One of the statistics Trump loves to cite is the fact that border crossings have actually fallen in the U.S. since he took office. A New York Times article yesterday sheds light, though, on exactly why. It quotes a number of Venezuelan migrants who are now fleeing south—away from the United States—because they have heard stories of innocent people being rounded up and sent to a gulag in El Salvador, just for having tattoos—or being separated from their children.
In other words, Trump's human rights violations have become so egregious that a growing number of people would rather return to a brutal dictatorship in Venezuela than take their chances in the United States. In a matter of months, the United States has become the sort of authoritarian country that people flee from, rather than try to get to. "They flee from me, that sometime did me seek"—as the poet Thomas Wyatt once put it. I hope we're proud of ourselves.
The United States under Trump has indeed "solved" the refugee crisis of people heading north. But we did it by creating a new refugee crisis of people fleeing south—away from our own evil cruelties. People fled Venezuela to escape a regime that jails people without charge or trail on bogus accusations—with no respect for constitutional rights. And now that Trump is doing the same to Venezuelan asylum-seekers, many of the same people are fleeing away from him in the opposite direction.
And that of course is by design. The administration is incredibly proud of their little gulag in El Salvador—their little atrocities and evils. And indeed, there will be fewer immigrants to the United States this year—if that was their only goal, they have succeeded.
But anyone with any real kernel of patriotism in their hearts would see what a devastating loss this is to the country: the fact that we have treated people so unjustly and evilly that they do not even want to come here. They'd rather take their chances with the dictator they fled in the first place, since apparently the United States doesn't respect constitutional rights or international humanitarian norms any more than he does. In short: the U.S. is being abandoned by the world.
People running away from us to escape our atrocities is not a good look. "The flee from me, that sometime did me seek." Wyatt was not saying this was a good thing. He found in it a form of tragic abandonment and loneliness. "My friends forsake me like a memory lost," as John Clare once put it in a later era of poetry. That's the U.S. now: the world is turning its back on us. They are running away from us. And why? Because we have completely forfeited their trust.
As we speak, by the way, the administration is prosecuting a judge in Wisconsin for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant to escape ICE. According to the indictment, she guided him out of the back door of her courtroom so that he wouldn't be captured in the dragnet. I have no idea if that's what actually happened. I also have no idea if that's a violation of the law, if that's what did happen.
But I don't really care either way. It seems to me that this administration's goons are already abducting people and illegally rendering them to a forever prison in El Salvador—so I don't see how they are entitled to any deference as enforcers of the law. They are in violation of the law themselves. And if a judge refuses to make their jobs any easier by helping people out the back of a courtroom, then she's only doing what any of us ought to do in the same situation.
In an era like this, we should all be conscientious objectors—in the sense Edna St. Vincent Millay gave the term in her poem of that title. We should never—in thought or deed—make it the least bit easier for this administration to deport people to death, torture, persecution, or indefinite confinement. "I am not on [Death's] payroll," as Millay put it—"Am I a spy in the land of the living / That I should deliver men to Death? Brother [...] never through me / Shall you be overcome."
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