ICE, Immigrants and Fear 

We can’t help thinking about the plight of our friends and neighbors, the Latino immigrants who live here in Sonoma Valley. The fevered actions of the Trump administration – aggressive workplace raids, courthouse seizures, arrests at immigration office appointments, and the like – are designed to instill fear in the immigrant community and to whip up fear of immigrants among the rest of us. 

Although such aggressive tactics are currently being employed in large cities, we expect that their reach will eventually touch smaller, rural communities like ours. If, as originally portrayed, enforcement was limited to arresting dangerous criminals, we’d be less critical, but it’s now clear that enforcement is based upon racial profiling and legal immigrants are being targeted too. Now there’s talk of those arrested being sent to Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. It’s getting more frightening by the day. 

Our Latino immigrants, whether  legal or undocumented, play a vital role in the community. They are a mainstay support for agriculture, and toil in the vineyards picking grapes, pruning vines, clearing weeds, and inspecting irrigation. Their experience and expertise cannot be easily replaced. They toil in the kitchens and as waitstaff in our local restaurants. They maintain our gardens, cut our lawns, and fill our yard waste bins. They care for our children, clean our homes, and in many cases have become virtual family members. 

America’s immigration system is broken, and has been for several generations. Neither political party in control has been able to muster the votes in Congress to revamp the system, and those looking to escape terror in their own countries or build a life with opportunities, especially for their children, here, have few options.  Easy targets for political opportunists looking for people to blame for society’s problems, immigrants have always made easy victims. But what’s going on now is unprecedented: using United States Marines to help enforce civil law on American soil! It’s an authoritarian act, pure and simple, and it’s cruelly dangerous. 

As these Trumpian tactics expand, so too will the public’s resistance to them. America is at an inflection point, one in which the nature of our democracy may change dramatically. The institutional norms that have acted as democracy’s guardrails are failing. Congress has been corrupted by oligarch and corporate money. The courts often are little more than sounding boards where delay tactics and logically twisted rulings have become standard. The executive branch is consolidating power into itself, and effectively ruling by fiat. As these realities begin to be felt by the population as a whole, people will wake up, but we hope it’s not too late.

The rise and fall of empires is nothing new, and the past century has been one of the American Empire. It may well be that America’s empire is in decline, but that does not mean things have to fall apart or that we must inevitably turn against each other. Those with wealth and power will, however, do whatever they can to maintain control, even at the cost of freedom and democracy. Our task, the task of residents and citizens, is to protect and care for each other, speak out against tyranny and cruelty, find ways to resist and undermine those, and uphold values of decency and kindness. It’s either that, or give in to the darkness of the human soul and have America become a living hell.