In this week where Christians the world over celebrate Jesus as “the resurrection and the life,” the Trump administration is trying to make people who are alive appear dead.
Is there any end to the lengths the Trump administration will go in absurd and illegal moves?
Whether it’s ICE making legal immigrants disappear, Elon Musk taking his proverbial “chainsaw” to federal employees or Trump demeaning practically everyone, as Adam Serwer said in 2018, “Cruelty is the point.”
That is certainly the case with the 6,100 legal immigrants Trump’s Social Security Administration has declared dead in order to wrongly cut them off from their own money and scare them into leaving America.
Greg Pearre
In case you missed the story, Trump officials overrode the staff of the Social Security Administration to change the status of these tax-paying immigrants from “alive” to dead” even though they remain very much alive.
Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, objected to the administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. Pearre clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk.
Pearre told Coulter the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead. But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees.
Scott Coulter
Soon thereafter, security guards appeared in Pearre’s office and told him it was time to leave. They escorted him out of the building.
Musk and the Department of Homeland Security cooked up this brew as a ploy to force immigrants to leave the country.
Tom Homan, ICE director, helped birth this plot from hell. Already falling behind the goal of deporting 11 million immigrants as Trump promised on the campaign trail, Homan and his agents have been making mistakes. They have disappeared people who are in the country legally. They have deported university students and arrested university professors. They refuse to admit when they arrest the wrong people.
This is a form of cruelty usually reserved for nations in the kingdom of darkness such as Russia and Hungary. Anyone who has followed Trump’s saga knows cruelty always has been his constant companion. Whether these immigrants are legal or not matters little. This is an accelerated level of cruelty compared even to Trump’s first administration.
The idea of an agency of the federal government grasping the power of life and death goes beyond rational thought. Here we enter the domain of the cosmic war between good and evil, light and dark, life and death. Surely, these goons haven’t stolen the Book of Life from the throne room of God.
It is ironic that earlier, Elon Musk claimed “millions of dead people” were cashing Social Security checks. Musk posted on X, “Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as ‘ALIVE’ when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem.”
“This is an administration incapable of knowing the dead from the living.”
That was a lie too. But now he’s strangely content with marking people as “DEAD” when they are definitely alive.
This is an administration incapable of knowing the dead from the living.
In the Apostles’ Creed, Christians affirm Jesus is coming again to “judge the living and the dead.” The Trump administration doesn’t have the authority to make such judgments.
An extra level of irony attaches to this spectacle as this is Holy Week, the most important week in the Christian year. Even now, Christians prepare to celebrate the truth of 1 Corinthians 15:52, that in Christ, all are made alive.
The people doing this, the people supporting it, claim not only to be Christian but wrongly believe America was founded as a “Christian nation.” They also believe Trump was “anointed by God” and spared from an assassin’s bullet for such a time as this.
Yet because of Trump and his allies, immigrants fear for their lives. Trump and his cronies seem oblivious to the reality that all things have been put under the dominion of the one who was dead but is alive again and has the keys to death and hell. And that is not Donald Trump.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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