HALIFAX—The day is coming when all of us will be asked this question by our children and grandchildren: what did you do while United States President Donald Trump was deconstructing democracy in America, and snuggling up to dictators around the word?  

What did you do as Trump waged extortionist war on economies all over the planet—including Canada’s—with his ruinous tariff policies, and even threatened “annexation” of other people’s countries?  

It is always the question that gets asked when freedom is threatened by epic tyranny. And it is individual citizens who have to decide what—if anything—to do about it. The usual answer is an unconscionable acquiesce for far too long.

In the 1930s, the question was ;what did you do when Adolf Hitler was transforming Germany into a fascist death camp for Jews?’  

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was ‘what did you do about the hideous war in Vietnam that dragged on from 1955 under the French until the last U.S. troops left in 1973 after almost a decade of bloody and ultimately futile engagement?’

And in the Middle East, the question is ‘what are you doing about the slaughter in Gaza that has already taken at least 56,000 Palestinian lives, 17,000 of them children?’ No one knows how many more dead are lying under the rubble that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an arrest warrant for all alleged war crimes, has made of Gaza.  

What is going on today in the U.S. is just as urgent, though for different reasons. It is nothing less than the purposeful destruction of the world’s once premier democracy. The evidence is as inarguable as it is jaw-dropping.

Trump has unleashed “his” DOJ on his perceived political enemies like former FBI director James Comey.  

He has mused about firing or launching a criminal investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He has talked about firing judges whose rulings run counter to his agenda. And he has violated the United States Constitution multiple times.

He built a modern-day American concentration camp, Alligator Alcatraz, in the Florida Everglades. There, undocumented migrants were held 35 to the cage. The camp’s capacity is 5,000. One congressman who visited the camp observed that all of the “inmates” were either Latino or Blacks.     

And consider the new and dreaded ICE age that Trump has ushered in south of the border.  

Agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement were originally tasked with finding and deporting the worst of the worst undocumented migrants in the country—the killers, drug dealers, and human traffickers Trump is always talking about. Few people had an issue with that goal, nor should they.  

But ICE has morphed into the president’s personal police force, doing his bidding. It is arresting people without warrant, holding them without bond hearings, and deporting them without due process. Think of it as a policy of snatch and dispatch.

Trump has given ICE new marching orders: 3,000 arrests every single day, in order to reach his absurd goal of deporting millions of people.  

To meet that all but impossible quota, ICE is no longer going after the worst of the worst. Instead, it is picking the low-hanging fruit. Seventy per cent of the people they are now arresting are not criminals, and do not have any charges pending against them.  

Who are they? They are grandfathers who have been in the country for decades, with kids in the U.S. Marines. In some cases they are people who were showing up at their immigration hearings only to be arrested. And in other cases, they are American citizens who fit the racial profile of who to arrest.

CNN recently documented the case of a young man driving to work when he was stopped by ICE agents. They hammered on the windows of his vehicle, and shouted at him to get out of the car.  Even though he told them he was a U.S. citizen and a veteran, they smashed out his car window and sprayed him with tear gas.

He was dragged away to jail without being read his Miranda rights, and without access to a lawyer. He was later thrown into a jail cell for three days before he was released without explanation.

It should be remembered that being an undocumented migrant is not a felony under U.S. federal law. So why is Trump turning ICE into the largest law enforcement agency in the country to battle what in law is a civil violation?

In his recently passed and so-called Big Beautiful Bill, Trump gave ICE a whopping $75-billion in new funding. That will enable the force to hire 10,000 new agents. When that happens, ICE will be larger than all the other U.S. federal law enforcement agencies combined.

It is important to note that this massive cash infusion to ICE comes at a time when health, education, and veterans’ affairs were all taking enormous cuts to pay for Trump’s outrageous tax cuts for the super rich. He is Robin Hood in reverse; taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program alone amount to $1.02-trillion. A stunning 10 million Americans have lost access to those services with the passage of this legislation.  

In addition to the demolition of those programs, Trump has served up punishing cuts to elite research universities like Harvard and Columbia, and slashed $1.1-billion from the budgets of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcast System.   

Yet there is a windfall of cash for an unprofessional police force that does the square root of bugger all for the average American.

What ICE is really all about was recently on display in Los Angeles at MacArthur Park. An armed group of ICE agents, some of them on horseback, descended on the park. They were backed up by U.S. military personnel and vehicles.  

The agents swept through the park in an apparent immigration enforcement operation. All they managed to do was to disrupt a children’s summer camp and upset local residents. They left without making any arrests, shortly after being confronted by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. She demanded to know what they were doing and when they were leaving.  

The mayor saw it as an obvious show of force meant to intimidate. And she and others in the community had a message for the rest of America: “Wake up, wise up, and stand up.”

Before it’s too late.

Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist.

The Hill Times

 

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