Locked in my apartment for a couple of days because of the weather, I end up watching a great deal of news—most of it painful and evoking despair. I feel the need to add my voice to the collective anger elicited by President Donald Trump; his political cohort (Vice President JD Vance, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem); and his ill-trained paramilitary group of ICE agents for their repressive and murderous immigration policies (including entering homes without judicial warrants). As always, it is difficult to provide original commentary on the political world, given the number of written pieces and media commentary covering what occurs every day. But I feel it imperative to write something so I can become more than a passive observer railing impotently at my television, watching government-propagated lawlessness savage a city and its population. I have no illusion that I am writing anything unique or able to change anybody’s perspective, but it seems important for my own moral being to write a few words about the situation.
I am usually an incremental social democrat—open to compromises that make political and human sense. And I am normally wary of absolutes, but Trump and the Republicans arouse extreme emotional responses in me that I know rarely achieve much politically but still cannot easily be submerged or dismissed.
The fact is that Trump and his minions are dependent on cowing us all into either fear or hopelessness. Any promise they make cannot be trusted for Trump is a pathological liar who lies the way anybody else breathes.
So, I want to see ICE defunded until it is reorganized and turned into a functional force that does not overstep its boundaries, as it does now.
Some Democratic senators have stepped up, and the words of the always eloquent Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia truly resonate: “As I stand where Alex Pretti lost his life, in a real sense, I feel like I’m standing on holy ground. And the blood spilled on this ground reminds us we’re in a moral moment in our country, and the soul of our nation is at stake here.”
