Donald Trump isn’t even in office yet and there’s already political flak between his intended “border czar” and the mayors of Denver and Boston over Trump’s plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants.
Paul Homan warned the mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, “to get the hell out of the way.”
Maybe the border czar needs to meet with Boston hero David “Big Papi” Ortiz. On April 20, 2013, Ortiz delivered an impromptu address in a pre-game ceremony honoring the Boston Marathon bombing heroes. Here is what he said: “This jersey that we wear today, it doesn’t say Red Sox. It says Boston. We want to thank you …. for the great job they did this past week. This is our f’ing city and nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”
Ah, Boston what a great place for the center of dissent!
Rodney Kennedy
This is where we threw the king’s tea into the sea and said, “This is our country.” Americans have low tolerance for kings, tyrants and dictators. And we will not take kindly to an administration kicking out 11 million people who came here looking for freedom and opportunity.
In Denver, Mayor Mike Johnston pledged to go to prison to resist the deportation of illegal immigrants from his city. Homan responded: “Me and the Denver mayor agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, and I’m willing to put him in jail.”
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky decided to join the jousting.
“I would say that the mayor of Denver, if he’s going to resist federal law — which, there’s a long-standing history of the supremacy of federal law — he’s going to resist that, it will go all the way to the Supreme Court,” Paul predicted. “So, I think the mayor of Denver is on the wrong side of history and, really, I think will face legal ramifications if he doesn’t obey the federal law.”
Did he say prison?
Johnston’s announcement of his willingness to go to jail awakened my Baptist pride. Prison was a typical mailing address for Baptist preachers when we first started spreading “Baptist ways.” I recommend Sen. Paul read Baptist Ways: A Historyby Bill Leonard, a professor who spent 17 years at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., before facing his own exile at the hands of a renegade crowd of populist theologians who managed to gain control of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Thomas Helwys
Not all Baptists are “hand tamed by the gentry.”
Thomas Helwys defied King James of England. The king threw Helwys in Newgate Prison.
John Bunyan spent 16 years in prison for refusing to stop preaching. He used his incarceration to write his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and Pilgrim’s Progress.
In 1651, Baptist preacher Obadiah Holmes was jailed and then given 30 lashes
Did he say legal?
Get an old-fashioned stamp with the letters LEGAL. Each time a legal act turns lethal, press the stamp on the documents. You will soon need to replenish the ink supply on the stamp.
“Americans have been deceived into believing immigrants are the enemy, the cause of all that makes us unstable and keeps America from being great again.”
Hiding behind the words “legal” and “illegal immigrants” are a host of monstrous generalizations, staggering lies and horrible fears. Americans have been deceived into believing immigrants are the enemy, the cause of all that makes us unstable and keeps America from being great again. The fantasy sold by Trump is his promise to make us all safe. He shows people a world they wish existed, a world in which evil is manageable, but it is a big lie.
Even if all the immigrants are deported, the murder rate in America will not decrease. The vast assertion and mighty lie about immigrants has put our critical thinking out of action. It is nothing but wish fulfillment. When the immigrants are gone, there will be still be the Americans — the racist, sexist, homophobic, fundamentalist, disjointed, libertine, promiscuous, dim-witted, short-sighted, lacking in vision Americans.
Fear those who have the power to co-opt the word “legal” as a means of legitimating unspeakable acts of violence. And if they come for the immigrants, how long will it be before they come for the professors, the liberals and the preachers?
“Trail of Tears,” by Brummett Echohawk, 1957. Gilcrease Museum.
Did he say history?
That a member of the United States Senate would seem not to know our history of injustice raises questions about his training in American history. Paul attended Baylor and Duke — two institutions with outstanding history departments. He can’t blame his historical blindness on his professors.
This is History 101. But Paul seems to have missed the lectures on human rights abuses in his basic history course. I fear he was not adequately taught the politics of human rights, which is crucial to understand if we are to follow the justice of the prophets and Jesus.
“Paul seems to have missed the lectures on human rights abuses in his basic history course.”
There is too much historical evidence the government of the United States has at times authorized appalling abuse, even murder, of women, Native Americans, slaves, colonized peoples, homosexuals. American historians have done a thorough job of giving voice to the powerless, the voiceless, and the faceless. Now there are far more accurate pictures of how we have demeaned, imprisoned, enslaved and exterminated other people.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was legally used for ethnic cleansing through forced removal of 60,000 Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. Known as the Trail of Tears, this event screams injustice. Fifteen thousand died on the Trail of Tears.
In 1860, Americans legally owned 3.9 million slaves. There was no shortage of senators and representatives willing to defend the law of slavery in the 19th century. This is our story — the story of the long, dark night of captivity of an entire race. And it was followed by a system we call sharecropping that ensnared generations of poor Blacks and whites in something very much like slavery. The only benefit to poor whites was the illusion of saying, “At least I’m not Black.”
Lynching memorial
After the Civil War, white men from the North and white men from the South carved out a legal deal, a story told by historian David W. Blight in Race and Reunion, to reinstate the Southern states to the union on the basis of taking away the hard-earned fruits of war — freedom for slaves and the right to vote — and replacing them with Jim Crow, the KKK and a reign of murderous terror.
Nothing stains American history like the lynching era (1880 to 1940). As James Cone puts it, “The lynching tree is the most potent symbol of the trouble nobody knows that Blacks have seen but do not talk about because the pain of remembering — visions of Black bodies dangling from Southern trees, surrounded by jeering white mobs — is almost too excruciating to recall.”
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 enabling the forced incarceration of about 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority American citizens.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s legal “Wetback Project” (racist language typical in the 1950s) deported more than 1 million immigrants. Again, this was a “legal” enactment of federal law.
An FBI photo of Fannie Lou Hamer after she was beaten in jail.
And there’s the account of Fannie Lou Hamer in historian Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. Hamer and fellow Civil Rights workers were “legally” beaten in the Winona, Miss., jail.
Payne reports: “Guards had taken turns beating June with nightsticks and a leather strap. She lost consciousness twice and had to be carried back to her cell. When Mrs. Hamer’s turn came, the guards, perhaps tired by this time, had her lie face down on a bunk and ordered two Black prisoners to beat her with a studded leather strap until she couldn’t get up.”
Can we say death?
What is legal can turn lethal. The deportation of 11 million migrants condemns them to a life of poverty, unemployment and, in many cases, death. Those who sentence others to exile or deportation should know the dire consequences the deported will face. Sarah Stillman, in an audio presentation for The New Yorker, says, “Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. may face violence and murder in their home countries.”
“Those who sentence others to exile or deportation should know the dire consequences the deported will face.”
And we should consider the death that will occur in the American dream, consciousness and integrity. In a nation in the grip of Trumpian tropes of “sad passions,” we have unleashed a wave of cruelty, hate, fear and anger. What we fail to see is that living life only as a reaction to the existence of others is a kind of death-in-life. Shannon Sullivan argues that the “sad passions” — living merely by opposition to or in reaction to others — is a form of death.
Trapped as America is in this melancholy, this longing for a lost golden age, and promised by the fake savior who plasters everything in gold gilding, that we will be great again, we are left only with the sadness of what our melancholy interprets as loss, as if we once possessed and then lost a perfect age void of immigrants. The current mood mourns a loss that is a lack. Hence, we are left only with melancholy, a lack displayed as a great anger at others.
The “legal” deportation of migrants isn’t being orchestrated by army generals loading trains and sending people to gas chambers, but the officials and their supporters are sending and sentencing migrants to death. And the ICE man, Tom Homan, swears he didn’t sign the order, he’s merely carrying it out. The parallels to the whining testimony of Nazi generals at the Nuremberg Trials make my blood boil.
Yet plans are in place to deport fellow human beings — mothers, fathers, children — on what amounts to a lethal death march.
Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric of “criminals,” “murderers” and “rapists.” Vegetable gatherers, fruit pickers, roofers, brick layers, landscape workers will be ripped from their homes in the name of the angry god of melancholy. What’s legal “turns justice to wormwood,” says Amos 5:7.
Hiding behind “legal” raises questions from God, according to Amos 6:12: “Do horses run on rocky crags? Does one plow the sea with oxen? But you have turned justice into poison and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood.”
Sen. Paul is wrong. The right wing is on the wrong side of justice and history. The mayor of Denver is on the right side of justice and history.
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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