By Nate Holdren, Des Moines
I write this letter to the editor on the evening of Friday, Sept. 26 after hearing the news that Ian Roberts, the superintendent of the public school system here in Des Moines where I live, has been taken into ICE custody. ICE are a wing of law enforcement and it is abundantly clear from the historical record that law enforcement agencies lie sometimes (I am a historian of the United States). They seem to do so all the more often under the Trump administration. This means I am not inclined to take at face value the preliminary reports claiming that some past issues with Roberts’s visa status. More importantly, it doesn’t matter if those reports are true, or at least, it shouldn’t matter.
Many of us in the present are horrified by what ICE is doing around the United States, and heartened by the opposition to ICE, opposition that falls in the spirit of the underground railroad that opposed slavery, the civil rights movement, and resistance to war, to name just three examples from the long history of justice movements. What opposition to ICE and that longer history of justice movements helps make clear is that law and morality are two different concepts. There have been and still are bad laws, and worse yet, laws that entrench and defend injustices.
Deportation is legal. In one sense that is morally irrelevant, because our principles are our own, a product of what we, in conversation with fellow persons of conscience, think is right and wrong rather than something set by legislators and judges. In another sense, that deportation is legal is deeply morally repugnant, something that sits in the long tradition of unjust laws. It is repugnant above all because it authorizes terrible violence against people. It is also repugnant because bigots, cynics, and thoughtless enablers use the legality of deportation to short circuit thinking, to shield their small, rarely exercised consciences from thought and empathy, by treating “legal” and “moral” as the same thing.
Deportation is wrong, full stop. It is an act of violence committed by the state. It is an injustice. Many of us in the present believe our world will eventually move from the bleak place it often is these days to being a better place. Dr. King put this in his famous line that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. As that arc bends further over time, as we get closer to the good society that Dr. King called the Beloved Community, future people will look back at deportation as a barbarism tolerated for too long, much like past legal bans on minorities voting, laws against interracial marriage, legal segregation, slavery, and the death penalty.
In the present, in opposing deportation, it is urgent that we accept no half measures or ideological middle ground with the forces of injustice. Like capital punishment, torture, and slavery, deportation is wrong. Always, all of it, no exceptions. People of conscience must not let ourselves be pulled into line-drawing between acceptable and unacceptable instances of this violence committed by the government. The historical record is very clear that justice movements lose when they let themselves be sidetracked into litigating when forms of state violence are acceptable vs. unacceptable, often in an effort to seem reasonable so as to be palatable to the rich, powerful, and officially respectable. Some people think that establishing that some deportation is wrong (or that some executions are wrong, that some torture is wrong, that some slavery is wrong) will help others to meet us halfway but the effect is the opposite. That kind of approach waters down calls for justice, helps keep some injustice ideologically acceptable, and delays meaningful social change. Many in the Democratic Party are guilty of this, some of them well meaning and some of them cynical (the Obama and Biden administrations’ draconian records on immigration enforcement are a case in point). Whatever their intentions, those who would ask us to oppose deportation only sometimes are enemies of justice. It is imperative that people of conscience do not listen to them.
Getting back to Roberts, my heart goes out to him and his family and everyone affected by his detention by ICE, as it goes out to everyone affected by ICE’s actions present and past. I type this with sinking heart as I think about what Roberts and his loved ones must be going through, and with great disgust over the efforts I am sure we will soon see to get to the bottom of Roberts’s visa status. Some well meaning people will ask us to be patient during those efforts. In doing so, they accidentally align with the forces of injustice who ask us to forget the critical distance between legality and morality. Roberts should be released regardless of anything to do with any visa. All migrants should be. The investigation process itself is part of the problem, in that it helps distract from and maintain the deep injustice that at present some people are deportable. That needs to change.
ICE’s actions even when legal are not legitimate, no more than were the actions of police who enforced legal segregation or the “man-stealers” who legally chased down fugitive slaves who had, in the eyes of the law at the time, illegally stolen themselves by running away from plantations. No deportations, period, for anyone, and fire everyone employed in migrant detention and deportation.
