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Why mistreatment of immigrants undermines our democracy
While the news continued to be filled with images of immigrant children in cages at the U.S. border, I was with my family at Disney World. Disney World during a heat advisory is by no means the happiest place on earth, but it is hard to conceive the end of the world order while watching people from all over the world buying cotton candy together, united in their shared desire to wear headbands adorned with Mickey Mouse ears while eating mouse-shaped pretzels. Disney World in June in sweltering heat somehow gave an impression of racial, ethnic and religious harmony that stood in stark contrast to what we knew to be happening in Texas.
Terrible things are happening in our country, and yet daily life remains exceptionally normal. We may march in the streets on Saturday, but we go to church or the beach or a kids’ soccer match on Sunday. We share our angst and outrage on Facebook in the evening, but we get up in the morning and go to work and nothing has changed, nothing at all, in our routine. And so when we warn of the loss of democracy in this country, when we worry about the end of the rule of law here, between Sunday brunch and Monday’s commute and getting the kids off to summer camp, our concerns can be dismissed as a sort of mass delusion. Liberal paranoia. A fever dream.
I understand. The erosion of democracy is just that — erosion, like the slow pulling away of the beach by encroaching waves. Everything seems fundamentally the same as it did last month or last year, except to those who no longer have a secure place to stand.
And then, of course, there are the distractions — the next outrage, the next shock, the next unbelievable thing that the president said or did, all clamoring for the little of bit of attention that we can devote to the daily news. Trump walked in front of the Queen of England! Trump insulted our NATO allies, undermining a key cornerstone of our national defense! Trump held Melania’s hand in a crushing grip! The outrage is exhausting, continual, unrelenting, and even the most ardent spectators of political show have no time for all of it . . . but could we go back to the part about NATO?
Actually, let’s go back even further. Let’s go back to “outrage,” which includes, of course, the word “rage.” President Trump excels at rage. He is angry, angry, angry; he encourages anger; he cultivates it; he inspires it. This, too, is exhausting. But it is also destructive. Anger crowds out empathy, compassion, rational thought, fairness. As a country, our anger and divisiveness go way back. They are not a creation of the Trump presidency, but they are an energy source for it. As they have been, throughout history, for authoritarian regimes.
And history is all we have to work with as we try to make sense of the current political situation. We know what the rise of totalitarian power looked like in Germany in the 1930s. We know what it looked like in Italy with the rise of Mussolini. We know what the swing away from democracy looks like. The World Economic Forum maintains a list of countries that are losing their democracies, their freedoms, their civil rights, and a “Democracy Index” on which the United States has dropped from being a full democracy to a flawed democracy. Still a democracy. But flawed. The question is whether we have farther to fall.
We have not yet moved so far from the foundations of democracy that anyone pretends that the law does not matter. The immigration crisis is fundamentally a crisis of law. The law is being used as a weapon against immigrants — and not through the enforcement of the laws, as claimed, but through the abrogation of the protection of the laws in the name of enforcement. I am hearing from lawyers across the country that Customs and Border Protection officers are violating US immigration laws and asserting that their actions are at the direction of the Attorney General of the United States. If those claims are accurate, we no longer have a functioning Department of Justice. And that is devastating.
Most people don’t want to think about what our immigration laws require and what they permit. They think of the border as a line, or a wall, that cannot be crossed without express permission. But our immigration laws are not nearly so sharply drawn. And the right to seek asylum is both a legal right and a human right. For example, f you are standing on US soil at a point of entry, you have the right to apply for asylum. I find myself sharing actual laws, legal decisions, court filings, affidavits, trying to help people understand what is really happening and why it matters. It doesn’t help. Tl;dr. Too long; didn’t read. Some days I feel that way myself.
But it matters. For a country to be committed to the rule of law, those with law enforcement authority must follow the laws as they exist and not as they would like them to be. The country’s law enforcement officers — including prosecutors and judges —must operate consistently within the framework of the law and respect the law by telling the truth about what it requires. And their must be meaningful oversight, so that occasional rogue actors cannot undermine the whole.
Does it make us less a nation of laws if our president insists that immigrants should be denied due process of law? Quite possibly, especially if he expects federal employees to take actions in accordance with his words. Does it make us less a nation of laws when the attorney general orders border protection officers and federal prosecutors to refuse to process asylum claimants who have a legal right to make those claims, to take asylum seekers’ children from them as a deterrent and to convince asylum seekers that they must choose between moving forward with a legal claim for asylum and having their children returned to them? Unquestionably.
What is happening at the border appears to be a violation of our laws by those sworn to enforce them. In addition to being vicious, these actions make us less a nation of laws. And if we are not a nation of laws, it is unclear how long we will continue to be a democracy. �
