ICE ‘viciousness’
Dear Editor:
Since the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) homicides in Minneapolis I have heard and read comments saying if you don’t want to be shot by ICE, mind your own business.
That is a generally true statement. But that is the advice that the Christian German nation followed as the Nazis took over.
They minded their own business when the Nazis first took disabled people. They minded their own business when the Nazis next took homosexuals. They minded their own business when the Nazis next took Jews. Finally they minded their own business when the Nazis came for those who criticized them.
I am reading Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas about the Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and was killed by them. It is difficult to read because we are mirroring Germany only we are going at warp speed.
I don’t think all of the ICE agents are the moral monsters like the Proud Boys who are now joining ICE. The huge signing bonuses, the high pay and the rumoured bounties for each person taken into custody are attractive incentives for supporting a family.
But they are being taught that the fourth amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government) does not apply to them, that they can go door to door asking for IDs, that they do not have to identify themselves. They are being told that all the people they are grabbing are violent criminals and that the people protesting them are “domestic terrorists.”
But each breaking of a car window, grabbing of a two-year-old child, gassing of a protester, taking into custody of an almost-naked U.S. citizen, and the other outrageous acts take them down the road to moral depravity.
We as the public even get inured to the viciousness as we see it daily. An Auschwitz survivor said it wasn’t Hitler and Himmler who took her there; it was her neighbors. They turned her in, they grabbed her, they put her on the train and they ran the camp.
We see daily how people grabbed are treated. Do we really think they are treated any better while they are in custody?
The same administration that denied access to the Epstein files is denying Congressional and public access to the confinement camps.
Meanwhile, Republican senators and representatives, including ours from Kansas, have become Hitler’s Reichstag, rubber-stamping his decisions, cheering his speeches, and swearing loyalty to him.
Ron Svaty,
Ellsworth, Kansas