Back when I was a kid, the idea that any kind of authority could stop a person and demand their papers was considered outrageous, the sort of thing that happened in \u201cbad\u201d countries, not in the USA.<\/p>\n
I was an Anglo kid, of course \u2013 Anglo in the Texas sense of being white and not Mexican American. Black people knew better as did Mexican Americans, including those whose families had lived north of the Rio Grande since before Anglo settlement in Texas in the early 1800s.<\/p>\n
These days I know enough history to understand the amount of racial privilege packed into my outrage. Our history is littered with stories of people forced again and again to prove their right to exist while others are accepted even when they\u2019re doing harm.<\/p>\n
But I still feel that outrage on behalf of all the persons being harassed by trumped-up semi-cops right now. And I would get very angry if someone asked me for my papers.<\/p>\n
I mean, I still get mad every time I\u2019m driving near the Mexican border and have to stop at one of the border patrol stations that are inland from the actual border.<\/p>\n
Not that I ever have any problem there. I\u2019m very obviously Anglo and dealing with cops brings out my Anglo Texan accent. But it still pisses me off in a deeply personal way, and not just because I\u2019ve noticed at those places that people whose skin is a little darker than mine end up spending a lot more time answering questions.<\/p>\n
In his January 15 issue of his Law Dork newsletter, Chris Giedner reports that the awful woman who is running our Department of Homeland Security (an agency whose very name evokes Nazi Germany in my mind and has since the right wing came up with it after September 11) says anyone in the vicinity of an ICE operation can expect to have to prove their identity.<\/p>\n
And of course, even proofs of identity don\u2019t work if they want to abuse you. Or shoot you.<\/p>\n
It is reported that a couple of the thugs doing these raids have said to people after the murder of Renee Good, \u201cDidn\u2019t you learn your lesson?\u201d <\/p>\n
They mean \u201cdon\u2019t you know we can kill you if we want to?\u201d These days it seems to apply to anyone who questions what they\u2019re doing. Or even just gets in the way.<\/p>\n
But given the strong response we\u2019re seeing to the ongoing abuse in Minneapolis (and in other places before that), I\u2019d say a whole lot of us learned a different lesson: that we better do anything we can to stop ICE before it gets even more out of hand.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not the safest reaction in the short term, but it\u2019s probably the only reasonable one if we are trying to get our country back.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a whole \u201cknow your place\u201d attitude in these extremists trying to run roughshod over the country. The very idea of it hits a visceral nerve in me, one partly rooted in my feminism, because I\u2019ve seen it in a lot of men who expect me to cower before their \u201cmanliness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019ve got a lot of years in Aikido, which means that I do understand that the most effective way to deal with such people is to find ways to take their balance or use their own force against them, preferably in a non-physical way.<\/p>\n
But I must confess that when confronted with this sort of person, I have a tendency to revert to my West Texas roots. The very idea that I am supposed to back down because some male person is angry at me makes all caution fly out the window.<\/p>\n
And I don\u2019t think anyone should have to put up with that kind of nonsense.<\/p>\n
By the way, while the horrific abuses of ICE going on now are several orders of magnitude worse than we have seen before, the treatment of immigrants in the US has been bad for a very long time. I recall doing some volunteer legal work for a person seeking asylum back in the 1980s and being shocked to discover that the immigration service treated lawyers like crap. I could only imagine how they treated immigrants who lacked representation.<\/p>\n
I am very pro-immigration. I think it should be very easy for people to enter this country. We have the resources and we clearly need the workers. So I\u2019d object to ICE even if they weren\u2019t grabbing people at their immigration hearings or tackling daycare workers in front of the children they\u2019re taking care of.<\/p>\n
But this is about more than immigration. Their ultimate goal is to get all of us to accept this kind of violence aimed at anybody the current regime dislikes.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t plan to do that. None of us should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back when I was a kid, the idea that any kind of authority could stop a person and demand their papers was considered outrageous, the sort of thing that happened in \u201cbad\u201d countries, not in the USA. I was an Anglo kid, of course \u2013 Anglo in the Texas sense of being white and not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1169],"class_list":["post-4426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-abolish-ice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4427,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions\/4427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}