Immigration raids and resistance

I'm pasting this inflammatory image here today because, for the second week in a row, I've been asked by friends at church, "But what can we do?"

They hope I might know. They are wrong. None of us who care about human decency and the torture of babies by our own government know -- yet. I have no roadmap, but I have experience, and I have thoughts.

Many of those of us who came of age during the long moral horror that was our country's war in Vietnam have experience that prepares us for this time. Much against our hopes, we learned to persist, to refuse to give up. The struggle against the war seemed to drag on forever in our young lives. By 1966, a substantial fraction of us knew that our government was doing something very wrong -- evil even -- into which some of our age peers might be conscripted. Yet our purportedly ethical political system seemed incapable of bringing the atrocity to an end. The Vietnam war dragged on for another 9 years with escalating commitments of U.S. troops; over all, 50,000 of our soldiers and millions of Vietnamese and other South East Asians were killed before North Vietnam definitively booted us out in 1975.

And across those long years, people of conscience in the U.S. tried expedient after expedient, tactic after tactic, appeal after appeal, trying to end our national atrocity in progress.

We educated, first ourselves, then our fellow citizens (at least I hope it usually went in that order.) What did we really know about a peasant society in South East Asia? What do we really know today about failing kleptocratic states in Central America's Northern Triangle, about how climate chaos drives migration, about how U.S. and international immigration and humanitarian law work, about how migrants who settle in the United States survive and thrive? Not all we should, though it may seem a little easier today to be informed in the era of internet. In the face of atrocity, knowing and spreading opportunities for knowing seems like not much, but it is a prerequisite to much more.

We mobilized and organized, by which I mean that people imaginatively found ways to create friction that expressed revulsion from an evil war in every sector of society. There were draft resisters and mass marches, but also over time there appeared businessmen [sic, though there weren't many women] against the war, labor against the war, teachers against the war, farmers against the war, even GIs against the war ... Name a social sector, some of its members sought to give it a role. They struggled to win over the indifferent and the hostile, they passed resolutions, held teach-ins, boycotted and picketed Dow Chemical (makers of that fiery weapon, napalm) and other war profiting companies, and supported military objectors. Today the Trump policy of deliberate cruelty to brown people seeking succor in this country has moved people to a multitude of similar actions, from shaming Amazon for selling its facial recognition technology to ICE to experts confirming that it's accurate to call the CBP detention facilities "concentration camps." These areas of pressure are limited only by our imagination and willingness to chip away through them.

We challenged power using the constitutional system. This came last in the Vietnam era, because both political parties were wedded to that evil war. (Ah yes, that was the era of less acute partisanship we're sometimes admonished to yearn for.) But we did bring down a sitting president; LBJ gave up on re-election in 1968 because Vietnam opponents had divided the Democrats. People repulsed by cruelty to migrants start off far ahead today. None of our Dems are going to endorse Trump's wall and his family-breaking random deportations. Can we get the Dems affirming that an aging country should welcome enterprising immigrants and refugees into our complex multi-ethnic future? This seems a goal worth agitating for.

A lesson from movement history is that you never can be sure in advance which initiative against the machine will strike a chord. Some take center stage for a season, then fade. But many of them might erupt at any moment. Pay attention.

A further lesson is that non-violence and kindness to one another in the midst of moral anguish and urgent struggle also count while working for greater justice. If so inclined, try praying. It too can help.