Are We Safe Yet? Or Ashamed?

By Roy S. Johnson

This is an opinion article.

Protect.

We hear that word a lot.

Public safety.

We hear that a lot, too.

Donald Trump’s mass deportations are for our own red, white and blue — not brown — good, we are told. His promise of the most massive deportations in “world history” is to protect us. It’s for our safety.

That’s what they say.

Burly, hooded, I mean, masked ICE agents are infiltrating (terrorizing) communities nationwide for us.

They’re ambushing men and women at their jobs, in their cars, inside federal buildings, at shopping centers — places where you and I are safe. Where all should be safe, unless you’re brown. Unless your English isn’t quite perfect.

It’s okay, we’re told. It’s for us. To protect us. For our safety.

Weaponizing our military — respected men and women highly trained to defend us against foreign incursion — and unleashing them on Americans exercising their constitutional right to gather and protest.

It’s okay. It’s to protect us.

From whom?

From Adriana’s mother? She was ICE’d recently outside the agency’s office in Homewood after driving from Russellville to attend what she thought was a regularly scheduled meeting, something she’d done faithfully since moving to the U.S. eight years ago. Instead, she was stung, as were as many as seven people there that day, according to immigration advocates.

“It was people who have been checking in, who’ve been following the law, that have been doing everything they’re supposed to be doing to maintain their case,” said Allison Hamilton, executive director of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice.

Adrianna said immigration officials gave her mother “false hope.”

“She would have preferred if they would have just told her, ‘We can’t do anything about your case, just take your stuff and go.’”

Do you feel safer now that her mother is gone?

Are we being protected from the construction workers who got ICE’d this month after leaving a D.R. Horton home building site in Montgomery?

Or from Leonardo García Venegas, an American citizen? He was on a construction site in Foley attempting to video ICE agents detaining a fellow worker. He told Telemundo that agents knocked the phone out of his hand, then would not believe his Real ID was real. “They told me it was fake. Said it wasn’t valid and that it was fake. My ID,” he said. “They handcuffed me and they handcuffed me really tight.” Hours later, the Florida-born Venegas was released.

Are we safe from the farm worker chased through crops in Oxnard, California, presumably by federal agents?

From people being tearfully yanked from spouses and families across the nation, ICE’d in hallways outside immigration courts while attending routine hearings?

From the 28 allegedly undocumented migrants who were arrested after vans they were in were pulled over on the Dauphin Island Parkway in Mobile County for alleged traffic violations?

The county’s Sheriff’s office released a statement saying it “continues to work daily with our Federal Partners to protect our community by faithfully executing the immigration laws of the United States.”

Ah, to protect us.

Are we safe yet? Or is what we’re feeling in our gut actually shame?

Trump believes that if he says something enough times, no matter how absurdly incorrect or foul it may be, it’ll become fact. At least in the minds of steadfast loyalists, those who support him, no matter how absurd, illegal or immoral his actions and policies may be.

Deportations rid us of “criminals, rapists and murderers,” he’s declared more times than can be counted — and he’ll keep on declaring until we’re convinced of it. In fact, according to data compiled by The Washington Post, almost 1 in 4 people detained by ICE nationwide since Trump was inaugurated in January have no criminal conviction or pending criminal cases.

Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which compiles immigration figures, estimates that as of the end of May, about 44% of the 51,302 people in ICE detention facilities had no criminal record other than a lack of immigration documentation.

As of late, Trump’s clear order was to ratchet up detainee numbers in a pitiful attempt to fulfill an unattainable campaign promise.

To keep score rather than keep us safe.

“Since President Trump assumed office last January, the primary emphasis has been on increasing immigration civil arrests and removals,” writes the group at Syracuse. “These levels have not met this administration’s targets.”

Yet they have met resistance. Good and necessary resistance.

“No Kings” rallies scheduled for Saturday in Alabama and throughout the U.S. are clear evidence of our growing disdain for the daily images showing the heartless treatment of migrants.

Images that make many of us squirm.

Resistance, too, from business leaders whose industries would inevitably be squeezed by a mass deportation. Industries already seeing workers staying home out of fear.

Resistance that finally made Trump bow to a truth he surprisingly acknowledged Thursday in a social media post, vowing policy changes (don’t believe it, of course) after admitting his deportations are hurting the farming and hospitality industries.

That they’re not safe.

They’re not for our good. Nor are they protecting us.

Indeed, the people vowing to protect us from people who have no protection are the ones we truly need to be protected from.