Kevin O'Keefe is artistic director of Circus Minimus, which brings the magic of circus arts to kids and to schools.
BRATTLEBORO-On the scummy pond of the Trump Administration's immigration atrocities, this one wouldn't make much of a ripple.
It's not like when, in a stunning display of ineptitude they exiled Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of these United States, to a gang-filled super-max prison in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia maintains a full-time job, is married to an U.S. citizen, has three children, and has never been charged or convicted of anything.
Despite admitting an "administrative error" (if you know Trump's playbook, this is huuuge and goes against his first commandment - never admit) the government adds arrogance to intransigence by continuing to defy the three courts that have ordered Abrego Garcia's return and to defy the Supreme Court by leaving him there to rot.
In a staged meeting in the Oval Office (the one your tax dollars recently paid to have gilded in the "stable genius"'s signature garish style), Trump and the minions acted as if they, the most powerful people in the world, don't possess the power to bring a U.S. citizen back from the black site they dumped him in El Salvador.
The United States is paying the El Salvador government $6 million. If Abrego Garcia is a gang member (as they contend), why not charge him, present the evidence, and let him defend himself? Why deny him his due process?
I understand courts must give the president leeway to conduct foreign affairs, but this wasn't a foreign affair before the government deported Abrego Garcia. They made it a foreign affair. They refuse to correct their error or follow the directions of the courts.
Presenting Abrego Garcia, the citizen they disappeared, the same one they were ordered to return by our Supreme Court, is impossible. Somehow, though, they were able to persuade the president of El Salvador (Nayib Bukele) to sit next to Trump and play the world's coolest dictator in their obvious propaganda charade.
The Constitutional crisis we've been bracing for is here. Adam Serwer recently wrote in The Atlantic that the "rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn't have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court - and for the rule of law."
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The banal event I'll shortly mention doesn't rise to the level of abducting Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national graduate student with a valid student visa, off the street near Boston with gunmen in unmarked cars and then sending her to Louisiana, despite a federal court order that she not leave the state.
It won't sting the way Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student sitting in a jail in Louisiana trying to fathom the logic of how being a supporter of human rights for Gazans is antisemitic in the U.S. Khalil has not been presented with an arrest warrant and his First Amendment rights have been trampled.
More recently, in Colchester, masked men in plain clothes detained an Upper Valley resident during a scheduled citizenship interview, despite his status as a lawful U.S. permanent resident.
"The Trump administration detained Mohsen Mahdawi in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian," said Luna Droubi, his attorney, via email. "His detention is an attempt to silence those who speak out against the atrocities in Gaza. It is also unconstitutional."
Incidentally, in one week in March your federal government abducted 370 people off the street, and that was just in Massachusetts. In Argentina in the 1980s, they called such a practice "forced disappearance." The United Nationsdefines the practice as the deprivation of liberty, "followed by a refusal to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the persons concerned."
What many Americans are beginning to realize is that if they can do that today to immigrants, they can do it to me or anyone else tomorrow. No one is safe from this administration.
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The U.S. government actions are remarkably consistent with what started as against the Jews in the 1930s in Germany. Nazi ideology eventually flexed its muscles over Roma, homosexuals, Blacks, Poles, Soviet prisoners, people with disabilities, and social outsiders.
It's not hard to see how starting with immigrants and wedging outward to any perceived enemy of Trump could include millions. After all, one of the central themes of his presidency is revenge and retribution.
Now the government is encouraging anyone to snitch on anyone not adhering to their anti-DEI agenda. Putin actively encourages snitching on neighbors, as Stalin once did. The prison camps, or Gulag, were full of victims who had been snitched on by their fellow citizens.
Trump is entering rare company indeed.
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The banal event that I want to point out occurs daily. It is relatively minor, so that it wouldn't even warm the reptilian heart of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration policy and the man whom I'm hoping history will judge in a manner similar to Goebbels and Eichmann for his diabolical efficiency.
This pro forma missive arrives in your inbox, generated most likely by an algorithm within the bowels of the Department of Homeland Security: "DHS is terminating your parole. Do not attempt to remain in the United States. If you remain in the United States the federal government will find you."
Whose homeland?
Ours, the hundreds of millions of Americans who are descended from immigrants.
Whose security are these human beings and families threatening?
No one's, of course. Families and human beings who arrive at the border have an all-too-common dream: to live safely and hopefully make a better life for their children.
My own family, like Trump's and Miller's, similarly arrived here similar generations ago, but the process was relatively simple for people of my great-grandparents' generation. Now immigrants must contend with all efforts of Herr Miller, whose sole focus is to turn their dream into a nightmare.
Aside from continuing to defy the Supreme Court, Miller's most recent illegal action is to access Social Security numbers of immigrants, declare them dead, remove their numbers, and thus ruin their financial lives. Immigration status makes no matter to him.
Miller has updated the adage from the days of the frontier: The only good immigrant is a deported immigrant.
Using threats, intimidation, and ruined financial lives is part and parcel of the Trump administration's push for self-deportation, thus raising numbers and saving money.
Trump recently cancelled or paused over $41 million of our tax dollars - money that we paid to the federal government in income taxes. Money that Vermont has earmarked for our schoolchildren, for food for our hungry, for affordable housing, for electric vehicles, and for interlibrary loans.
At the same time, the administration is setting aside $45 billion dollars to expand immigrant detention.
So we can build $45 billion in jails but we can't afford an interlibrary loan service?
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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