Ignorance by intent

You have to love Marc Rosenblum's parting shot on leaving federal employment: 

“I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” Rosenblum said in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”

Rosenblum served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics in the DHS (that's the Department of Heimat Security for the historically minded).

“He had one of the most interesting charges at DHS,” a former colleague tells WIRED of Rosenblum. “There's 22 component agencies, and so there are 22 different ways of aggregating data that were just completely siloed.”

“So Marc's charge was to consolidate all the data and put it in a way that internally, I at headquarters could know exactly how many Coast Guard interdictions happened off the Coast Guard station in Miami, and how many of those were Cuban, Haitian, Nicaragua, Venezuelan. And then kind of conceptualize that with the same population of people that were crossing the Southwest border,” the former colleague adds.

Knowing and showing that sort of information, it's no surprise he no longer felt he had a place in current government. Reconstructing the government's ability to understand what is going on in this huge, multifaceted country will be one of the more difficult tasks required when we evict the MAGA morons.

ICE kills

 

San Franciscans gathered Saturday outside the Tesla dealership on Van Ness Avenue.

The national movement follows two recent, horrific killings by ICE agents. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a beloved father and worker, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas, while driving a work van. On July 13, ICE agents killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his partner and toddler. There have now been 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump was inaugurated, 33 deaths in fiscal year 2026 alone. 

ICE agents were not even looking for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Salgado Araujo, 52, was killed during a traffic stop by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, prompting thousands of Houstonians to take to the street in protest and to demand justice. 

Salgado Araujo was a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the US for more than 30  years without legal status, according to his family. He was not the intended target of the ICE operation that resulted in his killing. 

... Democratic Congressman Christian Menefee said ICE needs to be “torn down to the studs” and rebuilt as an agency that recognises the “dignity of the people that it encounters”. 

“But we all know that that will not happen under this administration,” he added.

Johan Sebastian Guerrero, shot in Maine, again was not an intended ICE target. 

Investigators have not released details of the shooting in Biddeford. But a spokesman for Senator Angus King said this week that the senator had been told by senior officials that Mr. Guerrero was not the intended target of the immigration operation. Mr. Guerrero was in his car just after 7 a.m., as he headed to work.

Benjamin Gideon, a lawyer representing the Guerrero family, said at the news conference that Mr. Guerrero had been working in the United States lawfully. “The Trump administration issued him a permit to work in this country legally,” he said. “And they issued him a Social Security card and a Social Security number.”

“Do we accept the idea that innocent, loving partners and loving and devoted fathers of 3-year-olds can be collateral damage to this government’s policies?” Mr. Gideon asked. “Do we agree that this is just an acceptable cost of doing business?”

Passing motorists on busy Van Ness Avenue honked enthusiastically. The Tesla dealership is a regular weekly protest site and drivers know what to do. 

• • •

Later in the day, members of Indivisible hosted a more contemplative memorial for ICE's victims at Sue Bierman Park, gathering around an improvised altar.

ICE out of the Bay

Enil has friends. And so, when he had to report in to immigration court on Sansome Street in downtown San Francisco today, his posse showed up.

According to Bay Resistance: 

Enil is a loving father of three and longtime community member who was brought to the U.S. as a baby and has lived most of his life here.

He is an advocate for immigrants’ rights and has strengthened our community through his leadership and care. ICE is trying to detain him again and rip him away from his family.

A long line of other migrants waited outside the doors. Every day dozens of anxious people show up for their various ICE check-ins, never quite knowing if this will be the day the regime arbitrarily decides to take them into custody. The occasional larger protest against ICE, like this one, they sometimes find confusing and a little scary, according to one of the Faith in Action regulars.

So far San Francisco has been spared one of the Trump regime's murderous immigration enforcement surges, but we never know -- and try to be ready.

The local legal community has done a valiant job of decoding and stymieing the multiple illegalities in the process. Immigration law is a snarled nightmare even in benign circumstances. The San Francisco Chronicle has produced a detailed, easy to understand account of how the San Francisco bar is working to protect migrants. Read it! [gift link]

Memories of delight

There are so many ways to reflect on America 250. I loved this one. 

The Center for Asian American Media writes: 

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, we’re looking through our Memories to Light archives of home movies from our community and are moved by how Asian Americans have long been an integral part of our nation. 

Memories to Light is CAAM’s archive of Asian American home footage from across the country, spanning six decades (1920s through the 1980s). These images embody shared social, cultural, and political representations of Asian America and demonstrate the importance of collective storytelling as a path toward greater understanding of the Asian American experience. 

What a gift! 

Takes one to know too many

Panic about newcomers to the United States seems to be a hardy perennial in the American experience. 

Because my parents were unusually old when they reproduced, closer to 40 than 25 when they had a child, I carry a memory of coming up with people who had come of age during the immigration restriction panic of the 1920s. Even in the 1950s, they saw nothing amiss in reflexive "soft" prejudice against people who came from what they saw as "shithole" countries; in their world, that would be people of Italian or, even worse, Polish ancestry. The great patriotic coalition of World War II had sanded some ugly edges off this for them and this disdain didn't extend either to European Jews or American-born Blacks. But during the restricted phase of legal immigration that extended to 1965, they were just normies with normie attitudes. 

My generation were more open to new experiences and newcomers; we call that the Sixties. We were beyond shocking and very controversial to previous generations.

And then, like many Americans, my parents became more and more open to the different sort of Americans who came among us when we opened legal immigration doors a crack. 

The dwindling white base of the current Republican Party desperately wants the past and their entitled bigotry back. The Supreme Court's too small majority affirming birthright citizenship does not mean the end of the fight; it merely signals a new phase in the never finished struggle over who is a real American.

Air Force vet and former Republican Congresscritter Adam Kinzinger speaks to this moment; he knows the worst of his former constituents.  

Why Trump Won't Stop Until He Ends Birthright Citizenship 

Who is an American isn’t a difficult question. Despite what four politicians in black robes tried to tell us ..., the 14th Amendment is incredibly clear, written in language anybody can read and comprehend: “Any persons born or naturalized in the United States.” It’s simple: If you’re born here, you’re an American, and entitled to all our country’s blessings. And it used to be pretty widely agreed upon that this was an asset that this set our country above other nations as a beacon of freedom.

When I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, I knew this was part of the deal. And I served in uniform alongside people that would have proudly given their life for their country, even if their parents were born somewhere else.

... Let’s be very clear about this: Trump and his allies are not going to stop trying to end Birthright Citizenship, and whoever succeeds him will pick up that mantle. Deciding “who is an American” is central to the MAGA project; it is among the very first steps in their playbook. 

If you think this is an overstatement, just look at one response yesterday from a prominent MAGA stooge—the CEO of the right-wing magazine The Federalist: 

click to enlarge

I'm reproducing this deranged screed here because most of us don't see the stuff our right wingers stew in. "Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners." "Deny entry to all female foreigners." "Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry." These people are scared stupid!

Kinzinger goes on: 

What makes America exceptional is the idea that citizenship isn’t about bloodlines or tribal membership—it’s about our shared commitment to a set of principles. It is a big, sprawling, living and breathing Democracy. This is what sets us apart from nations that define citizenship by ethnicity or religion. A Shining City on a Hill isn’t meant to be admired in the distance, it is an actual place with people, industry, traditions and faith.

And that gets us to the core of MAGA. The movement to end birthright citizenship isn’t trying to make America stronger. It’s trying to make America smaller, more fearful, more divided. It’s trying to turn the Constitution into a weapon against the very people it was designed to protect. Ultimately, Trump wants a smaller citizenry, a smaller democracy and a smaller America—in every sense of the word.

This is an existential fight for [Stephen Miller], for Trump and for the sociopaths they’ve got running the government right now. It is the skeleton key to the fascist takeover so many of them pray for each night. So the fight continues because they will never stop. 

America, as they know it, cannot exist with birthright citizenship in place because they believe it diminishes them. And, to me, that’s what makes the MAGA movement so weak and pathetic. They want to make being born here a curse, when the rest of us know it is an immense privilege. ...

What happened at the Supreme Court is not just another move in an ongoing MAGA v. Dems chess match. This is our existential fight.

No to ICE in Gilroy!

Californians will recognize this image: a string of marchers trudging under the sun carrying banners alongside rich fields in a wide agricultural valley. City people may forget at times, but this too is our state.

The location on Sunday was just outside Gilroy, in southern Santa Clara county. Why the march? The Trump/Miller deportation machine is threatening to build an ICE detention facility among these fields.

Neighbors are not having of it.

Gilroy is proud to call itself the Garlic Capitol of the World. 

A go-to source for information about the Gilroy detention plan seems to be the independent non-profit newsroom, the San Jose Spotlight. They've got the goods: 

Blueprints confirm ICE involvement in South County facility

Detailed blueprints show an ICE office with detention and processing space is planned in South Santa Clara County.

The 111-page document obtained by this news outlet, dated Sept. 17, 2025, illustrates a future U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility with detention areas, detainee processing areas, interview and holding rooms, spaces for mothers with infants, visitation rooms, weapons and ammunition rooms, tactical equipment storage, offices and a fitness center planned at 7240 Holsclaw Road. Certain pages of the document bear the logos for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The planned facility is located in an unincorporated area right outside Gilroy.

San José Spotlight obtained the blueprints after first reporting on public records that gave an incomplete picture of what was being built. ...

County and Gilroy elected officials want no part of this project; California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued to block what he claims is an "Illegal Development" of an ICE facility.

 

Country people understand that sometimes elders need a seat in the heat.

We must not become numb ...

A Pew Research Center survey in twenty-five countries asked respondents "to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country." According to the report, only people in the USofA thought a majority (by 53%) of their peer citizens were immoral and/or unethical.

There were other countries which came close to that judgement: Turkey (49%) and Brazil (48%) stand out. But people in most of the surveyed countries thought far fewer were off the ethical rails; the most trusting included Canada (7%), Indonesia (8%), and India (9%). 

We sure don't trust each other these days; I'd hazard the U.S. findings are just about Civil War numbers. We believe, earnestly, that those other guys must be despicable and dangerous. I certainly do think that what MAGA has wrought, through attacks on immigrants and people they see as queer, is quite simply evil. Not all Republicans, but hey ...

John Della Volpe of Harvard reports a finding from a focus group with young adults with mixed political leanings in Charlotte, NC. 

ICE Didn’t Just Target Immigrants

I’ve written before about how ICE has become a feeling for Gen Z, not just a policy. Charlotte made that visceral. Nearly every hand went up when I asked if ICE operations were affecting them personally — across race, gender, and political identity.

A 22-year-old Black behavioral therapist described what happened at her autism center: “The families were scared. They didn’t send their kiddos to therapy. Staff were losing out on hours, the kiddos were losing out on hours — nobody felt safe.”

A Hispanic caseworker and new mother described days away from her baby because parents were being detained and children had nowhere to go.

A refugee resettlement worker said even legally documented families stopped attending appointments out of fear.

When legal status doesn’t eliminate fear, enforcement has created something beyond policy.

It has created a climate.

Friday was the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, of the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, AL, which segregationist cops broke up with clubs and horses. 

Selma is nearby and feels live to Alabama-based legal commentator Joyce Vance:

... On the anniversary of Selma, a moment that reminds us that Americans are capable of coming together and doing great things, MAGA remains enthusiastic about where Trump is taking the country while many Americans seem to have become numb from the constant barrage of truly horrible things this administration does and is perfectly fine with. ...

... We need the kind of national courage that took us from Selma to the Voting Rights Act in the space of five months. It’s difficult in a sense because there are so many different outrages that it’s hard for people who love democracy to pick one to coalesce around. They all deserve our attention.

... There is great danger in moments like this, and that is precisely why we need to make sure we don’t let this go.

She's right. Wherever we fit in our kaleidoscopic patterns of mutual incomprehension and resistance to ignorance and cruelty, we cannot let go. 

What Donald and MAGA have wrought

My Erudite Partner, Rebecca Gordon, has written a meditation on home, refuge, and asylum for our disgraceful moment: On Seeking Asylum and Refuge. She ponders: was this country ever a safe place? For who? What is a safe place anyway?

... the word asylum has Greek roots. It suggests being free from someone else’s right of seizure, and so, by extension, “refuge.” When people come to this country seeking asylum, they are looking for refuge from horrors of all kinds: political oppression, familial or institutional violence, war, torture, you name it. An asylum is, by definition, a refuge, a safe place. That’s why institutions for people with mental illness used to be called “insane asylums.” (It’s been suggested that Donald Trump confuses the legal concept of seeking asylum with the term insane asylum, which is why he thinks that other countries are sending their mental patients here.)

An asylum should be a safe place, even if it may never feel like home. But in the first year of Trump’s second term as president, it’s become clear that, for those seeking, or even granted, asylum, the United States is no longer a safe place. ...

Read it all here. 

Standing up against our aspiring king

At Five Corners intersection on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts:

 

It was cold, but not that cold, and the sun shone a bit as year-round islanders stood in witness to a woman killed and a regime which steals from us all and murders because it thinks it may.

The island has had its own invasion by ICE.

The masked thugs were not popular. There are plenty of people here who've come from other countries to work. Many have made a life in this place -- legally or otherwise.

New Englanders know BS when a would-be tyrant tries to feed it to them. ICE shot that woman in Minnesota because they thought they could.

These folks have a proud tradition to uphold. 

White Christian Nationalists and an American soldier

Yesterday a young man wonderfully named Godspower Nwawuihe scored two touchdowns for the US Military Academy team in a rout of the University of Connecticut in the Fenway Bowl in Boston. The internet is not very forthcoming about his ancestry, but hints that his parents came from Lagos, Nigeria, before settling in Garland, Texas. 

The day before yesterday, Donald Trump ordered the US military to lob missiles at northwestern Nigeria. CNN reports that people on the ground in the target area were mystified. 

Abuja, Nigeria  — A day after part of a missile fired by the United States hit their village, landing just meters from its only medical facility, the people of Jabo in northwestern Nigeria are in a state of shock and confusion.

... Kagara did not realize it at the time, but what he was witnessing was part of a US strike that President Donald Trump would later refer to as a “Christmas present” for terrorists.

Not long after the impact in Jabo, Trump declared on Thursday that the US had carried out a “powerful and deadly strike” against ISIS militants in the region, who he accused of “targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!” 

According to US Africa Command, the operation neutralized multiple ISIS militants. 

But Trump’s explanation has left Kagara and his fellow villagers scratching their heads. 

While parts of Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups including Lakurawa – which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to suspected affiliations with Islamic State – villagers say Jabo is not known for terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim majority.  

“In Jabo, we see Christians as our brothers. We don’t have religious conflicts, so we weren’t expecting this,” he said.

When local violence does break out in northwestern Nigeria, it seems often to involve conflicts between herders who are Muslims and settled farmers who are Christian. Such conflicts are thought to have been part of human history all over the world.

Should Mr. Nwawuihe complete his time at West Point and be commissioned as an Army officer, will he be sent to kill Nigerians? 

Mr. Trump seems to treat random strikes in Nigeria as a gift to white US Christians who probably couldn't find Nigeria on a map. These strikes are just one more crime against hard won civilization from our clownish grifter ...

• • •

The contemporary Republican base of white evangelicals is a morass of white Christian nationalism. They think God gave them this country and they have a right to rule us all -- and the world too.

 Historian of religion Jemar Tisby provides a succinct definition of the affliction. 

White Christian nationalism is an ethnocultural ideology that uses Christianity as a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control. 

It is characterized by beliefs such as a conviction that Christians have a mandate to exercise dominion over all segments of society, the notion that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, and the sense that they are under attack by anti-American and anti-Christian forces. ...

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian catalogues the fixations and crimes of the nationalist-deluded. 

... White Christian nationalists generally do not seem interested in good works, helping the most vulnerable, or personal character. This is a movement seeking power, not redemption. Its adherents are motivated to remake America into a white, Christian dominated nation. 

Lacking the votes to bring their goals about through democracy, they are all too willing to suppress voting and rely on other anti-democratic measures. Blowing up people on the high seas, separating children from parents, brutalizing Hispanics, and taking away SNAP benefits are features, not bugs for people lacking empathy who seek racial and religious dominance.

These people are a lot of us. Sociologist Robert P. Jones attempted last March to measure carefully the prevalence of this dangerous fantasy.

... three in ten Americans qualified as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (29%). These percentages have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022. In other words, Christian nationalism supporters, while a sizable minority, are outnumbered by a margin of two to one among the general public.

... A majority of Republicans today qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (20%) or Sympathizers (33%), compared to less than one quarter of independents (6% Adherents and 16% Sympathizers) and less than one fifth of Democrats (5% Adherents and 11% Sympathizers). These views are reinforced by TV media outlets consumed disproportionately by Republicans, such as Fox News or far right TV news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax.

... As the US has become more racially and religiously diverse over the past few decades, our two major political parties have responded in dramatically different ways to these shifts. Today, only 41% of Americans identify as white and Christian. But today’s Republican Party is 70% white and Christian, a stark contrast from the Democratic Party, which is 25% white and Christian.

... We see the connection between Christian nationalism and support for political violence clearly in the data. Nearly four in ten Christian nationalism Adherents (38%) and nearly three in ten Sympathizers (28%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 15% of Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters.

If these folks get their way, Mr. Nwawuihe may indeed find himself dispatched to attack people in the land of his ancestors. What a dangerous, ignorant world we are making ... 

Seasonal reminder

Can't have refugees wandering about unmolested ... via Naked Pastor

A message for the Christmas season

Choose Love, Not ICE

 

The Roman Empire that Jesus was born into was as violent and capricious as our own nation states. Maybe more so. But we have more power than those subjugated people under Roman rule. At least we think we do. What are we doing to break the power of violence in this season?

Video from the Interfaith Alliance. 

Criminality and luck

The Atlantic's Adam Server dissects the President's vile racism currently directed against Somali citizens of Minnesota and so many others after the DC shooting of two National Guard members.

I appreciate being absolved by Serwer of the crimes of so many individual members of my people.  

... white Americans as a whole are not responsible for Trump largely dismantling the federal government’s capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, his doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering. I don’t believe that there is something inherent in white culture that causes Trump to act this way; he is simply a particularly reprehensible human being.

...  The logic of [Trump's] racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. 

Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.

That a crime by an Afghan former CIA recruit or Somali fraudsters can be laid at the feet of all “Third World” immigrants shows how arbitrarily such lines are drawn. What matters is not what individuals do, but who they are, and whether or not they fit Trump and Miller’s narrow, racially defined view of who Americans can be. 

Whatever individualism used to mean to American conservatives, their movement is now led by adherents of the most foul collectivism humanity has ever known.

He goes on the remind us all that white Europe never sent its "best people" to America.

Among the original English settlers, of course, were not only religious refugees and indentured servants but criminals Britain did not want. Many German immigrants to the United States came after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Irish immigration was spurred by famine and British imperialism; Italian immigration was driven by the bloody post-unification chaos and, especially in the south and Sicily, by lawlessness, brigandage, and Piedmontese repression. Let us not forget the Eastern Europeans, among them Jewish families—including Miller’s own—who fled the autocratic regimes and ethnic violence of their homelands.

Most Americans of European descent are the children of such “broken” societies, by one standard or another, and America would not have become wealthy and powerful without them. No reason beyond bigotry exists to apply different standards to immigrants because they came from Nigeria or Mexico instead of Ireland.

There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. 

Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.

My own ancestors were a mix of pesky religious fanatics that the Britain of their day was glad to send away and later adventurers of unknown probity. They did more than just okay at the expense of the native population and their less fortunate fellow immigrants. So it goes.

Trump and his nativist bigots can't face the truth; their momentary preeminence is a nasty accident of criminality and history. In the New World, it was ever thus.

Who are these Somalis?

That vile old racist who is polluting the Presidency let his freak flag fly in a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday:

via Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)

My friend Shelley Sherman posted this heartfelt riposte to Donald Trump's vilification of the Somali community in Minnesota on Facebook. Somalis are not faceless to her and they certainly are not "garbage."

I am angered and appalled at the remarks by the President with the backing of his administration, insulting Somalis in general and Rep Ilhan Omar in particular. 

I had the privilege of working with Ilhan Omar before she was elected to public office, at the University of Minnesota Extension. I know her history and her character. She is an amazing person, intelligent, brave, thoughtful and funny, someone who came to the US as a child and knows how to build bridges between cultures. 

I also worked with other Somalis, and heard their stories of having to leave their country due to war, about life in refugee camps, losing family, and finally being able to come to the US, and to Minnesota, which welcomed them.

The Somalis, like the Hmong from Laos, the Oromo, the Sudanese, the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans, the Cambodians and Vietnamese, came to Minnesota as refugees and have built lives there, attended school, learned English, worked hard and have become an important part of the fabric of the state. 

We benefit from their presence. They are found in many different professions, in private and public spaces. The majority of them are US citizens, through naturalization or birthright, and the President’s racist attack on them is an outrage; as is his use of ICE to threaten and abuse people, largely based on the color of their skin.

All over the country, organized people are learning how to push back against abuse of our neighbors. That work has become a measure of good citizenship for us all.

Welcoming the season awaiting Jesus' birth in Massachusetts

 

If you see something, you know what to do.

 

According to local reporting:  

Dedham church sparks outrage over nativity scene with political message

 

... “We thought this was a good way to show the dynamic of what’s happening in the world today,” said [Father Stephen] Jasoma Monday. “This is a stance I’d hope all churches would take. We should be a welcoming community.” 

... Father Jasoma, in response to criticism he recieved, told Boston 25, “I’ve some push back from total strangers, was called a murderer yesterday... What we celebrate at Christmas is the peace Christ brought into the world. It’s right here, it’s right now. We are to embrace it.”

Boston 25 reached out to the Archdiocese of Boston and is still waiting for comment.

I suspect this trouble making priest and congregation might be on the same page with the new pope. 

A call for accountability from ICE and from ourselves

Martha's Vineyard island lies off the coast of Massachusetts. Reached only by ferry boat or small plane, it can seem a world apart from the agonies of the mainland. It is not. 

It has long been a landing spot for successive waves of migrants, hardy people willing to work. Early English settlers here pushed the native Wampanoags to the margins of the island, where they were often joined by previously enslaved people of African descent. Seamen and whalers from around the world came in the 18th and 19th century; the East Coast Black bourgeoisie populated the vacation town of Oak Bluffs. At present, about 20 percent of the year-round population are referred to by others as "the Brazilians" -- working class, relative newcomers from the Azores and continental Brazil itself whose industry keeps much of the life of the island going.

ICE sails away with some of its captives in a summer raid.

That mixed migrant population has put a target on the island for ICE under the Trump regime. 

When we are on Martha's Vineyard, we attend Grace Church (Episcopal) in the town of Vineyard Haven. The priest of this friendly parish shared a message this week in an island newspaper about the nightmare the Trump's anti-migrant crusade is inflicting on this place. 

Time to hold ICE accountable for its actions 

by the Rev. Stephen Harding 

As a priest ordained in the Episcopal Church, I am bound by the vows I made at my diaconal and priestly ordinations and by our Baptismal Covenant. When I was sworn in as a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, I took an oath to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the State of New York, and the Charter of the City of New York. As a citizen of the United States, in addition to the rights provided by the Constitution, part of my obligation is to support and defend the Constitution.

When I served as director of pastoral care at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, my department and I were expected to comply with the medical center’s policies. We were directed and expected to report any unethical practice, or anything that might involve wrongdoing. The policy explicitly stated that if we saw something being done that was wrong and kept silent, our silence made us complicit in the wrong.

I believe that once Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States, and there has been time for reflection and the restoration of the rule of law, the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and their enablers will prove to be among the more shameful moments of our country’s history. ...

... ICE has made itself judge, jury, and enforcer, with no transparent oversight or accountability. By wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, and detaining individuals without charging them, ICE agents are indistinguishable from masked vigilantes, and jeopardize the safety of the public and themselves. 

... If the elected, appointed, and other government officials cannot keep their oath to protect, support, and defend the Constitution of the United States, then they, too, are acting dishonorably, and are complicit in ICE’s actions.

I remain convinced that the people of the U.S. are fundamentally decent, compassionate, and generous. The tactics, actions, and insolence of masked ICE agents demean themselves, disrespect our dignity as human beings, and diminish us as a nation. ...

If ICE and other Trump officials should be held accountable, the rest of us can't turn away from our own responsibilities in the times. What can we do to care for and protect strangers in our midst? What can we do to replace government leaders who are doing wrong?

From the 'hood in these scary times

Latino Heritage Month celebrations kicked off in the San Francisco Mission District yesterday. A few blocks away from the costumes and the Lowriders, somebody had something to say.

Our "hood has not yet experienced Trump's full assault. But folks are getting ready. And meanwhile, they threw a fine street party.

Latino Heritage Months marks the anniversaries when many nations south of the US border gained independence from European colonizers.

9/15 - Independence Day for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua

9/16 - Mexico Independence Day

9/18 - Chile Independence Day

The California community college in Barstow, CA offers a nice description of the history of these festivities geared to people who find the notion of Latino Heritage unfamiliar. This is significant, as I presume the Trump regime will try to outlaw such information.

We want you here -- but no I.C.E.

Sign at the entrance to a Mission District medical office - click to enlarge

 

That's the Mission way.

Checking in on the siege of Los Angeles: a summer of ICE

Those us of elsewhere shouldn't lose sight of the Trump regime's martial law play acting and real raids on immigrants in the Southland. We can learn a lot about what Stephen Miller and Tom Homan want for our future. And we can mourn and take heart from our California siblings.

When South African, naturalized-American, medical entrepreneur and newspaper magnate, Patrick Soon-Shiong cancelled the Los Angeles Times' endorsement of Kamala Harris, I cancelled my subscription to the paper. Since then, I've watched the paper bleed interesting journalists, much as the Washington Post has. It's sad. Unlike a lot of northern Californians, I am fond that overwhelming megalopolis to the south.  So interesting and so varied. And -- as so often -- where it is happening.

But losing the LA Times has not meant being altogether cut off. In order to try to entice me to resubscribe, the LAT still sends me a kind of editor's digest which gives me some access to the state of the metropolis as seen by the newspaper. A letter from Deputy Managing Editor Shelby Grad passes on a surprisingly upbeat and eloquent contextualization from the beleaguered city:

In today’s divided media world, these events were instantly cast as either a dangerous erosion of democracy or grandstanding by politicians searching for a viral clip, depending on your source.

But they underscored a clear message from our summer of ICE: Los Angeles isn’t afraid anymore.

A lot of very dark things have happened in Los Angeles over its 244-year history, events driven by misguided zeal, greed, bigotry and intolerance.

But they are always abetted by fear.

• One of the most notorious lynchings in American history occurred not in the Deep South but in 1870s Los Angeles, when a mob killed 19 Chinese people and some in the city were driven by blood lust.

• An estimated 170,000 Japanese Americans — many in California — were rounded up and taken from their homes, farms and businesses and held in prison camps. Both the right and the left put aside their differences to eagerly back the internment.

• A year later, in 1943, the streets of Los Angeles became the scene of shocking mob rule as scores of Mexican teens and young men were beaten, stripped of their ornate “zoot suits” and left bloody and naked on the sidewalk. Police officers laughed, encouraged the beatings, then arrested the victims. Politicians and the papers blamed the Mexicans.

Shelby Grad continues: 

 Fighting our fears

California historian Kevin Starr wrote eloquently about that part of the Los Angeles psyche that sets the city into “a state of psychosis, surrendering itself to the dream-fear.” Real events become magnified into anxiety that no one is willing or able to control. In 1993, Starr wrote about the paranoid rumors sweeping the city in advance of the verdict in the Rodney King civil trial. (More riots! Military occupation! A gang invasion of the Westside!) He thought immediately of the city’s past sins.

“Future historians will look back to these days and struggle to interpret a time in which fear became fact and rumor became the basis of policy,” he wrote. “It became its own horrible reality, and the City of the Angels, as it always feared it would, dreamt itself out of existence.” A city of dissent

There are a lot of reasons for L.A. to fear criticizing the sweeps and stay silent. It just gives Trump more ammunition. What will he unleash on us next?

But that is not happening this time. The protests, the aid efforts, and the many individuals speaking out against the arrests happening before their eyes show that dissent is alive and well here. Yes, living in a deep blue state gives them some cover. But isn’t it better to speak your mind and not fear the consequences? Isn’t that one of the things supporters love about Trump?

Taking a stand can also bring change.

The 1871 Chinese massacre occurred in an L.A. still ruled by vigilante justice, which made dissent hazardous to your health. But as John Mack Faragher chronicles in “Eternity Street,” the killing of 10% of the city’s entire Chinese population brought shame to L.A. — and forced some to finally speak for change. A few brave voices led to a larger movement that established L.A.’s first real criminal justice system and police force, marking an end to the vigilante era.

It didn’t curb racism or injustice, but it was a start.

• • •

Today's Angelenos are not a cooperative bunch when it comes to Trump's attempts to suppress speech in the city. From Talking Point Memo: 

A major new development out of Los Angeles, where the LA Times reports that U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli has been no-billed by grand juries in some attempted prosecutions of ICE protestors: 

The three officials who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity said prosecutors have struggled to get several protest-related cases past grand juries, which need only to find probable cause that a crime has been committed in order to move forward. That is a much lower bar than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard required for a criminal conviction.

Citizen jurors sometimes do speak for the people.

• • •

Politico notes that the Trump/Miller/Homan invasion merely reinvigorates California Latino revulsion against the Republican party, just as each wave of bigoted nativism has done for the last 30 years. 

“Grabbing people with criminal histories, I think there’s a lot of support for it,” [Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based GOP strategist]  said. “But catching people who have been here for 30 years, have family, work, contribute to the economy — and the only reason they’re undocumented is because America has failed to provide a program for them to be here legally — I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of stomach for that.”

 • • •

The New Yorker found an oblique angle from which to approach the city's struggles, a profile of the local consul-general of Mexico, Carlos González Gutiérrez. After a long, distinguished diplomatic career, he finds himself in the midst of an emergency for people he serves in a place that is their home and in some ways also his.

... The weekend after the Presidential election, he said, consuls-general across the United States called him to express their concerns about what the second Trump Administration would mean for Mexican nationals. ...

In June, González Gutiérrez began to see enforcement tactics that seemed unprecedented during his time in Los Angeles. ICE had begun raiding workplaces, snatching people off the streets, and arresting them as they waited to enter immigration courts. The government was apprehending people without criminal records, many of whom had been members of the community for decades. 

... On June 7th, he advised Mexicans with immigration hearings to inquire about the possibility of moving them online, and reminded them that, if they got detained, they should stay calm, not sign any documents they don’t understand, and, last of all, “remain silent and be in touch with your consulate.” Three days later, he still urged calm, and told people to protest peacefully if they protested at all. “In Mexico,” he said, “we’re deeply proud of you—of your work, your bravery, your dignity, and your identity as Mexicans. It is absolutely compatible to be a citizen or resident of this country who is both loyal and honest, and at the same time feel proud of your country of origin.” 

... As of early July, staff from the Mexican consulate had interviewed three hundred and thirty Mexicans who had been detained there during the previous month. Fifty-two per cent had lived in the United States for more than ten years. Thirty-six per cent had lived here for twenty years. Several more had been in the country for thirty years, and some for forty. Sixty-four of the people they’ve interviewed have already been deported, some forcibly and some voluntarily. 

Three hundred and nine of the interviewees were men; twenty-one were women. Immigration raids typically target men, but George Sanchez—a historian at U.S.C. who is perhaps the foremost scholar of L.A.’s Mexican and Mexican American communities—made the point that these latest raids have been particularly “masculinist.” “ICE has gone to Home Depots, not the transportation centers where buses pick up women every morning in East Los Angeles, taking them to the west side where they care for white people’s children,” Sanchez told me. “The Administration doesn’t want complaints from these families, whereas the day laborers at Home Depot conjure an image of the supposedly threatening foreigners they claim to be after.”  

... González Gutiérrez told me about two men who have lived in Los Angeles for forty years but had never applied for citizenship. Now they face deportation. “The fact that so many people have established roots in this country, that they have kids here, that they are a full part of communities they’ve helped prosper, that they still have to live in the shadows as undocumented people—this is the tragedy of this community,” he said. 

... González Gutiérrez cannot ultimately shape the outcome of immigrants’ cases. As a diplomat, he told me, he, too, is just a guest in this country. Like all other diplomats, he said, he abides by the rule of reciprocity: he can only do here what he would want an American diplomat to do in Mexico. ... 

... “When you are here, if you are a Mexican national, you realize that you belong, that, to a great extent, this is a Mexican city. I don’t say that in a chauvinistic way,” he told me. 

“What I mean is that L.A. celebrates diversity.” In a ten-minute drive, he noted, you might pass through Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Koreatown, the Maya Corridor. “L.A. belongs to everybody,” he said, “but Mexicans are part of it in a very central, essential, structural way.” ... 

... Los Angeles, as González Gutiérrez described it to me, is still the “political capital of the Mexican diaspora.” That’s why the Trump Administration’s actions there, and the resistance against them, have been so fierce. ICE officers will soon be bolstered by the billions that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gives them. With infinitely fewer resources, the protesters are becoming more organized, too.  

... On the morning that I met the consul-general, I had breakfast at La Chispa de Oro, in the predominantly Mexican American neighborhood of Boyle Heights, with the Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. He told me that “at first people were scared, but now they’re pissed. You get masked agents with guns pulling random people in public, that’s terrifying. Too many people in L.A. know that type of terror from our ancestral countries. You think it can’t happen here, then it does. So you feel sad about it, but then you’re, like, ‘No.’ ”

I weep for the city of the angels and I applaud its people. That's what this season of nativism is like.

A good use for the National Guard

In Chicago, a couple of soldiers accompanied their mother to her ICE appointment. Some Congresspeople turned up too, fearing what one called "scammy" summons from immigration authorities to their constituents. ICE denied the Congress guys entrance, despite their legal right to inspect the facility.