Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

You may remember how furious I was when the regime of Orange Judas started deporting veterans, and how even more furious I was when it started to deport active duty military, both of which groups had signed up in good faith to help in ways that there simply were not enough citizens qualified to do (such as language skills), and whose honorable actions were a compelling case for them to be granted citizenship. If you do, imagine how furious I am now that it has started to DEPORT CITIZENS.

The State Department is calling into question the legal status of Latinx citizens along the southern border based on the claim that “there has been a significant incidence of citizenship fraud” in the region, though there is evidence of no more than a handful of cases. In 2009, the government seemed to have settled the matter in court with the ACLU before Trump’s State Department recently resurrected this xenophobic conspiracy theory. As a result, Latinx citizens residing near the southern border have been denied passports, prevented from re-entering the country without warning, detained in immigration camps and scheduled for deportation proceedings.

For years right-wing pundits have harped upon the importance of coming to the United States legally — “doing it the right way.” But if they mean what they say, then how can they support the denial of citizenship to documented Latinxs who were born in the US? If the hackneyed reactionary refrain that anti-immigrant policies are about legality rather than racism is true, then why is the Trump administration planning to make it harder for legal immigrants to obtain green cards and citizenship? 

Not, perhaps, surprisingly, U. S. citizens attempting to use valid passports are also being affected. From the Washington Post, quoted at Daily Kos,

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings. In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States. As the Trump administration attempts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, the government’s treatment of passport applicants in South Texas shows how U.S. citizens are increasingly being swept up by immigration enforcement agencies. 

This is short, today, but I see no point in piling stories on stories, or ranting about how this was here all the time; it was behind all the furor about Barack Obama’s citizenship, and we should have looked closer at how seriously they were taking that, and if we had, we might have seen sooner exactly how huge the enemy was and is that we have to fight.  (But maybe we should have.)

Mark Bray, writing in Truthout, makes an interesting case that it’s difficult to fight this kind of thing by attacking it as breaking the law, because the word “law” doesn’t mean to fascists what it does to sane people. They believe they are defending a “natural law” which is higher than artificial laws enacted by “paper-pushers.” I think we’ve seen this same attitude in “evangelical Christians” – the ones who, among other things, shoot up women’s health clinics and murder doctors. But, in the United States, in our lifetimes, we have not seen it so blatantly expressed by people who are already in government. The closest my memory can come to that is Nixon’s “if the President does it, it’s not a crime.” Shocking as that was, maybe we didn’t listen deeply enough to it.

Alecto, Magaera, Tisiphone, I have to tell you that Puerto Ricans have already called upon Chupacabra, but, unfortunately, he has been unable t gag Orange Judas down. So now I’d like you to run down to Mexico (you may not have to go all the way as there have been some sightings in New Mexico, although not recently) and look up La Llorona. If she can be brought to understand that [a] despite his over-six-foot height, Donald J. Trump has the mind and the emotional maturity of a two-year-old, and is therefore actually a child, and that [b] the Potomac is lovely this time of year, perhaps she can be persuaded to help us.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.