“People are disappearing into this no man’s land. They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights.” —Immigration rights attorney Alma David, quoted in The New York Times
“Terrible things are happening outside… poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” — Anne Frank diary entry January 13, 1943
Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.”
Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins with the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.
The Trump regime’s treatment of Roberto Mosquera, profiled at length in the New York Times by Nicholas Casey, shows just how far down this terrible road we’ve already traveled.
Mosquera has been held for a year without trial or legal due process in a maximum security prison in the tiny landlocked southern African country most people have never heard of, Eswatini, one of the world’s few remaining pure kingdoms that was formerly known as Swaziland. The 59-year-old father of four is slowly going blind from untreated glaucoma, and apparently will be held there for the rest of his life.
He first came to America at the age of 12 as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba. He fell in with a local Hispanic gang and ended up being accused of shooting a member of a different gang in the leg (he insists he didn’t do it and wasn’t there at the time). He served his time in an American prison and, when he got out, reinvented his life.
He became a born-again Christian, got married and had four American citizen daughters, and became a plumber, rising through the ranks to foreman. The Times quoted his former boss as saying he’d turned his life around and:
“He wasn’t just a hard worker; he inspired the guys around him,” he said.
He was also in the United States legally (in part because Cuba isn’t accepting deportees), and checked in with the feds every year to renew his work permit. The last time he showed up, however, he was told his permit was being withdrawn and he was seized and taken through a series of brutal detention facilities and eventually put on a plane to Africa, a continent he’d never visited. As the Times notes:
“That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.”
In other words, we’re watching the creation of human beings who can be pushed outside the normal protections of law, geography, community, and ultimately even public attention. Roberto has been “disappeared” by Trump and Miller and is now in prison for what may be the rest of his life, and this all happened without his ever having stood before a judge or jury.
Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were grounded in the idea that all humans are born with human rights, even though it took this nation centuries to get seriously close to living by its own creed.
Instead of referring to “citizens,” the Constitution repeatedly mentions “persons,” a word that encompasses all humans. Consider, for example, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, part of the Bill of Rights:
4th Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
5th Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” (emphasis added)
These, in part, constitute what’s called due process, which is repeated in the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Most of the tens of thousands of people ICE is now holding in its custody or who have been deported are there without ever having stood before an actual Article 3 judge. Their rights are being ignored.
The process the Trump regime is now pursuing is to obliterate what Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt called, “The right to have rights.” In Chapter 9 (“The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”) of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she elaborated on what happened when the butchers, bakers, and shopkeepers got jobs in the Nazi detention camps:
“The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”
She realized that the gravest crisis of human rights is grounded in a government arguing, in its behavior, that some humans aren’t fully human and therefore aren’t entitled to basic human rights. A stateless person herself for 18 years, this idea of governments denying the basic humanity of less-favored groups was at the core of much of her writing.
With Roberto Mosquera and the thousands of others Trump and Miller are paying millions of our taxpayer dollars to foreign prisons to hold until they die, we’re watching play out here in America that very transition from a decent, rights-respecting government into a rogue and lawless regime.
We’ve danced with this before, of course. The entire history of the institution of slavery was grounded in the proclamation of the southern states that Black people weren’t fully human. More recently, George W. Bush humiliated America on the world stage by sanctioning torture and murder in Abu Ghraib and other foreign prisons and black sites, along with its assertion that Gitmo was beyond the reach of American human rights law or the US Constitution.
But this is a modern, whole-of-government approach to dehumanizing nonwhite people in the name of immigration enforcement, with a hundred-billion-dollar budget. And now ICE is buying electric shock gloves for themselves, to ratchet up the brutality.
Republicans in Congress funded, and the Trump regime has built, a massive machine to Make America White Again, considerations of “woke” concepts like rights be damned. And it’s growing and becoming more hostile to average Americans and their concerns by the day.
Nobody in a democratic republic should have the power to make people disappear. It’s antithetical to the very idea of our form of government.
When this regime has been relegated to the dustbin of history, we’ll have a hell of a big job reestablishing this country’s once-vaunted embrace of human rights. There will have to be either full-on trials or something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
We should be doing the planning now.
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