Commentary by Jerry Lanson
Given the daily horrors that pass for policy in the Trump administration, it’s little surprise some stories simply slip past below the radar. At other times, the news media take days to catch up to them.
Such was the case with a National Park Service decision last week that expunged MLK’s birthday and Juneteenth from the list of holidays on which entrance to the national parks is free. In their place, Americans were invited to enter the parks for free on Donald Trump’s birthday, June 14.
Though The New York Times was playing catch up when it posted the story on Monday, the paper did a good job of placing this particular action in context. “The changes,” it wrote, “follow previous moves by the Trump administration to take down materials mentioning slavery at national parks and come as part of a broader effort by the White House to erase or play down Black history at government sites.”
The park service’s action, in short, was one more prime example of the whitewashing of America under Donald Trump’s presidency. Whether stripping words like “race” and “racism” from government documents, trying to bully private sector companies and universities into eliminating any mention of diversity, equity and inclusion, or detaining citizens because of the color of their skin, this administration never seems to miss an opportunity to diminish the rich mix of ethnicities, cultures and races that have shaped the democratic, economic and human foundations of this country.
Nor is foreign policy exempt, as the administration turns its back on Ukraine and turns its sights – as in gun sights -- on Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. Last Friday, the Harvard historian Heather Cox Richardson posted a chilling essay noting dramatic changes in the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy. It has turned its back, she writes, on “the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II allies put in place after the war to prevent another world war.”
The new strategy, she suggests, does much more, too.
“Observers,” she continued, “referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and ‘fourteen words’ to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan.”
Trump’s repeated reference in recent days to Somali people as “garbage” is one more example that he and his administration have thrown out any trace of subtlety in its escalating assault on people of all shades of color. That assault is evident, too, in the unrelentingly cruel actions of federal immigration officers. Two stories in the past week make that point.
A headline in Sunday’s Washington Post read, “The US citizens getting caught in Trump’s immigration crackdown.”
The article began with the story of a 15-year-old high school student, born in the Chicago area, who was chased three blocks by federal agents from a basketball court at which he was playing and tackled for no reason other than his skin tone.
“In Chicago and elsewhere, Latino US citizens and lawful residents describe being detained for hours, and in some cases days,” WaPo reported. “Others were not detained, but say they were assaulted because of the color of their skin.”
WGBH Public Radio reported last week that agents from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) plucked people waiting for their naturalization ceremony from a line at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall because they originally emigrated here from one of the 19 countries the administration classified on December 2 as “high risk.” The countries include Haiti, Somalia, the Republic of the Congo and Iran, among others.
The process of being eligible for a naturalization ceremony, the final step to becoming a US citizen, takes years.
While increasingly targeting citizens and would-be citizens of color, Trump’s ICE agents continue to round up undocumented immigrants around the country who have jobs, contribute to the economy, are raising families and have no criminal record. Some, like the Babson College student arrested just before Thanksgiving as she was about to fly home to Texas to surprise her parents, are so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrations who arrived as small children and have lived in this country most of their lives. For many years they’ve been left alone. No longer.
And despite ICE’s oft-repeated assertion that it is only arresting really bad actors, data show an entirely different reality. The New York Times reported last week that 84 percent of those arrested in ICE crackdowns in Washington, D.C. between Aug. 11 and Sept. 10 had no criminal record.
Such stories and statistics have become so commonplace that too many of us shrug in resignation, which ultimately is a form of acceptance. That, tragically, appears to include most state and federal Democratic lawmakers, who could – and should – do far more to resist this tidal wave of tyranny. It’s an embarrassment.
“The lack of a unified [Democratic] voice comes as the crackdown on minority communities, including legal residents, has grown more aggressive.” The Washington Post wrote Tuesday.
The article noted a sharp discrepancy between the actions of Democrats holding elected office during the first Trump administration and today.
“When President Donald Trump imposed a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, Democratic advocates and lawmakers raced to airports across the country to protest,” wrote the WaPo. “They held news conferences and visited detention centers the following year when Trump began separating migrant children from their parents.
“Trump has unleashed even more draconian immigration policies in his second term …. But Democrats have not mounted the same visible pushback even as Trump has halted immigration applications from 19 countries, deployed federal agents into minority communities and called Somali immigrants ‘garbage’”
Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, told the WaPo he fears things will get worse in the face of this timidity. “The fact we do not have a strong counterresponse from [Democratic] elected officials at all levels of government is the most frightening,” he said.
Certainly, some Democrats have consistently and courageously spoken out, among them California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. But more prominent voices are needed and all must sustain their efforts. Instead, 11 months into Trump 2, the strongest and most sustained pushback is coming from civil liberties groups like the ACLU, immigrant support organizations such as LUCE immigrant justice network of Massachusetts, and ordinary citizens, such as the Chicagoans who took to blowing whistles whenever they saw ICE approaching.
This week, they were joined by the parishioners of a Catholic Church in Dedham, Massachusetts. St. Susanna Parish caused a stir in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston when it displayed an outdoor Nativity scene with an unusual twist to mark the Christmas season. Shepherds, sheep and wise men gathered around the manager, but Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus were nowhere to be seen. They are replaced by a sign in blue letters that reads “ICE WAS HERE,” The New York Times reported. A smaller sign reassures passersby that “The Holy Family is safe in the Sanctuary of our Church.”
The Archdiocese ordered the parish to remove the signage, calling it “divisive political messaging,” the NYT reported. But courage can come from the grass roots. As of this writing, St. Susanna has refused.
This commentary originally appeared in Lanson’s Substack, From the Grassroots and is republished by permission.