Love that is complicit

In this week’s podcast episode, I talk about the ways in which a sea change is underway in the country due to the countless actions everyday people are taking on the ground. Public opinion is shifting, forcing even Republicans to respond to their constituents. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of reforms and what they can and can’t do. Which has also led me to think about going to visit my mother on the dementia ward. When she realizes I’ve come to see her (or if she forgot I was there and then realizes it again), she often says, “I love you,” emphasizing each word. She has good days and bad days. On the worse days, it might be the only coherent sentence she says.

Growing up, I never once doubted my mother loved me. I knew it the way I knew I was left-handed. I was a child whose mother loved her, and loves her still.

Imagine my confusion when she married a man who humiliated and beat me with a belt. At first, I assumed she might do something about it. But it went on year after year, and I understood that I lived in a world in which she still loved me deeply, but she would do nothing to protect me.

It wasn’t until long after I left home that I understood that she was scared—not of being hit herself, because he never hit her. But she was a wreck from her vast and unquenchable fear of being abandoned. Her mother had left her to be raised by her grandmother, and she would never get over it. She would countenance almost anything—even harm to her children, whom she loved so much—to avoid the risk of that.

Later, though she thought of him as an evil man—a literal demon—she would claim that she’d never known that my stepfather hit my brother or me at all. We told her that if she didn’t know, it was because she hadn’t wanted to know. It was a choice.

I think about all this often because now we see people across the country who claim to love their neighbors and worship a messiah who told them specifically, “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me.” And yet they’ve accepted the idea that their neighbors who were not born in the U.S. should be violently pulled from their homes and their lives here.

They’re looking the other way while tens of thousands are sitting in camps, and others are being removed from the U.S. altogether, sometimes to places where they’ve never lived and don’t know the language. In some cases, the government has rendered immigrants to horrific detention in other countries.

How do people square that abuse? Some Trump supporters enthusiastically embrace his racism and are pleased their president is championing the cause of ethnic cleansing. Others who aren’t deeply committed to racism have instead accommodated themselves to a cruel and violent system that punishes immigrants even as it depends heavily on those same people to take care of children and old people nationwide, or to serve food, clean offices, and build homes.

But what had been possible to ignore before Trump’s return—what had been possible not to see if you didn’t want to see it—has now been made obvious and unavoidable. Before, Americans could just let themselves be scared of immigrants and be pleased with imagining the government out there protecting them from some vague threat. (This even though the rate of Border Patrol officer criminality is higher, as noted by journalist Garrett Graff, than the per capita rate of immigrant criminality.)

Now, however, with the brutality we’re seeing widespread in the streets, people have to actively commit to delusional thinking in order to not understand what’s taking place. Thus, we see the New York Times publishing a story yesterday on Katie Britt, the hand-wringing U.S. Senator from Alabama who says that she can’t stop thinking about Liam Conejo Ramos, the little boy in the blue knit hat who was sent to Dilley detention center, where he was reported as feverish and vomiting. People are coming to realize they have to reckon with reality.

Yet Senator Britt also wrote a letter to a constituent yesterday, the same day that the Times story ran, saying that despite the killing of Renee Good, her “support for law enforcement remains unwavering.” She further condemned “criminal illegal aliens” and those who give them “a safe haven at the expense of the safety and security of American citizens and our communities.”

It’s not unreasonable to conclude that Senator Britt is a grifter who wants to seem human to her constituents even as she doesn’t care about the fate of the most vulnerable among us. But based on my childhood and my mother, I think it’s entirely possible that Senator Britt is actually haunted by Liam.

She’s sold herself to a system that’s asked her to surrender her agency, that’s asked her not to see certain things. And she’s doing her best not to, because she knows that if she breaks that covenant, she’ll be on the outside of what she sold her soul to access. Like my mother, she’ll be abandoned—a painful prospect.

Still, all this noise and all these people calling attention to the increasing violence against U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike are harder and harder to ignore. If Senator Britt actually cares, she should be condemning the Department of Homeland Security rapidly moving up the asylum hearing for Liam and his father to today, attempting to expedite their case preemptively, perhaps revenge on the judge who ordered their release.

I haven’t yet seen her do that. My mother’s chosen blindness was so profound. I suspect Senator Britt will likewise find a way to continue not to take any meaningful action to protect a child she might actually care about. I hope I’m wrong.

In either case, most Americans don’t profit so directly from the misery of Liam and children like him. Confronted with the undeniable facts on the ground, more and more are becoming appalled. Polling on immigration and enforcement tactics has shifted enormously in ways that might open a door to stepping away from the police state we have now—one which began to take root long before I was even born.

And while targeted rebukes and Congressional pressure might hem in the public excesses for a time, the harm itself can’t be meaningfully reformed. If I had been hit fewer times with a belt during each beating as a child, if I had faced ritualized sessions of psychological terror that had been shorter in duration, I surely would have been grateful in that instance. But the relations themselves were the issue. Everything in my home growing up was geared to allow the person in power to do violence to those who had no way to protect themselves and lacked a means to demand accountability.

You can no more slap a few reforms on our current system of immigration enforcement than you can create a safe structure for child abuse. You can’t tidy up a mission in which harm is the core principle.

Yet I still see and hear the strangest lines coming from intelligent humans. Probably a dozen people have told me in the last year that something had to be done, because under Biden, there were open borders. But the fact is that in fiscal year 2024, Biden’s last full year in office, “DHS completed roughly 700,000 removals and returns, more than any prior fiscal year since 2010.” Overall, deportations were higher under Biden than Trump in his first term, though the number of people arriving at the border surged to numbers not seen under Trump or Obama, and the Biden administration did not keep up with those new, higher levels.

The reality of whether enforcement was happening at the border didn’t matter in terms of the election. And I’m not here to defend Biden or Obama on the border in any way. I disagreed with their immigration policies, too. My point is that with different priorities and different challenges, Biden and Obama both had higher levels of deportations than Trump did during his first administration. But the voting public refused to see it.

And the reason was because the political debates over border enforcement aren’t actually aimed at border security. Elected officials’ intent is to promise to punish undocumented people sufficiently to produce a desired political effect among voters.

Up until Trump, Americans have been trained to want a Goldilocks amount of cruelty on immigration—enough that the public can be frightened about the threat, and then made to feel safe. And the parties have differed about what that level is. But there’s no Goldilocks amount of cruelty that’s reasonable to inject. It’s a sick cycle.

Even if you don’t care about Liam or his father at all—and I honestly believe that most Americans do care—there are self-serving reasons people shouldn’t avoid the reality of today’s news. Each of us and our families are also at risk.

A country that allows vast systems build on cruelty cannot, in the end, be reliably controlled. The history of the rise of authoritarians shows that these systems come for more and more people in the long run. In the end, Renee Good and Alex Pretti will always be shot.

But it’s getting harder and harder for the people who have tried to smother their compassion to not see what’s unfolding all around us. For my mother, it’s too late. But for the rest of us, this moment is a tremendous opportunity that we should use to change the fundamental dynamic of what we accept—and what we demand—from our political leaders.

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