Are we a free people anymore? We were told ICE would begin seizing illegal immigrants who were convicted criminals, MS-13 members, drug dealers, murderers, human traffickers and people of that ilk. We wondered how there could be 12 million such people who needed to be deported as Trump claimed during his campaign. Maybe these were some of the illegal immigrants who were eating the dogs and cats of the residents in Springfield, Ohio.
Now, we are witnessing immigrant farm workers, students, factory workers and assorted individuals without criminal records of any kind, being arbitrarily arrested by masked operatives and removed to foreign prisons without charges and no means of family or legal protective help.
Now, cities that don’t demonstrate active assistance in these arbitrary ICE arrests are being threatened with withholding federal funding. City and state authorities are being put in the position of aiding and abetting the arbitrary arrests and deportation of innocent individuals as if these people are slaves. We’ve seen large numbers of men chained, hands and feet and sent to prisons with no civil or human rights assured. Thus, local authorities are being dragged into these unlawful acts of US government fascist authoritarianism.
Even as horrified wives and mothers protest the unproven charges against their sons and husbands, families are being broken up and administration officers are having to acknowledge that many detainees are no more dangerous convicted criminals than the masked ICE agents themselves. At least some of these government agents are themselves convicted criminals in the January 6th assault on the US Capitol. Certainly, few if any of these illegal immigrants have been convicted of 34 felony counts and assault against a woman.
Yet our Republican Party senators and representatives are silent on these vile, arbitrary assaults on individuals. Conservative Republican journalists ignore the subject as if its routine in American society.
If the old adage that “If one of us isn’t free, then none of us are free” is true, then we are already living at the start of a fascist, authoritarian state. If any government agent(s) can arrest anyone off the street without legal representation simply because of their color or foreign language, America has fallen back into the pre-Civil War era. ICE agents are the equivalent of slave catchers who used the Fugitive Slave Act to demand the assistance of otherwise unwilling individuals and groups. If you don’t aid and abet, you are also guilty.
Until this cancer on the face of America is removed, none of us is truly free. We are no longer a country of free men and women. America is descending into an enemy of world democracy, willing to abandon Ukraine and our European allies. Trump initiated a devastating worldwide trade war with huge tariffs. Our federal deficit is likely to balloon by $3-4 trillion with massive tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of the population. We have threatened to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal and control the Gaza Strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East”. Millions of average Americans will lose their Medicaid and Medicare benefits. Social Security is on the chopping block and that loss will devastate many millions of highly vulnerable Americans of that into which we have already paid.
The Republican-controlled Congress aids and abets Trump along with the Supreme Court as part of the Bill of Goods known as Project 2025, aimed at the dissolution of American democracy into an oligarchy.
When I think about those American soldiers’ graves at Normandy and other locations around Europe and Asia, it sickens me to think so many abased, deluded Americans would support Trump under these circumstances. Worse yet, the Republican legislators who ignore their oaths of office to defend the US Constitution and the Supreme Court majority who hand a convicted felon like Trump the legal power to break the law in pursuit of their mutual philosophical goals, are unworthy. They have abandoned the very thing all those good men suffered and died to preserve.
They support this scoundrel of a man so he can place a massively larger portion of our country’s wealth in the hands of a few. Now he can arrest and deport virtually anyone at will. Are we a free people anymore?
Somehow, the 4th of July has a very different feel in 2025.
Dominic Terrone
Oxford
Agree. We are in trouble!
I feel like a veteran without a country! We all need to be strong enough to look truth in the face and admit what we now see isn’t America as the framers intended. It certainly isn’t America as even Reagan saw it. If the Constitution doesn’t rule, anarchy does. Our standing across the world will continue to fall further into the depths of whatever greed, graft and lies can create. No country can ever be great where truth is ignored and only hate prevails. America will never be great again in my lifetime. We are no longer the free-thinking, standards-enforcing Americans who saved the world in 1945. We are no longer who the original patriots envisioned and it is tragic. Ben Franklin was right. Keeping democracy was too hard, especially when you stop caring. I have been to sheep-herding trials. When God said the He was the Shepherd and we were the sheep, it was not a compliment. We have now lived down to expectations. There is no one in the world who is coming to save us, because too many “Americans” are too cowardly to try to save ourselves.