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Category: Uncategorized
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The United States of Fear
Remember that Donald Trump said real power, to him, is fear?
Fear is the dominant emotion afflicting millions of our fellow Americans since the inception of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2025. I’m not afraid, you might say. But what about people with darker skin? What about those who also have accents not readily recognized? What about those who might not be citizens?The invasive search of the home of a sitting Member of Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-MN, on so-called immigration crimes, puts a high-profile face on the mounting Ill feeling toward immigrants this President has stirred, starting with Muslim citizens and emigres. Statements that are false and expressed with rage, by the president of the United States, the so-called “leader of the free world,” cause rising anger and distrust among the populace.
You’ve seen what’s happening:
Armed and unidentified masked thugs – most representing the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency – are being sent to cities across the country to drive unmarked SUVs to chase and capture mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, hunting them, hurting them, some even killed.
Is this the United States of America?
Remember the call of Lady Liberty? Her New York harbor light, even today, continues to beckon,
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”But now we have a president who says those desperate people seeking freedom are “criminals” from “insane asylums,” who are “poisoning the blood” of our country. Who would want to come here, once they’ve heard or read the words he uses to describe those who’ve risked everything to make a home in what they thought was a free and welcoming land?
Tens of thousands of those captured have been spirited far away from their families and put in one of 203 “detention facilities,” holding nearly 69,000 men and women – many whose families don’t know where they’ve been taken.
The captured live in enclosures ranging in size from one to more than 2,000 persons, and exist amid conditions reported to mirror the harrowing “concentration camps” Germany created in the 1930s. Some are flown to secretive deportation airport hubs to be sent to countries where they have no family or friends or cultural connections.
We’re used to seeing movies, documentaries, news stories, in which people from other countries speak wistfully of their dream to come to “America.” Our nation has been spoken of in hopeful whispers that make you feel proud to live in such a land. But is our country, now at this time, the America they and you have known since childhood? Currently, chasing emigrants? Pummeling them? Tackling? And throwing people into far off pens? Is this the United States you know or want?
Instead of our wishes and immigrant hopes, we have here, in 2026, fear.
Do you think “those people” are not around you? What about the crew putting on the neighbor’s new roof? And the guys mowing your neighbor’s yard? The house cleaner? The babysitter? Also, the men and women putting up the new building downtown? Think they could be afraid? Perhaps asking, “Why are there soldiers around?” “Is ICE here?” “Will I be chased today?” “Will someone throw me to the ground?” “Will my kids be safe at school?” “Is my neighborhood safe?” “Could I be shot?”
Since Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by personnel from ICE and U.S. Border Patrol, respectively, in January; federal agents seeking to apprehend persons believed to be undocumented immigrants, have subsequently shot dead fleeing persons in Tennessee, Texas, California and Maine.
Immigration and customs enforcement agents, leaping, masked, from unmarked vans, tackle people suspected of making illegal entry to our country, whether last week or last century. Sometimes up to five khaki-clothed masked men thrust a migrant to the ground near a shopping center, church, school or workplace.
“They say that this is supposed to make America great again,” said 18 year old Wendy Domingo, whose undocumented parents had just been arrested in the family car in Lake Worth Beach, Florida. “They’re just crushing my people’s dreams,” she added. Wendy had been driving the whole family – including her four siblings (16, 14, 11 and 3) – out for a shopping trip following Sunday Mass, when she was pulled over by Border Patrol agents. Wendy asked why.
The Homeland Security Department later answered on X: “These illegal alien parents willingly chose to break our nation’s laws and, as a result of those choices, are responsible for what happens to their children — just as any U.S. citizen parent who breaks the law is when they are taken to jail.”
In suburban Evanston, Ill., a U.S. citizen with dark skin, was beaten by ICE agents, who said they had detained him by “mistake,” leaving him with injuries to his head, neck and teeth.
How did your ancestors get here? There likely was no Ellis Island for your great great grandparent, when s/he first set foot in the United States on the docks of New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore or New Orleans.
When did we allow people like our original ancestors into the U.S.? For many there was no visa or passport requirement, and any court at any level could make you a citizen after you’d been here five years.
Recently our president crudely demeaned immigrants from some countries. He spoke with contempt for the country of Norway. No one deserves to be treated this way. Not other people. Not other countries. Not us.
Act.
Speak up.
Vote.