The Innocence Trap

This month, everyday Americans witnessed Renee Good and Alex Pretti being martyred in a wave of terror unleashed against immigrants. The country has clearly been moved by their deaths. And even the Trump administration seems to have been shaken by the public’s reaction so far, with Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino apparently being removed from Minneapolis (or worse) by his superiors. Americans across the board are realizing the significance of their murders, and it may well be a turning point in the attempt to stop the purges now underway.

Their public executions on the street were shocking in and of themselves, happening in a matter of minutes or even seconds. And the Minnesotans whose lives were lost weren’t even the first to be shot in recent weeks by ICE or Border Patrol. Keith Porter Jr, was killed on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles by an off-duty ICE officer.

Some reports suggest that Porter or those he was with that night had fired shots in the air in celebration (an unfortunate but common New Year’s Eve tradition). The agent claimed gunfire had been exchanged, but a lawyer for the family said that no evidence of this had been produced by the government.

While outrage did follow Porter’s death in Los Angeles, it didn’t rise to the same level of national reaction seen in the wake of the two officer killings in Minneapolis that have happened since. That might be because Porter was Black, as well as the lack of any video recording the officer shooting him.

His cousin, a Black Lives Matter activist, told the Guardian, “As an organizer, I never thought I would be standing here for one of my family members.” The family has asked for help to force accountability from the officer and deliver justice.

Porter, like Renee Good, was a parent. And stories about his death mentioned his help with kids in the foster system, and his work for a time as a aide to kids with special needs. When someone is killed by law enforcement of any kind, there’s often a rush to try to show that they were good enough people that they deserved not to be shot.

Tonight I want to address how these murders of those seen as “good” tend to galvanize the public against state violence in helpful ways, while also looking at why emphasizing the victims’ innocence can be a trap.

Innocent and guilty alike

When I wrote my global history of concentration camps, it was a heavy lift to stay immersed in so much violence and sorrow for so long. A key reason I decided to write that book, as unqualified as I felt, was because in the course of writing my prior book, I discovered that no one had written a comprehensive history of how and when concentration camps had come into the world and how the world had gotten to Auschwitz, let alone what happened to this kind of detention after the Nazis were defeated.

So in my introduction, I laid out some principles to define and make it possible for readers to recognize what a concentration camp even was. And I addressed the fact that there were edge cases that I wouldn’t have enough pages to dive into beyond a brief mention. (And the truth was that I was already far exceeding the word count my publisher wanted from me.)

I referenced examples of detention that might not start out as concentration camps but can wind up effectively becoming them. Refugee camps can begin with a crisis but continue for years or even decades. There are criminal justice systems in which law enforcement can be done so disproportionately to one part of the population that being born into a certain racial or ethnic group would mean facing a significant risk of imprisonment not borne by other groups.

And sometimes in those systems, though in theory detainees are supposed to get a speedy and fair trial, they become mired in pretrial waiting, with no idea when they’ll have their day in court or be free.

When it comes to the U.S. criminal justice system, other parallels exist as well. One common aspect is that questions of innocence and guilt become very warped. Here’s how I wrote about it in terms of concentration camps a decade ago:

“Concentration camps house civilians rather than combatants—though at many points from World War I to Guantanamo, camp administrators have not always made an effort to distinguish between the two. Detainees are typically held because of their racial, political, religious, or cultural identity, not because of any prosecutable offense—though some states have remedied this flaw by making legal existence next to impossible. Which is not to say that all detainees are innocent of criminal actions against the government in any given system; rather, the innocent and the guilty alike may be swept up without distinction or recourse.”

Next to impossible

What does the phrase in that paragraph mean about legal existence being “next to impossible”? Concentration camp regimes and authoritarian states alike use existing legal systems to make it impossible to have any kind of a normal life as members of the targeted population.

In Nazi Germany, this meant restrictions on Jewish residents. They were stripped of citizenship, of the right to hold a wide range of jobs. They were forbidden to use basic facilities like main streets, public buildings, national memorials, theatres, and more. Living as a Jew in Nazi Germany, it became harder and harder to continue day to day without breaking laws.

When I went to Myanmar a decade ago, this meant that the federal government stripped the Rohingya Muslims of their identity cards, rendering them unable to vote, tracking and limiting where they could live and their movements, and even putting them in camps. In South Africa under apartheid, and in Jim Crow America, how the government classified your race determined where you could live, who you could marry, whether you could vote, and what public facilities you could use.

What the Trump administration is doing now is making life similarly illegal for immigrants of all kinds, whether they’re undocumented, documented, or even have become U.S. citizens. They’re administratively fighting to keep citizenship from those in the process of applying for it. They’re trying to take birthright citizenship away, despite it being enshrined in the Constitution. And they have unleashed tremendous and increasing violence toward the goal of ethnic cleansing.

According to those caught up in the current raids, anyone perceived as foreign is targeted, with a very broad emphasis on subjective perception. Black and Asian people have also faced detention and abuse, whether they were immigrants or not.

Rejecting the rules

One solution is for those who are less vulnerable—whose lives are perceived by the dominant culture as more valuable or more innocent—to stand up next to or in place of those targeted. In some instances, they may belong to other vulnerable classes who are simply less maligned at the moment. This was the case with the many American Jews who joined Black Americans in the civil rights movement in the U.S. (Married to a woman, Renee Good was the member of a targeted group, too, but in theory, one statistically less vulnerable to state violence than the people ICE or Border Patrol were hunting that day.)

In other instances, as with Alex Pretti, the life of the person who allied himself with those the government has targeted for violence should have mattered most of all to that government. An American-born gun-toting white man who supported veterans and seemed to be projecting his own strength and resolve is very much the model of what Stephen Miller claims to want America to become. And yet Pretti did the unthinkable—he made himself as vulnerable as the people that Miller wants to ethnically cleanse from the country.

It’s a good reminder that in the eyes of the current government, innocence can only be maintained by supporting their violence and going along with their agenda. People are killed because they refused to support that violence, or because they were in the middle of a road that ICE wanted to drive down, or because they were celebrating with friends on New Year’s Eve.

Every loss is such deep sorrow. So let me emphasize here that it’s extremely important to talk about the beauty of their lives and how they lived them, to share that loss and demand justice for it.

Yet when people use the language “he shouldn’t have been shot; he was completely innocent” meaning that he was a generous person who lived a wholesome life, it can be a dangerous step in another direction.

Only being able to mourn or demand justice for the purely innocent binds the public into a tighter and tighter trap that ultimately harms everyone. If the government can bend the laws or the judicial system’s interpretation of them, it is possible to make it so that no one is innocent, and no one has the right to demand justice for themselves or anyone else.

The death of Campos

Along with those three non-immigrants shot in the streets of our country in the last month, we have also learned of deaths inside detention facilities. One of them was Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban immigrant who had been arrested in 2003 and convicted of sexual contact with a minor, serving a year in prison before being released.

He’d since been convicted of attempting to sell a controlled substance and spent five years in prison and three years under supervised release, which ended almost a decade ago. According to the medical examiner’s report and witnesses, Lunas Campos was choked to death by guards at Camp East Montana in Texas.

Last summer, the Associated Press reported that the $1.2 billion contract to build and operate Camp East Montana was awarded to a private contractor. This particular facility is, for now, slated to become the largest detention facility in the U.S.

Yet the company running it, Acquisition Logistics LLC, had “no listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer.”

According to the accounts of the medical examiner and the witnesses, it was murder. That death should be getting the same kind of outrage—or even more, because it was done secretly in a detention camp, where accountability will be that much harder to get. If they can break the law to kill Geraldo Lunas Campos, they can break the law to kill you.

Of course some people will portray this statement as lacking common sense, and ask, “Would you leave your children with a child molester?” Of course not. But I would argue that the government, having the ability to administer law, has a higher standard of justice to uphold in terms of other peoples’ rights than individual Americans personal decisions about who to let babysit their children.

Hard questions

I’ve deliberately picked the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, because it’s one that people may find harder to care about. But morality and strategic thinking have to consider hard questions. Otherwise you’re just living a life based on bias and whim.

In addition, any country of 348 million is going to have tens of millions who have committed crimes at some point. Though immigrants consistently commit less crime than those born inside U.S. borders, as a group, they will likewise include criminals. Some number of them will have either been deported or have paid their debts to society according to the law and released. They have rights, too. I would argue that those imprisoned or currently detained also have rights.

There have long been laws in place to weigh criminal offenses and when they should lead to deportation. Lunas Campos was released from prison and lived in the US during all four years of the first Trump administration. I have serious questions about why he was detained now.

Those questions may have good answers, but in this administration, it’s currently impossible to believe anything said by the authorities. But even if we were to assume that the current effort to deport Lunas Campos is justified, that deportation did not require the building of a detention camp as part of an expanding concentration camp regime. It did not require the creation of conditions in which violence and abuse became standard fare in the facilities. It did not require his murder, or the deaths of the many other detainees that have happened in custody.

Implications

And if you are asking yourself, “Hey, this seems to have implications for more than just the immigration terror currently capturing everyone’s attention in Minneapolis,” I would say that yes, it does. You can’t get to the state of horror we’re at today without a long history of police violence in America being allowed and even admired on both sides of the aisle.

A study a decade ago by a professor at the University of South Carolina found that half of all black men had been arrested by the age of 23. Even with less likely presumption of guilt, nearly forty percent of white men had likewise been arrested by that age. Any system of real justice we might build for the country has to account for the fact that we have created a nation in which tens of millions have been raised into a system geared to punish them.

This is just part of the reason why it’s critical to respond so strongly to this expansion of ICE and Border Patrol abuse and mistreatment into the general population. Without hard pushback now, the government will secure the ability to punish anyone they want whenever they want.

The answer is not just to get rid of an individual official. The answer is not better training for ICE and Border Patrol. It isn’t to somehow allow the mistreatment of immigrants but not citizens born in the U.S. It isn’t to only respect the rights of immigrants who are documented while allowing arbitrary mistreatment of the undocumented. It’s to insist on human rights for everyone, and to create a system in which punishment is not the central and defining feature of government for whole sectors of the U.S. population.

What do do about it

If you’re still wondering how to take action, first and foremost, do what so many are doing now. Show up. For those who can, be part of ICE patrols and observer networks. Be present. Plug in to alert systems. Make signs. Countless towns and cities already have concerned residents organized. But if you find your community doesn’t have much in place, it’s even more important to start now.

Harass your politicians. Work with them on the local level to make it harder for ICE to get collaborative policing agreements, or to lease space. Where ICE is using space it already controls, target the vendors and contractors they work with, and call on local authorities to block support for other contracts with the collaborating vendors.

On a state and national level, be quick to praise politicians who take even baby steps—but be just as quick to demand they meet your next goal. If your representative denounces ICE’s actions, then demand that they stop funding DHS. IF they agree not to fund DHS, but ask for simple reforms or training, thank them then press them to dismantle the agency instead.

Get training as an observer. Find a community of people who are already engaged on this front. And don’t let anyone tell you that murder is only murder if the victim was a saint.

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