Don't Let The Trump Regime Steal Your Soul

Your principles are only worth something if you stand on them when it’s hard.

Photo by Aswin Deth on Unsplash

This week, two articles about immigration have set off firestorms on social media. One in the New York Times looks at two men, one who had his identity stolen and the other an undocumented immigrant who bought and used it, to illustrate the epidemic of identity theft by undocumented immigrants, who often need social security numbers in order to work and can procure them from middlemen — with disastrous and sometimes financially ruinous consequences for the people whose identities have been swiped. The other in the New Yorker is about a Trump administration policy of third-country removals: Deporting people from the United States, some of whom were undocumented but some of whom were legal permanent residents, not to their countries of origin but to totally random third nations — often troubled places, sometimes places actively torn apart by war and violence. The people initially deported to third countries were men convicted of crimes. They finished their sentences in the US, and then, instead of being deported to their homelands, were sent half a world away to be imprisoned indefinitely. After the deportations of convicted criminals to third nations, the Trump administration targeted people who hadn’t been convicted of any crimes, many of whom were in the US because they were fleeing torture.

Both stories are worth a read. It’s been stunning, though, to see the reaction on social media, especially to the New Yorker story about third-country deportations, a hellish policy that should appall anyone whose politics are to the left of Stephen Miller. But instead of being angry about the policy, the reaction has been outrage at the story — because one of the subjects, who was brought to the US when he was 12, was convicted of murder and served a long sentence before being deported to a prison in the tiny Southern African nation of Eswatini. “I’m fine deporting murderers” is the general vibe.

If you don’t understand why this is wrong, I’m not sure how else to explain it to you, but I’ll give it a shot: The US is under no obligation to keep people here who are not citizens and have committed serious crimes, and I personally do not object to deporting people who were in the US illegally and were convicted of violent crimes, especially murder. But the penalty for being a non-citizen who commits a serious crime is not to be flown against your will to South Sudan or Eswatini or some other place where a corrupt government is being paid to help disappear you (or locked up indefinitely with no access to a lawyer and no rights). There are virtually no due process protections in play here. The people being deported to third countries have no ties there. They are being exiled to nations where torture and abuse are de rigueur, certainly for prisoners. Like any other nation, America can and should lawfully deport people who do not abide by its laws. It should not be disappearing people to foreign torture-prisons in nations where those people are also not citizens, have no family ties, cannot speak the language, and have no rights whatsoever.

It’s been shocking, then, to see even some self-styled liberals chime in online to basically say, well, these are Bad People and so deporting them in this way is fine.

I get it from the MAGA folks — these are people who shrugged when babies were being ripped from their mothers’ arms and warehoused in “tender age shelters,” people who have very little empathy and even fewer principles. But liberals are supposed to have some actual beliefs. One of those principles is that it’s wrong to deport people without due process to random third countries where they have no ties, no citizenship, no family, and no rights, and where they will be stuck in foul conditions and likely tortured, possibly for the rest of their lives, unless they are sent to places where they have been tortured in the past.

And the thing with principles is that they’re only worth something if you stand on them even when it’s hard. Even, for example, when the person you’re standing up for is a murderer.

The test subjects for this third-country deportation policy were the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five, all men, all convicted of crimes. As Sarah Stillman of the New Yorker writes, “The first group, from countries including Myanmar, Mexico, and Laos, had been deported, in early July, to South Sudan, a nation struggling to recover from a civil war. Days later, the second group—five men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen, all of whom had lived in the U.S. for many years—had been deported to the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There, they were detained in a maximum-security prison, without clear justification.”

But of course, the administration didn’t stop there. There’s a second category of people also now being deported to third countries: Those who haven’t been convicted of crimes, and who have what are essentially protective orders from judges (in several cases under the Convention Against Torture because they faced genital mutilation, rape, torture for being gay, and so on) allowing them to stay in the US and barring their removal to their nation of origin, because there is credible evidence that that they will be abused or killed there. Many of these people, too, have been deported to third countries like Ghana, which subsequently deported some of them to the places they had fled. This seems to be the point: The Trump administration will have more legal trouble deporting people without criminal records who US judges have found to have credible torture fears; so instead, the Trump administration deports them to places like Ghana, which then turns them over to their home countries, and the Trump administration can shrug and say it’s not their fault. Stillman paints this scene:

The Justice Department attorney, Elianis Perez, did not contest the basic fact of the removals. Instead, she insisted that the U.S. had obtained “diplomatic assurances” that Ghana would comply with the Convention Against Torture and other safeguards. Yet one member of the group—a bisexual Gambian man who had been granted protection under [the Convention Against Torture] by a U.S. immigration judge—had already been returned to his home country.

“How is that O.K.?” the judge, Tanya Chutkan, asked.

“Your Honor, the United States is not saying that this is O.K.,” Perez replied. “What the government has been trying to explain to the court is that the United States does not have the power to tell Ghana what to do.”

This is wrong. If you don’t understand why this is wrong, I don’t know what else to tell you. And I cannot for the life of me figure out why any liberal or progressive is signaling support to the Trump administration on this one, or justifying this insane policy in any way — including by saying, well, one of the deportees was a murderer.

Except: I think too many people have had their brains and moral compasses slightly broken by this administration. I think there’s a deeper psychological issue happening here, and it’s not good.

In the aftermath of the anti-woke backlash and Trump’s second win, many progressives, myself included, have been doing some soul-searching. Clearly, a lot of our beliefs and especially our strategies and our language are not widely popular. Clearly, we got a little high on our own supply, and we believed that as long as we were righteous, we could simply righteous our way to victory without having to actually persuade, compromise, engage, or even address genuinely difficult questions. We pushed too hard and too far too fast, in ways that sometimes defied deeply culturally salient values like fairness. There are a bunch of issues where this was apparent, but immigration is one of the more obvious. There was a genuinely righteous response to the immigration horrors of the first Trump administration, but the long tail of that righteous opposition was that progressive groups then opposed a great many of the more reasonable immigration restrictions proposed by moderate and liberal Democrats. This dovetailed with the opening of more migration routes through the Darien Gap, the social media recruitment of many more migrants, and traffickers’ not-incorrect assessment that crossing the border illegally would be easier and more humane under a Joe Biden presidency than a Trump one. That left Biden with surging immigration numbers, including scores of specious asylum claims. When the governors of conservative border states began busing migrants up to blue cities, even many blue-state Democratic voters began to feel frustrated by increases in visible homelessness and a sense that their cities were providing free housing and resources for law-breaking newcomers while neglecting the escalating housing and food costs hitting law-abiding and hard-working citizens.

In other words, Biden really did screw up the immigration thing, and liberals and progressives really did underestimate how much that would hurt Democrats in elections, and Democrats generally caught onto the problem way too late. Few of us want to repeat a cycle where Trump acts terribly, we react, and then when a Democrat retakes power the demands on them are so maximally left that they alienate a ton of voters and an even worse person wins the next time around and implements even more devastating policies. Liberals do need to have some principles, and we do need to have positions on immigration policy that are not simply reactive to the Trump administration.

But right now, I’m seeing a lot of liberals simply being reactive by siding with the Trump administration against the bleeding-hearts — without bothering to even understand what the administration is doing. It’s disgusting. It’s cowardly. It’s lazy (for the love of god, read a thing before you comment on it). And most of all, it’s ceding what should be immovable principles to seek approval from people who have none.

xx Jill