a migration pattern that finds them wintering in Mexico. They return here, north of the border, in late spring and early summer to seek nectar (thereby pollinating our food and flower crops) and lay their eggs. The eggs hatch as caterpillars which chomp on the plants where they’ve been laid until they’re ready to morph into butterflies and head back across our southern border. A major cause of decline in the population of Monarchs (and other pollinators) is that their breeding habitats here in the U.S. are fast disappearing. Widespread use of genetically modified crops (GMOs), resistant to herbicides, have made it easy for farmers to destroy “weeds,” including those like milkweed on which Monarchs lay their eggs.

These days I’m finding that many of my friends in other parts of the country would much rather hear about our efforts to nurture the Monarch butterfly population than have me share the news of what’s happening here in Southern California. But THIS is my reality—trying to pretend life is “normal” when there are soldiers and ICE agents in our streets. (And yes, they are even show up here in Manhattan Beach…which back in Boston you would equate with a suburb like Hingham or Cohasset, in New York, Rye (or Greenwich, Connecticut, in Chicago, Oak Park. Well, you get the idea.)

Yesterday a landscaper told me of a worker who didn’t show up for four days—and finally called…from Mexico. He had been deported. And said he was actually relieved not to have been sent to Alligator Alcatraz…or Sudan.

I’ve heard of a contractor who shut down his building sites, paid all his workers for a month, and told them to stay home.

I know of a family that invited their longtime nanny to move in and live with them for the duration.

Last week I stopped by a neighbor’s house and found her housekeeper in the kitchen weeping, “I cannot believe people voted for this.” She told me she fled Nicaragua thirty years ago because she could not find work—and was terrified of the soldiers in the streets “Now there are soldiers in the streets here. So, I guess if I get sent back, there won’t be any different than here.”

I often wonder what would be different if President Clinton had done more to stem the tide of immigrants fleeing Nicaragua to escape the chaos created by Reagan’s arming of the Sandinista rebels. What if GWB had sent troops to the southern border instead of to Iraq in 2003? (That was my pie-in-the-sky suggestion at the time.) What if Congress had done its job over the past several decades and established a guest worker program so seasonal workers could cross the border legally? The long-time ad hoc system that allowed them to do that has long since become impossible, so that now they stay because they need the work. They send money home to support their families but can no longer safely go back and forth with the seasons as they used to.

The vast majority of those being deported are not criminals. They came here fleeing poverty or peril. Or both.

I’ve been told by those who live in the neighborhoods where ICE raids have been occurring nonstop that it’s Latinos from Mexico, Central and South American countries are being rounded up. But not undocumented immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, or Eastern Europeans. Targeting those who are brown, not white is a shameful echo of the racist roundups (Chinese, Japanese, and yes Mexican expulsions) that took place here in California in previous times.

Meanwhile, I remember distinctly more than a few Irish immigrants who walked/bicycled past our house back in Massachusetts years ago. We got to know them and figured out they didn’t drive because they couldn’t get licenses because they were not here legally. Has ICE gone after them? I doubt it.

The caterpillars are still eating the milkweed. We had fourteen at one point. Now we’re down to four. We are hoping the “missing” ten have departed to make their cocoons and will soon be butterflies and will head off to their winter home in Mexico. Fortunately, it’s still possible for the Monarchs to cross the border freely.