When deportation means death

What lessons can we draw from the most recent 360-degree revolution in Trump administration policy, specifically the policy regarding immigrants who have come into to this country (legally) to receive life-saving medical care not available in their home countries?

Under previous administrations, this was a no-brainer. A policy that results in the death of innocent, desperately ill people is the definition of an immoral, evil policy. The Obama administration, for example, recognized that and allowed these patients to stay in the country under a deferred action status.

The current administration decided to change that by ending the deferred action status of the ailing immigrants whose survival depends on staying in this country to receive medical treatment available only in cutting-edge medical centers in places like Boston and San Francisco. Recently, without any public announcement of the change in policy, immigration authorities suddenly began sending letters to the patients, giving them 33 days to leave the country or be deported.

Apparently some immigration officials thought they could get away with introducing the new policy under the radar, probably because there are only about a hundred people affected, and they are among the most vulnerable and powerless.

That was a miscalculation. To receive a death sentence through a letter sent by an impersonal bureaucracy is a horror that would defy the imagination of Kafka. Some of the potential victims, their families and, especially, their doctors spoke up, the media got wind of it, followed by members of Congress.

The jig was up. Faced with a huge outcry, the Trump administration decided to not proceed with deportation, for now, but made it clear it wants to end the deferred action provision.

At best, it was only a grudging reprieve and not a clear and principled reversal of an obscene decision. Even a reprieve is better than the alternative for these unfortunate people and their families. But it leaves them in limbo, hardly an act of kindness.

The intention of deporting these desperate people, who had been fighting heroically for their lives—and participating in clinical trials that will save other people—is unspeakable. The Trump administration, in its zealous anti-immigrant crusade, finally seemed on the point of crossing a line of moral depravity that can only be grasped by analogy with the conduct of the worst regimes in history.

The fact that the Trump administration didn’t go through with it right now is a good thing. But, as with so many horrible Trump/Republican ideas that ultimately were not carried out only because of massive pushback by the public and congress, or a last minute change of mind by Trump—abolishing Obama care, bombing Iran, deporting really sick people—we will not see the end of awful policy proposals until Trump and the Senate Republicans are removed from power by the people.

The Trump/Senate Republican juggernaut is, among other things, a denialist club. Deny global warming. Deny that mounting white-supremacy-violence is a problem. Deny that guns kill and the easy availability of weapons of war are the reason this country alone in the world has so many mass killings. Deny that there is anything wrong with caging children. Then deny that the cages you see are even cages. Deny, Deny, Deny.

Introducing a policy by stealth betrays an awareness of guilt. Pulling the policy back only after a stink and only temporarily says the intention is still there. There has been no moral awakening: Only a political cost-benefit analysis: A desire to avoid giving Democratic presidential candidates such an easy target to demonstrate this administration’s moral bankruptcy. Which means that if Trump is reelected, he is likely to try the same thing again. That can’t happen; the American people must prevent it.

There are some clear lessons. There are virtually no limits to the cruelty of this administration when it comes to its anti-immigrant crusade or when those affected people are brown or black. It will try to introduce the very worst policies in fog and darkness. The only thing that stops awful policies from being enacted is media exposure, public outrage, and intense congressional pushback. Exposure, outrage, pressure—not the Trump administration’s conscience—is what stopped it this time and what must happen each time as long Trump and the GOP have the power to wreak havoc in people’s lives.

That’s in the short run. In the long run, this country needs not only a change in administration but a political transformation and an ideological awakening. A political transformation that kicks out of power those who defend the racist assumptions that are in the very foundations of this country. An ideological change through which such assumptions and others are definitively overcome.

Many of us in the boom generation wanted to bring that about, but we failed. Now many not only have given up but joined the side for maintaining the status quo no matter what. But not all of us have thrown in the towel, and the millennials won’t let us if we wanted to.

This administration has triggered a reckoning over the question of who we are as a country. The Trump administration and its supporters answer that, at the deepest level, we are what we were when America was great. Making America Great Again is nostalgia for a time after the great immigration from Europe ended and before all the movements of the excluded started and the new immigration from Latin America and Asia began. A time when the U.S. population was becoming more homogenous, not more diverse, when people knew who was on top and who was not, and who were the “real Americans” and who were not.

Trump and company want to turn the clock back to that era, put the train of history on those old tracks, make a counterrevolution away from the liberal ideals of racial and economic equality, make America great again for white, heterosexual males from northwestern European ancestry—and for them only.

Such a reactionary project poses a great challenge and has created a crisis of national identity. That crisis is expressed through anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Semitic mass killings. It is expressed daily by the racist, misogynist, corrupt, wacko in the White House. It is manifest in the party that has dominated politics for a generation, the Republicans, who look more like America 1950 than America 2019, and with their ideology and lily-white racial makeup could pass for the ruling party in the old apartheid South Africa. Finally, the crisis involves a change from the ideal of a society defined by a broad, affluent middle class to a country defined by a winner-take-all philosophy with an increasingly stark class division.

Great crises sometimes prompt great changes. The nature of our current crisis is such that it can only be overcome by a deep and radical transformation and not just a restoration of the Obama-Biden era.