The Terror and Cruelty of Trump’s Deportation Machine

Yesterday, the administration invoked a provision of the US code, 6 USC 279B1H, which allows for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to provide for the international reunification of children with their parents in appropriate cases, to try to rush through a mass deportation of children who by any rational measure are at imminent risk of harm if returned to Guatemala. These clearly are not appropriate cases, but team Trump simply doesn’t care. The administration claims this was at the instigation of the Guatemalan government, but sources in the Guatemalan government have told immigration attorneys working on these cases that the impetus has come from the US side.

These are not the hardened criminals whom the administration says they are rounding up. They are children, scared and far from home, and they are being deemed enemies by the most powerful people on earth.

Now, I’m not a religious scholar, but I’m thinking about how, if perchance Trump were to keel over and die this week, St. Peter might deal with the MAGAman’s efforts to storm the Pearly Gates. I suspect he might start by referencing a few Biblical passages—maybe that whole thing about the Good Samaritan and helping strangers-in-need or maybe the stories about Jesus washing the feet of the poor and the sick or maybe the message about the meek inheriting the earth.

And then, on the assumption there’s pretty good quality-control systems in place to prevent absolute turds from securing an eternal spot in Heaven, I hope he would rain down incredulous commentary on the insanity of the Trump ghost thinking it even remotely likely that those Pearly Gates could ever open for him.

He wouldn’t have to go back into all of Trump’s appalling behaviors over the decades. All he would have to do is look at this one week.

In the months before World War II broke out, a British stockbroker named Nicholas Winton helped break down bureaucratic obstacles in the United Kingdon and secured passage for hundreds of Jewish children to leave what remained of the dismembered Czechoslovakia and head to England. Six hundred and sixty-nine of them came on the Kindertransport without their parents, vulnerable young boys and girls whose mothers and fathers, in desperation, had agreed to part with them so as at least to save their children’s lives, even if they couldn’t save their own, from the inferno they knew was descending upon them. 

Winton is, rightly, considered one of the quiet heroes of the 20th century, a larger-than-life man who did an immense amount of good—and did so without tooting his own horn. (Only in old age did he talk about what he had done.)

Trump, by contrast, is using all of his vast power and communications platform to demonize the weakest and poorest among us, and he is now unleashing the deportation machine against unaccompanied children, hoping to remove them in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend when nobody is paying attention, and seeking to do so even in the face of court orders. It’s one of the ugliest acts yet of an administration wedded to cruelty and terror.

“This is unprecedented,” said Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice.  “We all need to hold the government accountable for following the law. The court order prohibits their removal for the next 14 days. Every one of them should be able to go before an immigration judge.” And every outraged reader of this article should, I might add, use those 14 days to phone their Congressional representatives demanding they step up to the plate to defend the Guatemalan children from Trump’s grotesque reverse Kindertransport.

Consider it for the good of Trump’s soul. After all, this sadistic, vengeful behavior is a huge no-no, I would think, for anyone genuinely hoping to get in St. Peter’s good graces. St. Peter’s denunciation of Trump wouldn’t have to stop there, however. This same week, ICE agents yet again brutalized vendors and day laborers in the Westlake district of Los Angeles. Video from the scene shows black vans speeding into the area at 7 AM, skidding to a stop and disgorging masked, khaki-clad agents who proceeded to throw tear-gas canisters toward their prey and then chase down individual migrants as they ran from “La Migra.” One man, witnesses say, was beaten by five officers. Within minutes of the raid beginning, eight men and women, including two with documentation, had been dragged off into the unmarked vans, which then sped away again with their quarries inside.

Siccing violent secret police onto unarmed migrants is, I suspect most any religious scholar would agree, another no-no for Heaven’s applicants.

So, too, is holding a young nurse-in-training, who came to the United States as a child, for six months in a detention site hundreds of miles from her home, refusing to release her back into the community despite documentation that she is suffering from multiple illnesses, and keeping her from the university she has been admitted into. This week, Allison Bustillo-Chinchilla, whom I wrote about a couple weeks ago, couldn’t take any more detention and agreed to self-deport back to Honduras—a country she hasn’t seen since she was 8 years old. Her attorney, Helen Parsonage, wrote that, “Six months in detention had done its job in wearing down this brave young woman to the point where she would rather return to a country she doesn’t remember than endure more time unjustly locked up. The United States loses a valuable and loved community member who was on her way to becoming a nurse. We desperately need more Allisons in every sense.”

Finally, last week, two firefighters busy fighting a huge wildfire in Washington were plucked out by Border Patrol agents sent specifically to root out undocumented workers on the fire lines. Now, I may be misinterpreting the whole Heaven thing, but surely one doesn’t bolster one’s case by arresting immigrants while they are risking their lives saving other people’s properties and lives.

Immigrant-rights protesters around the country know just how rancid these actions are—that’s why, for example, hotel staff around Los Angeles and Orange County will spend their lunch hours today, Labor Day, demonstrating outside their places of work, holding up signs denouncing the raids and deportations. “We want an America that not only fights for workers but fights for the immigrant fabric of this country. This country was built by immigrants,” said Lorena Lopez, the director of Unite Here Local 11, which represents many of these workers. Yet, Trump and his enablers, far from recognizing the value that immigrants bring to American society, are intent on ratcheting up their crusade against the country’s millions of immigrants.

Taken as a whole, just based on the actions of this one week, I’d say Trump is simply not a viable Heaven candidate. “He should consult the priests working with people in Harlingen about that,” Aber said of Trump’s quest to get into Heaven. “There are priests who have been witnessing day in and day out ICE grabbing people at their hearings.”So, St. Peter, I hope you don’t find it presumptuous of me to offer advice. Whether it’s this week or next, or even 20 years from now, that Trump comes-a-knockin’ at your gates, do please offer him the same welcome that he offered those panicked, sobbing Guatemalan children, that Honduran nurse, those day laborers in Los Angeles, those firefighters in Washington. In other words, look the shade of this vile man up and down, tell your law-enforcement angels to not go too gentle on him, and then request that he slither off to Hell where he so clearly belongs.

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