Trump's assault on community
'I don't want you to kidnap my neighbors.'
I keep thinking about this video:
I don’t know anything about the man who made the video. But the phrase he uses here — “I don’t want you to kidnap my neighbors, man” — strikes me as being the very heart of the stakes of our present moment.
Who are the neighbors of the videographer? Are they U.S. citizens arrested and possibly even deported by the Trump Administration for the crime of looking1 like immigrants? Are they migrants who parented U.S. Marines, or even served in the military and were wounded in America’s service? Or are they among the millions of undocumented migrants who work our fields, sew our clothes, build our houses and help make the country work?
When I describe it in these terms, it can sound like I am reducing migrants to broad economic categories.
For our videographer, though, the broad category becomes specific. He’s not trying to protect farmworkers or garment-makers.
He’s trying to protect his neighbors.
Communities exist in law -- the city, the state and nation -- but they don't only exist in the law. The live in the interplay between the human beings who live and work alongside each other. "Neighborhoods" don't generally have governing boards or taxing authority, yet they are supremely important.
Governments can only see people in terms of their relationship to the law, perhaps: Are you a citizen? Not a citizen? Which state do you belong to? What is the jurisdiction that governs your life, your actions? They are less equipped — ill-equipped —to ascertain who belongs to a community, to a neighborhood, quite apart from those legal distinctions. And they really make a hash of understanding, then, what it means to assault the dignity of an individual who belongs to that community.
I am being generous, here, in suggesting that the Trump Administration’s problem is an overly legal sense of who belongs and who doesn’t, that the problem boils down to one of paperwork and processes. We know with some confidence, I think, that the lines are drawn according to race and the whiteness — or lack thereof — of one’s skin.
White supremacy is the animating spirit of the Trump Administration’s enterprise. Legalese is merely the method.
The problem here is that the MAGA types cannot2 really conceive of being neighbors with migrants, cannot really contemplate being “in community” with them. The idea is so anathema to them that they cannot merely move to their own gated neighborhoods to hide behind walls away from Other People whose existence offends them.
Instead, they choose to launch an assault on communities. On the idea of a certain kind of community.
The threat the Trump Administration poses, then, is not just to the migrants who make lives within local communities but to the communities (the neighborhoods and churches and schools) that welcome and absorb them — however fitfully — and who, in the back-and-forth of all the ways that human beings relate, help create and sustain those communities.
Again, governments can only see individuals in terms of their relationship to the state and its various subdivisions. But governments — of course! — are made of people. In better times, governments still draw lines, but try to enforce the boundaries with some sense of defending communities instead of disrupting them. It’s why deportation efforts have usually focused on the law-breakers and transgressors instead of the folks simply working to send home a few bucks to their families. And it’s why the Trump Administration’s initial deportation efforts were so underwhelming. There aren’t so many law-breakers and transgressors among the migrants as the MAGA folks would have you believe.
These are not better times, obviously.
Aside from the racist intent, then, one of the things the Trump Administration is doing is refusing to allow room for the possibility of communities that exist independent or outside the state’s boundaries. There is no room for the gray, or for life within the gray.
Which, if you think about it, is fairly authoritarian.
But life is not lived entirely within the lines.3 The migrants who fear now for their futures, for their lives, may not have all the paperwork in place — or sometimes they do and the Trump has simply decided it doesn’t matter — but they are a part of our communities.
They are our neighbors. That’s is what the Trump Administration sees as a threat. And that is what the Trump is trying to crush.
Reading list
The Three Marine Brothers Who Feel ‘Betrayed’ by America: “In 2015, 12 percent of active-duty service members identified as Hispanic. By 2023, that number had increased to 19.5 percent. In the Marine Corps, the proportion was closer to 28 percent. ... During the Vietnam War, Latinos were about 5 percent of the U.S. population, but they accounted for an estimated 20 percent of the 60,000 American casualties.”
We all know what this means.
OK, maybe they can, but they certainly choose not to.
Earlier version said “within the lives.” Typo obv.
It is very clearly white supremacy. They detain U.S. citizens who look Hispanic or Arab, but don't detain white undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes.
The point I made to Marcus, the guy hassled by ICE/DHS was that the guys in masks were obviously ashamed of what they were doing -- hell, I would wear a mask, too, if I was doing that kind of work to conceal my shame. I noted that in the Westerns I watched as a kid, the bad guys usually wore masks when they were robbing the bank or the stagecoach, so it makes sense that people involved in crimes would try to hide their faces. But I did note, at the end of the video, that that cop that defused the situation was not wearing a mask, suggesting to me that he had nothing to hid as he was conducting his work honestly and with dignity and respect.
I suppose this might be the only work the masked guys could get, work that allowed them to behave like thugs, dress in in battle gear, and hide their faces as they round up the people who just bussed the tables at the local TexMex restaurant or groomed the sand trap at the nearby nine-hole muni. Yes, these are people to be feared as they are often armed with weed-wackers and leaf-blowers. Indeed, I can see why the ICE dudes conceal their faces...