The level of desperation among not just migrants coming to America seeking asylum, but among Americans who are outraged and horrified by the Trump administration’s response to the humanitarian crisis, is almost too much to be believed. Yesterday, the media widely covered a man’s attack near a Tacoma, Washington ICE detention center as though he were trying to set a concrete building on fire with flares and a propane tank — it turned out the anti-fascist protester wasn’t even aiming at the building, he was attempting to take out a fleet of buses that ICE uses to transport migrants.
That’s how far we’ve come, that protesters are now doing anything they can think of to keep Trump’s racist goon squad from enforcing his immoral and breathtakingly violent orders.
Trump has now, after having gone on a rampage against women of color in Congress yesterday that’s carried over into today, forever proven that his motivations are largely guided by race — he tried to tell even women who were born IN AMERICA to go back to their countries of origin, but was silent on the foreign-born Republicans who support him, since the countries they came from were predominantly white.
But really what Donald Trump has done is draw attention to his historic hypocrisy, his callous cruelty — when his own family faced deportation and his grandfather wrote a heart-wrenching letter describing the effects of the order demanding they leave Bavaria all the way back in 1905.
Americans are little more than bemused to find that Trump’s grandfather Friedrich wrote to the Prince Regent, Luitpold — it originally surfaced in Harper’s Magazine in March of 2017 — begging him to let his family stay, and intoning his pleas with a story of woe:
But we were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the High Royal State Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence in the Kingdom of Bavaria. We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.
Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a Bavarian citizen again.”
But more than 100 years later, Friedrich’s grandson would issue his own decree that would have kept his own family from entering the United States. Now, worse, because they are brown-skinned, the immigrants that Donald Trump has hardened his heart against are kept in cages, covered in their own filth, sleeping on the concrete floor as they await an uncertain fate.
Featured image via screen capture
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