(Washington Insider Magazine) -During the previous Presidential administration of Donald Trump, I wrote about a horrific claim that came from a nurse whistleblower in Georgia, who said that young immigrant girls were having forced hysterectomies performed upon them in ICE detention centers. I took that opportunity to lament the horrific, historical dimensions of this claim, which has its roots in racism, eugenics, and the like; it was particularly surreal because those types of disgusting, crimes against humanity, were being perpetrated by the American government, an alleged global force against that type of barbarism. Yet the Trump administration, to be sure, was quite cruel and apathetic towards the plight of the immigrant and asylum seeker, whether from the middle east or eastern Asia, to the Caribbean, Central or South America, perhaps more cruel than even Trump’s Presidential predecessors were.
Much of the disgust around the barbarism of the previous administration, alongside their careless handling of the country, its people, and the economy during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, helped the tide to turn in favor of his eventual Democratic successor, Joe Biden. Biden, a former longtime Senator from Delaware and Vice President under Barack Obama, ran as a return to the timbre of former President’s in many ways, while also fancying himself as a “transition” President, or someone who would bridge the gap between the old generation that has run Washington for so long, and the newer generations, who have grown weary of waiting to assume power themselves.
While in some ways, the President may very well be a transition President of sorts, he, in other ways, is just as out of touch with the timbre of the young people of this nation as the previous President was. When pictures began circulating the internet that showed a border agent on horseback, with a whip-like-implement in his hand, terrorizing Haitian refugees who were being held in Del Rio, Texas as they waited to apply for asylum, America exploded in outrage at this atrocious human rights violation; that the administration condemned it all immediately, did little to quell the feelings around the affair. Around this same time, someone on Twitter rightly asked the very reasonable question, “Why does the U.S. Border Patrol own even ONE (1) whip?”
Immigrating to the United States of America, and the Southern Border Patrol: Unpleasant and Difficult by Design
It is certainly a reasonable and moral question to ask, and one that, to my knowledge, has yet to have been met with a reasonable, morally justifiable response to date. Why does the US Border Patrol have a whip, whether they’re on horseback or not? Why does the US Border Patrol posture and portray itself in such a manner in the first instance? For, after all, the crime for which these people are being harassed over, is nothing but a simple misdemeanor in American courtrooms; the violent suppression of the free movement of those humans in need, and indeed, the brutal mutilation of humans in the care of allegedly responsible governments, is without question, infinitely more felonious and despicable than attempting to save your family from a life of violence, despair, poverty and suffering.
The apathy of American citizens and their government to these injustices should be appalling to all people, and would shame those ancestors of most Americans who came to this nation with no money, no English, no hope in their ancestral homelands, and infinite and eternal hope in and for their new homeland. The stories of barbarism, perpetrated by American border agents, in which children, young women, and mothers, as well as their husbands and sons, have been abused or violated in some manner, do not align themselves with the very spirit of this nation, or those beautiful, brilliant words attached to the great plinth of which the Statue of Liberty stands upon in New York Harbor.
As I wrote in a previous piece for this publication, which touches upon both the whip incident, as well as that famous Emma Lazarus poem in passing, these types of grotesque policies bring great dishonor to the United States and its already difficult, and short, imperfect history. The truth of the matter, however, is simply that this mindset and the associated behaviors and beliefs transcend one administration, and even one party of course. They exist within the fabric of the nation, its institutions, and the people themselves, and so cannot necessarily be legislated out by having different Presidential memos or policies passed or presented; this type of engrained feeling or concept can only be diminished or eliminated through compassion, education, and the passage of time and generations of Americans.
Yet we have wandered slightly away from answering the question that makes up the title of this piece. The United States Border Patrol has at least one whip in its arsenal, for the same reason that they keep any other weapon on hand; they believe that there could very well be a reasonable and rationalizable opportunity or excuse to use the weapon. This is common sense, as there would be no reason for the weapon to be there if there was not some anticipatory need for it within day-to-day operations, and no, I don’t believe it is meant to be used with and/or on the horse either. Plenty of horse people, including jockeys, get their horses to operate in the way they would like thanks to repetition, rapport, and respect for the animal, instead of this kind of coercion.
The irony that it is less reasonable to presume that the border agents were using the whip on horses, than on people, is certainly horrifying, to put it bluntly. Yet with the history of brutality against people who do not look, speak or act as American’s believe other American’s should, believing anything otherwise would qualify as willingly naive. When American border agents see young Haitian refugees, having recently fled a nation torn by earthquakes, political instability, poverty, and violence, it is damning of both the people involved, as well as the institution and greater government they serve, that these asylum-seeking refugees are looked at with disgust and distrust instead of sorrowful compassion and empathy; what makes those poor souls any different from the scared, starving or desperate American adults or children?
To be sure, there is little difference, other than their origin of birth, life experiences, and stories. They are the same people one sees when one walks down the way, except that they may look different, speak a different language, or may have dealt with some traumas that, while similar in how they make a person or peoples feel, are difficult, nigh impossible, to truly feel or understand in a real, relevant and meaningful manner oneself, unless one has gone through them oneself as well. With a whip in one hand, and nothing close to compassion in their hearts, are these the representatives of ourselves and our own morals, that we as Americans might choose to send out to help those poorest, most desperate of the world?
“He who allows oppression shares the crime.” – Desiderius Erasmus
Of course not. To think of sending someone with violent, apathetic intentions or predispositions where those suffering, needy humans are waiting for the possibility of relief and compassion is unthinkable and utterly barbarous. While it is not separating children from their families, taking out their reproductive organs, or splitting up fragile, thoroughly Americanized families, the spirit of the action is the same. While it is not Donald Trump lying and boasting and deflecting, it is a warmer face, with kinder, more articulate language, allowing for the same institutions to act in the same, inhuman ways, if to different degrees, as his predecessor, and even predecessors.
For while Donald Trump was always going to escalate the anti-immigration policies of the men that came before him, the men before him were generally pretty atrocious in regards to this as well. Men, women, and children were being kept in cages during the Obama administration, as well as under the Trump administration, where the practice was expanded upon and, to be sure, ICE as an agency did not even exist before George W Bush, drunk with power and a feeling of self-righteousness, created the agency in the midsts of both his battles against immigration and terrorism; for each President not named Trump, while the rhetoric all may have sounded kinder, it likely was not much kinder feeling for those who took, and continue to take, the brunt of these policies.
It was the many, varied and similar foreign policies that America maintained against nations, as well as the deportations from America of countless Americanized Latin and South Americans by those former administrations that helped to export gangs of American origin to countries in Central and South America, which had previously not known these particular groups; this helped to exacerbate internal, domestic issues that oftentimes already existed to some varying degree or degrees. While people are always moving around the world, and the United States has always expected immigration, the racial over and undertones of immigration reform, not only aimed at those coming from the southern hemisphere, but from the eastern hemisphere as well, have become as obvious over the last twenty years as they ever have been across the history of the country.
While legal immigration was curtailed to remarkably low levels under the Trump administration, and illegal immigration has been treated as though it is the equivalent to the Visigoths rushing into the decaying western Roman Empire, the truth regarding immigration is that, while reactionaries and racists are frightened that America might change in composition thanks to the influx of immigrants from these far-flung or exotic places, the composition of a nation is not ever fixed, but always changing, morphing and developing in different ways. Rome itself did not “fall” to “Barbarians” in the way that it is often portrayed by those conservative media figures, and indeed, assimilated others and became assimilated themselves over time, similar to the natives of the British Isle in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of 1066 AD.
The ethnic or racial makeup of the United States in 1800, to offer another example, was radically different than the composition of the nation by 1870, as it would’ve been by 1940, by 2010, and so on, and yet no subsequent generation could be called more or less “American” than any of the past or future. A person from 1800 might, were they able to, look at 2010 and proclaim that it looks or feels little like the America that they were accustomed to, and yet a person from 2010 going back to 1800, would likely proclaim the same thing, with about as much disgust in their voice as the ancestor from over 200 years ago. When confronted over whose America is more American, it is likely that both would voice their cases for why their era was the correct answer, while in reality, each would be equally as correct.
Our America of today is no less American than those Americas of the past, simply because it today has more, various types of Americans in it than before, while those Americas of the past are no less American than our America of today, simply because they were yet to house the Americans that were to come. It is not up to each American to judge the claim that an immigrant to the United States, new or old, old or young, has to consider themself an American, no matter if they just arrived across the border or ocean, or if their ancestors arrived, wherever they arrived to, voluntarily or otherwise, decades or even centuries ago; nearly all of our ancestors, at one time or another, were first-generation Americans too, after all. No, our duty as Americans, on the contrary, is to welcome and embrace these people, whomever they happen to be, and to make them feel and understand how important they are to us all, as fellow citizens and as contributing members of society.
Far from having whips in hand, these agents of the border should have blankets and food with them. They should be armed not with guns or implements of violence, but with immigration paperwork, a temporary ID and Social Security card, bus or train tickets to towns and cities that could use hard-working, humble, and kind new Americans, as well as a warm smile and embrace. America must not be threatened and scared by the suggestion of “freeloaders”, “drug dealers,” “criminals,” “rapists,” “bad hombres,” and “terrorists,” into isolating itself from the people and nations of the world, shutting itself off from the rest of humanity in the vain hope of saving some ever-ephemeral national ethnic, religious and racial composition for itself and its successors.
At the same time, if criminals and crime are the actual concern, then America must stop turning regular, desperate people into criminals, simply for wanting a better life, and must instead focus on the actual drug and human smugglers that do, most certainly, exist, but that make up an extremely small minority of the population attempting to enter the country and usually have super intense, elaborate operations for accomplishing their objectives. Furthermore, if America would actually like people to stop fleeing in droves to it, then America, instead of begging the utterly desperate not to make the journey up to it, needs to help and assist these nations, wherever they may be, in building, rebuilding, fixing, and/or securing themselves, not with American military violence or occupation, or private, capital-hungry contractors and subcontractors, but with the very people of those various and diverse nations.
To be sure, when this land was full of Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Dutchmen, having cheated and displaced the Natives and abused the Black people they had previously imported from Africa, it was those dastardly Irish who were, to that point, thought to be the greatest blight and lot of immigrants facing the nation. Indeed, the term “Paddywagon” exists because of how many Irish people they once used to haul away to the local lockups, before they themselves became the drivers in the decades to follow. After the Irish took their lumps and abuse, it was the Italians, Jews, and Eastern European’s who would be considered the next, biggest problems facing the country from abroad; this third wave of American immigration was a major catalyst for a movement to restrict immigration in a major way for the first time in the countries history, and by the early 1920s, 1924 specifically, the supporters of these types of restrictions would finally have their way.
The fourth wave of American immigration, the wave of which we currently find ourselves in the midst of since 1965, has seen remarkable hatred and disdain emerge from nativist opponents of immigration. These immigrants from the Caribbean, Central, and South America, as well as from the far and middle east regions of Asia, have been tarred with absolutely disgusting epithets, whether it be any of the aforementioned, those xenophobic remarks that might insinuate any number of things, including ties to “communism,” or even those tasteless and disturbing sentiments regarding the COVID-19 virus and its origins, the hatred of previous eras of American immigration continues to fester and exist in new, disgusting forms, inside the very same people whose ancestors once felt and overcame such cruel and unjust abuse from “older” Americans.
That none of these groups of people or waves of immigration have ever “destroyed” America, in some concrete or abstract sense, should be telling vis-a-vis the current fourth wave of American immigration from across the globe. They are no more untrustworthy, corrupt, criminal, lazy, stupid, or anything else, than any of the previous waves have been and in fact, have as much to give and contribute to the United States and its story as any other group or groups of people have previously. Each and every person and background adds to the ever-morphing and beautifully diverse culture of America, to its knowledge and experiences dealing with other issues and events, to its economic prosperity, its material wealth, and to the very spirit and essence that has always made the United States a place of hope, despite the horrors suffered here, and despite the struggles of so many different and unique peoples across its history.
A United States that greets these people of the world, desperate for a new start in the midst of horrific circumstances, with such brutality and apathy, is not worthy of the words attached to the Statue of Liberty, nor of the spirit embodied by the great, enormous bronze statue itself. When it says, as though with the very voice, and as the very embodiment of America itself, to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” these are not words of hyperbole. It was not, either historically or presently, alluding to something else, or anything else for that matter, other than the very spirit that a nation like France recognized as emanating out of America and its ethos itself. Yet in the final analysis, for anyone who knows both the story of Emma Lazarus, daughter of immigrants and writer of “The New Colossus” poem that adorns the plinth that Lady Liberty stands upon, as well as America in the larger, historical sense, it is only sad, but never surprising, to have to ask why the US Border Patrol even has a single whip in its possession to begin with.
