We recently condemned, without using the word, the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons who hauled four people out of the nearby town of Holts Summit and took them somewhere for some reason, apparently without warrants and taking special care not to identify themselves, somehow scaring the county sheriff enough that he didn’t want to know anything about what they were doing with these people.

We got some pretty strong positive feedback (thank you) and some negative feedback that basically boiled down to, “But they were criminals when they came across the border to begin with.”

There’s no disagreement that they broke the law by crossing illegally.  But that hardly justifies what Trump’s goons are doing to large swaths of people.  And there are numbers that prove that our president has turned this agency into a bunch of thugs.

An example of that attitude came to light during the weekend, a story about a youth baseball coach who confronted ICE agents armed with guns and tasers who approached some high school kids at a youth baseball camp practice in New York City and started asking them about their nation of origin and other issues. Coach Houman Wilder, who has a master’s degree in law and who has coached the Harlem Baseball Academy for years, stepped in, told his players to go to a nearby batting cage, and told the agents their actions were inappropriate. He told a The West Side Rag, an online news site covering the Upper West Side of Manhattan, “They started to talk about cuffing me, and that if the kids were here legally, what do they have to lose by answering. I told them that they still have their fifth and fourth amendment rights, and that they don’t have to speak to you or help with any investigation.”

He told MSNBC an agent told him, “I don’t care what the law says,” and called him a “YouTube lawyer” before leaving.

Wilder says the ball players are all American-born although their parents are from Africa, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic and many don’t come to practice now because their parents are scared.

You can watch the interview at Bing Videos

Associated Press reporter Melissa Goldin’s recent story reiterated Trump’s pledge to deport “the worst of the worst”—rapists, murderers, and child predators. (As we recall, he referred to them during his campaign as “animals.”)

He promised the largest deportation program in history. He’s determined to be remembered for that. And he will be. We believe he would not like how he will be remembered, but he won’t be around to write inflammatory overnight internet ravings of protest.

He says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens from these terrible people.

The problem is that most of these people ARE law-abiding, other than with the way they came here.

In kind of a strange way, perhaps, we should be complimented that people would be so desperate to seek opportunities and freedoms they don’t have elsewhere that they will break our laws by coming to this country illegally.  Most of us cannot fathom what we have meant to so many people from throughout the world.

The growing question of concern is who is going to protect us from Trump’s protectors.

Reporter Goldin has seen “nonpublic data” collected by one of the world’s leading libertarian think tanks, The Cato Institute, that shows almost two-thirds of the people picked up by ICE in the first eight months of this fiscal year had NO CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS. Of those with convictions, fewer than seven percent did violent crimes.

A little more than half, 53%, had immigration, traffic, or vice crimes.

(One of the founders of the Cato Institute, by the way, was Charles Koch, one of the Koch brothers who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars, at least, into Republican campaigns. Charles Koch remains as Chairman of the Board of Koch Industries. His brother, David, died six years ago. The Kochs have been strong supporters of conservative Republicans but they want nothing to do with Donald Trump.)

In the first five months of the fiscal year, ICE was arresting about 650 people a day. Then, at the end of the May, the power behind the throne—Stephen Miller—demanded 3,000 arrests a day. And the agents appear to be doing their best to do his bidding.

The AP story quotes the Transactional Records Clearinghouse as calculating ICE arrests jumped by thirty percent in May, compared to April, and another 28 percent in June and that that Cato Institute figures for the fourth months from February to May, show that ICE fed 421-454 “non criminals” a day into the system. But in the last two weeks of May and the first half of June, the numbers were 678 for the first two weeks and 927 for the second two weeks.

The AP also reported the Bureau of Economic Review put out a working paper two years ago showing that for the last century and a half, the incarceration rate for immigrants has been lower than for people born in this country and the gap has widened in the last six decades with immigrants SIXTY PERCENT LESS LIKELY to be incarcerated than American-born people.

Trump and his crowd like to dehumanize all immigrants by citing specific killings or rapes done by illegal immigrants, never mentioning how much greater, by far, are incidents of lifelong legal citizens committing those same crimes.

So let’s be clear about our view from this quiet hill:  Demagogues and dictators rise to power and try to stay in power by turning a segment of a nation’s population into dangers to society. They achieve dominance by making us afraid of our neighbors and the strangers we pass on the streets, or those who live in lesser neighborhoods or ethnic communities.

We always have to hate somebody, to fear somebody when the people we most must fear are those who paint others with the broad brush of dehumanization.

Should we turn a blind eye to those who are here illegally?  No.

Should we not care about immigrants who do deal drugs and who do commit terrible personal crimes?  No. We should arrest them and hold them as we would hold regular Americans. But our government does not round up the few who are dangerous. It is rounding up thousands of us in random raids and carting people off to undisclosed locations.

Just as we were posting this entry, a truly unnecessary tragedy was reported that is off-topic but is not surprising for this heartless administration. We must include it because it cries out for the telling of a story that is our conclusion.

The Atlantic reported that today (Wednesday), the Trump administration is going to incinerate 500 tons of USAID food for children living in war and disaster zones. It is part of the destruction of the agency that for years has carried a message of American kindness around the world. The magazine says that’s enough food to feed 1.5 million children a week and that it’s enough to feed every starving child in Gaza. It’s part of the sixty-thousand tons of food originally targeted for Sudan, which is battling a famine.  But The Atlantic reports that food cannot be delivered because the USAID has been gutted and its logistics experts have been fired.

These are not immigrants we are told we must fear and hate. These are children who will die because of one man.

Let’s look back to the 1950s when we were supposed to be fearful that our federal government was filled with Communists.

On a day in early June, seventy-one years ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy in one of his sensational hearings accused young Boston lawyer Frederick G. Fisher of being a member of a group he considered “a legal arm of the Communist Party.” Fisher worked with Joseph Welch’s firm, Hale and Dore. Welch was the lawyer for the Army in those hearings and had recognized that Fisher’s association with a left-leaning student group while in law school could be a problem. So he replaced him during the hearings.

But that didn’t keep McCarthy from attacking him.

McCarthy’s reckless accusation was stunning. For some reason, I was watching those events on our 13-inch Admiral black and white television set that day. I had no understanding of what the hearings was all about but what happened in a few minutes created in me a strong memory as I watched as a seething Joseph Welch, his voice shaking with emotion, barely controlling his composure, look McCarthy in the eye and say:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us.… Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentle man but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.”

When McCarthy appeared to pay no attention to Welch’s remarks and began another rambling insinuation, Welch cut him off:

“Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild.… Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency??”

There they are.  Three words for our time.

Reckless.  Cruel.

Children will starve because this administration has eliminated the people who could deliver it and the solution is to burn it.

Joseph Welch’s third word echoes from his  last sentence. It must be repeated and repeated and repeated today.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Decency is a word I have not heard lately, to our country’s shame. Nor, it seems, is it a word that is in any way familiar to our chief executive. He will shed no tears but all of us should.

(If you want to watch that dramatic moment that many believe turned the Senate against McCarthy, here it is from PBS:  Bing Videos)