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[Update, July 3: With little more than useless gestures like a performative speech by Hakeem Jeffries raised in opposition, Democrats have allowed Donald Trump’s Giant Bill of Terror to pass. I will have links to various analyses and reports in forthcoming Friday Updates.]
I’m on several deadlines, and the next few months will see shorter works from me. The fact that the world now changes every 48 hours 2 hours also means that I will be writing more quick responses like this one. Here, I try to understand the point of a growing reign of terror. None of what is going on is new, but what is different is the closing off any possibilities of alternatives. To what end?
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate student who has been in an ICE “detention facility” (prison by another name) in Louisiana for over three months has finally been released and is back in New York.
Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S citizen, was kidnapped from outside his apartment on March 8 and is only free now after months of a lengthy legal process. As he has consistently pointed out, many others without such resources still languish in the prison he just left. Khalil’s public abduction is, at this point, only one of many: everywhere people are being pulled out of cars and raided in Home Depots. The noose has been widening and tightening: ICE has targeted young people with no criminal records, like the 19-year-old Emerson Colindres, a soccer star at his high school who has been picked up and returned to Honduras, from where he and his mother had fled violence. Others are being picked up for ancient and minor infractions, like parking tickets. Still others are US-born natives. It is more than likely that Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran will distract many from the continuing injustices committed against immigrants.
The reign of terror continues, here and abroad, but to what end? Where does the logic of unrelenting fear take us?
Deportations are not the only issue facing us all: the Trump administration is swiftly erasing all the protections we grew up with and took for granted. It recently announced that it is considering a reversal of the ban on asbestos, a known and deadly carcinogen. Women’s rights and the rights of LGBTQ people are being swiftly rolled back: in Atlanta, a total ban on abortion meant that a pregnant, brain-dead woman was kept on life support until her baby could be delivered on June 13.
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It is pointless to continue to list all the horrors we are witnessing and experiencing at this time. Google any term at all, and you can pull up news items describing events and situations that, only six months ago, seemed more likely to exist in the pages of a dystopian novel like The Handmaid’s Tale or Children of Men. None of this is new to the Trump administration, a fact that the broad left would like us all to forget. George W. Bush initiated ICE, but it has been emboldened and expanded by Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and the Clintons created legislation that turned minor offences, like driving under the influence or filing a false tax return into “aggravated felonies” that placed immigrants on the fast track to deportation.
So, it’s not that the terror is new, but that it has now attained public visibility, with brazen kidnappings on the streets. Immigrants have routinely disappeared from workplaces, but their kidnappings and deportations were generally unseen by the public. They were not, for instance, placed on a midnight plane to a deathly prison in El Salvador and then photographed and videotaped for publicity stunts.
Terror is like a cloud that quietly envelops us all: a society where any segment of the population has to live in perennial fear is one where, eventually, everyone learns to live in perennial fear.
I feel all of this to be true, but I’m also left bewildered because I, for one, cannot see the point of the terror.
This may read like a facile statement, but it is a way of trying to get at what seems like a purposelessness to the reign of terror under which we all live. A few days ago, we were told that Trump had decided to pause the deportations of farm workers after receiving complaints from the farming industry (which represents a large chunk of his voters): migrant workers were literally being hunted down like rats by ICE agents, and many more were choosing to stay at home rather than risk abduction. But, Stephen Miller has set a target of 3000 arrests a day, and now the news is that the pause has been paused. No one seems to know what’s going on and why.
I have been trying to imagine the world envisioned by those creating this world of terror. In my mind’s eye, I see something like a scene out of the 1990 film version of The Handmaid’s Tale: orderly suburban neighbourhoods filled with mansions for those in power, and the general population terrorised into submission to do the manual labour required for the upkeep of the elites—let us call them the Masters. Some of us are recruited to clean and cook, others tend to the lush and fussy landscapes around the houses, and prisons are filled with labourers making not just license plates but all the technology that keeps the state humming. I have no idea what someone like me, at the ripe age of 250 and with a fairly useless uterus could contribute, and I suspect anyone over 50 will be quickly executed—unless they decide to use us for our writing or art skills, but even those might be delegated to AI. (I am among the world’s leading writers on trauma culture and an animal whisperer extraordinaire, but I doubt that my talents will be in demand.) Every night and in every house, women are raped by the Masters as their wives either watch or stay in their bedrooms, knitting and planning the next day’s banquet. Because, of course, what is the point of a reign of terror that does not destroy the self-worth of humans to keep them subjugated?
Where might all of this go, though? In Handmaid’s Tale, there is a distinct religious fervour and worldmaking in place, and while there are certainly signs of such right now, the overall agenda seems to be: frighten the hell out of everyone.
The terror seems pointless. Trump is certainly aiming his deportation program at his base, but even conservative towns and cities are growing restive and angry about the tactics: it turns out that when they said they wanted the “criminals” out, they didn’t mean their friends and neighbours, like Carol Mayorga, even if they had entered without visas. As for matters like environmental destruction: selling American parklands—some of the finest and most beautiful in the world—is ultimately going to mean that even the elites will have fewer vast green spaces to enjoy (and we should remember that Barack Obama effectively stole a significant part of one of the last and historic Olmsted parks to create his not-a-presidential-centre). Asbestos? Fine, keep it around, and eventually your silver-spooned heirs will come into contact with it and die early deaths. Vaccines are already being removed from healthcare and, I have no doubt, RFK Jr. will soon assure us that seatbelt laws are just silly. Red lights? Really, who needs such things? We should all bravely depend on our navigational skills to know when to rush through an intersection. Speed limits are silly, of course.
Get rid of…everyone?
Who will do any kind of work, at all? You can’t import labour from other countries if their citizens—even the fair-skinned German sort—fear what might happen to them on routine visits. You can’t replace workers by just driving up to the nearest Home Depot: those parking lots are emptying out. Scientific research centres, many the envy of the world? Academics are being courted by countries like Canada and China, and it’s likely that Europe and Asia will begin to make it easier for academics to work and live elsewhere. Who will teach the children of the elites at the elite schools that were already staffed mostly by harried, overworked, and underpaid adjuncts?
So much of this seems pointless: the U.S stands to lose over a $100 billion from undocumented immigrants who use Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN) to pay taxes that gain them no benefits. California alone stands to lose nearly $275 billion in “lost impact,” or 9 percent of its GDP from the loss of migrant labour. Even creating a system of fines and offboarding into legal status would net more money than hunting down people at their workplaces which are now left without essential labour. Videos surface of ICE agents chasing humans across fields: what do they do but increase the sense of terror—and not just in the migrant population? To what end?
Wars abroad and battles at home: the terror is being spread like fertiliser over a recalcitrant lawn, but it is unclear where all of this is heading except towards a state of perpetual chaos that does no one any good, not even the ultra elites who will need their bathrooms cleaned, their aging bums wiped, and their technology kept up to date. Everything being done so far seems like the act of ticking off a list of items on a to-do list. Promises were made to the populace: “wokeness” in universities would be eliminated, trans people would be disappeared from public life, “illegals” would be deported, and so on. But to what end, beyond gaining the votes of a dwindling bloc? What and who will take the place of everything and everyone now disappeared? Where is all of this going? What is the world being brought into being here, other than one suffused with anger and rage? Is the hope that everyone will just suck it up and learn to live with the constant presence of men in masks tearing their friends and family away from them? That certainly is not happening, as communities become fiercer in protecting others. How is anyone at all to function properly, even in their safe homes and jobs? Whom does any of this benefit, and in what way?
It is not that I yearn for a purposeful reign of terror, but that the lack of direction in everything going on right now might be useful: the trick might be to press on this weakness.
Even terror should have a point.
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For more on the history of immigration and past Democrat regimes, see:
On the Psychic Terror of Raids
Of Towers and Toilets: A Tale of Two Developments (On Obama’s stealing of public land)
On Trump, Immigration, and the Failure of the Left
On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative
“Undocumented”: How an Identity Ended a Movement
Trauma and Capitalism or, Your Trauma Story Will Kill You
Romancing the Border: Or, Making (Self) Deportation Sexy
Undocumented vs. Illegal: A Distinction without a Difference
Critical Race Theory Won’t Save Us
DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now
Travel, Passports, and the Differences between Expats and Immigrants
Image: Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco Goya, 1820-1823.
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