Ichabod

During the great struggles of the Northern abolitionists in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the worst setback for their cause—the most bitter in its defeat and the most heinous in its consequences—came not exclusively from the pro-slavery politicians of the South, but also in part from one of their own elected representatives and former champions: New Hampshire's Daniel Webster, who notoriously let them down by backing the Compromise of 1850. 

This was a deal with the Southern states that was billed as necessary to preserve the union—but it came at the cost of enacting the federal Fugitive Slave law, which forced Northern states to return people escaping slavery to the hands of their captors. Webster's decision to countenance such a bargain was seen by many in the anti-slavery cause as the ultimate betrayal. It prompted John Greenleaf Whittier for one to pen the mournful words in "Ichabod": he who might/ Have lighted up and led his age,/Falls back in night. 

I am reminded of this chapter of history in seeing the way politicians of both major parties have acquiesced this past year in the dismantling of the U.S. asylum system. That the rights of asylum-seekers were in doubt was obvious. International norms around welcoming people fleeing persecution are eroding around the globe. But what one didn't expect was that the consummation of this destruction would occur under a Democratic administration, with a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress. 

Just as in 1850, so now—it's the sense of betrayal that especially stings. The fact that it was not Trump and his minions who delivered the death blow to asylum, despite all their bombastic pledges and ham-handed attempts to do so, but rather that it came after they had already departed from office, and from the hands of those who had once pledged themselves to be the allies of asylum-seekers. That was, surely, the most unkindest cut of all. 

To be fair, it was a Trump-appointed judge who—on Friday—blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42 as they had originally planned to do on May 23. The White House is not to blame for the politically-motivated court orders hurled at them by an increasingly partisan judiciary packed with right-wingers. But the administration is to blame for normalizing the Title 42 order by implementing it for more than a year in office; and multiple Democrats in Congress too for now calling for its extension. 

When one sees no fewer than five members of the Democratic Senate majority backing legislation that would indefinitely extend Title 42, effectively killing asylum and abrogating U.S. treaty obligations under the UN Refugee Convention for the foreseeable future—members all of the party that pledged to stand with immigrants and turn their back on Trumpist inhumanity—one feels we are witnessing another Ichabod moment. The great "compromise" that is really the great betrayal. 

The annihilation of asylum rights is reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act chapter of American history in more than this limited sense, however. The policies also bear a family resemblance. What did the Fugitive Slave law do, after all? It sent people back into the hands of the oppressors they fled, thereby rendering the governments of even "free" Northern states complicit in the crime of slavery. This is textbook "refoulement" under international law, and it is what the modern law of asylum was designed to prevent. 

Nor are the forms of persecution and injustice facing the two groups of refugees (historic and contemporary) entirely unrelated. More than 20,000 of the people who have been expelled summarily under Title 42 are Haitian nationals—the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the West Indies, whose country was the site of the most successful large-scale revolt of enslaved people in this hemisphere, but which continues to suffer from the legacy of slavery and colonial interference today. 

There are even Black people seeking asylum in the United States right now who quite literally face enslavement if they are turned away and denied protection. In the West African country of Mauritania, slavery tied to a racial caste system is still a widespread practice, and Black people deported there face bondage. Advocates are fighting right now for temporary protected status (TPS) for Mauritanian nationals to ensure no one is returned to potential enslavement; but so far, the administration has failed to act.

Eliminating or severely curtailing asylum, or otherwise deporting people to such conditions, renders the U.S. government an extension of the persecutors and enslavers of other nations. Just as the Fugitive Slave Act turned states that did not endorse human bondage themselves into the accomplices of slave states, so too, abrogating refugee rights in the U.S. makes our government complicit in every evil and injustice to which they return people without offering them a chance to seek protection. 

There will be many people for whom this comparison still does not compute, of course. How can you talk about something we all know was bad from the 19th century in the same breath as something that is hotly-debated and openly-endorsed by politicians of both major parties today? 

Yet it shouldn't be so hard to understand the analogy. Two writers in the Religion News Service recently urged us to remember that a person escaping slavery is "an archetype of someone in physical danger." Just as the Bible commands not to surrender escaped people back into bondage, they say, the same moral reasoning forbids by extension returning people involuntarily to any danger or oppression. (The Torah verse they cite reads, in one translation, "do not return a slave [...] if he has taken refuge with you.")

The principle of asylum is, one sees, the same principle that animated the Underground Railroad. The same reason that one is obliged out of basic human solidarity to shelter someone escaping bondage is why our government (and every government) is duty-bound to offer a haven to people fleeing persecution who manage to reach its shores and borders. This principle—the principle of non-refoulement—is also the one Edna St. Vincent Millay enunciated with uncommon power in her poem, "The Conscientious Objector": 

I shall die, but 

that is all that I shall do for Death. [...]

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, 

I will not tell him which way the fox ran. 

With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where 

the black boy hides in the swamp. 

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; 

I am not on his pay-roll. 

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends 

nor of my enemies either. 

Though he promise me much, 

I will not map him the route to any man's door. 

Am I a spy in the land of the living, 

that I should deliver men to Death? 

Brother, the password and the plans of our city 

are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.