Walk With Me

Six days ago the federal government began another round of immigration raids aimed not against the hardened criminals and gang members that the President founded all of his campaigns on seeking to deport, but instead rounding up ordinary workers, all to meet a predetermined arrest quota (something which appears strange in the USA, but which saw widespread use in Stalin’s USSR). This followed three full months in which administration repeatedly had masked agents grab people off the street and, instead of deporting them in the normal, legal way, they rushed them out of the country in chains before the courts had a chance to order the administration to stop. When these orders did come down, the administration hemmed, hawed, and then finally said that it could not and would not bring people back for their day in court – a day which was no longer about their immigration status and whether or not they got to remain in the United States or had to return to their home country, but rather was about their very lives, because some of these people had not been put a plane back to their home country, but instead imprisoned in a jail so inhumane, dangerous, and with no plan to ever release any of the imprisoned (imprisoned without trial, I might add), that it fits the textbook definition of a concentration camp. The administration says these people are gangsters and criminals, the worst of the worst; but it won’t try to prove that in court. What it did say in court, however, was shocking: the Trump administration admitted that it had sent multiple people to this concentration camp by mistake, and in the same breath said that they would nevertheless stay there, and it has repeatedly ignored court orders to the contrary.

For the past three months, then, Americans have been living in a country in which the government disappears people off the street into an oubliette where they are cast to be tortured and forgotten, without so much as a phone call to their families. And because it has done this to people it admits it did not mean to and was not allowed to, Americans have been living with the reality that the government could do this to anyone, and therefore, morally, has.

So the Los Angeles into which ICE went on Friday was already living under the cloud of threatened imprisonment, brutalization, and quite plausibly, death, for anyone the administration cast an unkind eye on. It is understandable then that people were already incensed, afraid, and ready to resist. While doubtless some of the usual suspects showed up to vandalize and be as inflammatory as possible (in every sense), most people who showed up to protest were there to try to protect their neighbors from the fate that had already befallen others. And because the administration has repeatedly spirited people away without outside contact or legal representation into a foreign prison, and defied court orders to bring them back, the opportunity for defense provided by due process of law, or even the administrative immigration status review process, or the fact that normal deportations can usually be revisited and reversed, no longer existed – there was, in fact, no time and no opportunity but the present, as people were being dragged away. So, in some ways rightly and in others wrongly, people protested.

Since Friday, the administration has taken every opportunity to stoke the fires now burning in Los Angeles, hoping to provoke more strident resistance which they can use as an excuse to use force against their political opponents, and thus intimidate an entire country into submission. Most recently this has taken the form of something many political experts had long warned about as a dire extremity – the deployment of active-duty military into an American city for the purpose of quelling protests and intimidating the public. Today is Wednesday; as of today, we do not know what will come of this deployment, or what the next stage of escalation from the administration will be. But there is one thing we can reasonably anticipate the timing of.

On Saturday, the 14th, President Trump’s birthday, a gargantuan military parade is being held in his own honor in Washington, D.C. For several months, concerned citizens all around the country, people who like me have busy lives, who have to go to work every day, to take care of the kids, to pay the bills – have marked that Saturday on our calendars as a day of coordinated, peaceful protest, in response to everything Trump has done, on the occasion of this parade. Yesterday, the President announced that anyone who shows up to protest on Saturday will “be met with very big force.” He did not elaborate on what exactly he meant, but he has deployed Marines to Los Angeles and has announced plans to deploy troops to other cities where he expects protests. There are only so many things troops can be used for. I think the simplest understanding of the President’s words and actions is that he means to have the military threaten to shoot political protesters – or actually do it.

I have attended very few protests in my life. Many of the ones that make it on the news seem frightening to me; some of them upset me, and not in a way that persuades (activists defacing art in museums, people blocking ambulances, lighting buildings on fire). The only one I actually showed up at during the first Trump administration was in response to his discriminatory travel ban a couple weeks into his term. I was at another a couple of months ago – an altogether ordinary, peaceful, wholesome event, with families who brought their kids and walked their dogs, there on a nice sunny day instead of doing all the myriad things Alaskans rush to do outdoors on the precious few sunny days that we get, because they were genuinely alarmed, and because they cared about being Americans, and living in a free country.

I don’t know what Trump is planning to do to the people who show up to protest on Saturday. I worry something bad may happen. I’m a risk-averse person: I make three rights rather than one difficult left turn across traffic; I leave the trail to put trees between me and a perfectly calm moose; I always double-check the burner is off. But I had Saturday marked on my calendar as a day for another protest, and if I decided not to go and say my peace because the President threatened me, well, then it just wouldn’t be a free country anymore.

So on Saturday at around 11:30 or so, I’ll be taking my sign and walking over to 510 L Street. I’m not going to get in anyone’s face, break anything, and I’m certainly not going to fight anyone – I’ve never fought anyone in my life. I’m just going to go speak, and walk, because it’s a free country and I’m a free American. I make no preparations for anything unreasonable to happen, because I don’t think I should have to. I certainly hope nothing does – I have plans later to go see Tom Cruise punch bad guys and jump out of airplanes, and I don’t want to be late for my showing. But we can’t know the future. All we can do is show up.

Won’t you come and walk with me?