It was monstrous enough that Trump issued his inhumane Executive Order on immigration yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when one of the things we should be remembering is our nation’s guilt in turning back refugees from the Holocaust — turning many of them back to their deaths.
But that wasn’t enough inhumanity. The Order went into effect immediately, with no exceptions for refugees who had already completed the vetting process and were actually en route to the United States when the Order was signed. As a result, refugees arriving on flights at international airports all over the United States were, instead of being welcomed to what they had left thinking would be their safe new home, were detained at the airports, denied even access to lawyers.
This would include refugees from places like the eastern Congo and Myanmar, which have absolutely no connection to terrorism. But it also included refugees who risked their lives working for our military in Iraq. The New York Times has an excellent article up today describing a couple of such cases. Please read the entire article if your blood pressure can tolerate the outrage it will produce. Here is one example of the type of “dangerous” people this Order caused to be detained last night:
Mr. Darweesh worked as an interpreter for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul starting shortly after the invasion of Iraq on April 1, 2003. The filing said he had been directly targeted twice for working with the American military.
A husband and father of three, he arrived at Kennedy Airport Friday evening with his family. Mr. Darweesh’s wife and children made it through passport control and customs, but agents of Customs and Border Protection stopped and detained him.
Brandon Friedman, who worked with Mr. Darweesh as an infantry lieutenant with the 101st Airborne praised Mr. Darweesh’s work. “This is a guy that this country owes a debt of gratitude to,” Mr. Friedman said. “There are not many Americans who have done as much for this country as he has. He’s put himself on the line. He’s put his family on the line to help U.S. soldiers in combat and it is astonishing to me that this country would suddenly not allow people like that in.”
Mr. Friedman, who is chief executive of the McPherson Square Group, a communications firm in Washington, continued, “We have a moral obligation to protect and repay these people who risked their lives for U.S. troops.”
He said he feared for America’s military: “This not only endangers troops in the future, it endangers troops who are in combat now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria wherever. If those interpreters and those fixers hear that the United States is not going to protect them then they don’t have any incentive to work with U.S. troops and there’s no way that we can operate without their support and assistance.”
www.nytimes.com/...®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
We should send the Statue of Liberty back to France, since it represents an America that no longer exists. Perhaps it could be replaced with a gigantic, gilded statute of Donald Trump, with a scowl on his face and raising a clenched fist in the direction of the rest of the world. That would more accurately represent the America we have become.