(Dobbs) "Fear Is The Tool Of The Tyrant"

With Trump and his acolytes doing their evil deeds, what’s not to fear?

“My client, who has lived in the U.S. since he was less than 1 year old— for 32 continuous years— was snatched up and deported on Monday.”

If only this Facebook post last week by an immigration attorney in Tucson was a one-off.

But it’s not. It’s something you can read about every week, every day, from cities all along the border and a thousand miles inland, especially since Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff and anti-immigration bullhorn Stephen Miller went to ICE headquarters in late May and told them their pace of deportations was too slow and they’d better pick it up.

They did. From about 650 deportations a day, they now are going after a daily goal of at least 3,000.

The Facebook letter was posted by my niece, who has specialized for sixteen years on “deportation defense.” Since Trump came back and especially since Miller’s Hitlerian order to ICE, her cases have shot through the roof. She has represented between 150 and 200 undocumented immigrants in the six months since Inauguration Day. And that’s just one lawyer, in one city along our almost 2,000 mile southern border.

Now, after virtually no due process, her client is “stranded in Mexico.” She writes, “His U.S. citizen wife and three little U.S. citizen children are there, trying to figure out where he can live (or where they all may have to live).” Would President Trump, or Stephen Miller, or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, or ICE’s acting director Tom Homan, or anyone else involved in despicable deportations like this one show any pity? They haven’t for far higher profile cases than this one, like the immigrants who were sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. So don’t expect it for a case like this.

My niece’s client has one marijuana misdemeanor on his record. He is not, as Trump heartlessly puts it, one of the “worst of the worst.” Instead, “he built a business that was a community hub— a gym— for at-risk youth.” But his business, according to an educated guess by my niece who has seen it all before, “will likely collapse. His U.S. citizen wife (a nurse in the U.S.) plans to work for a salsa factory in Mexico. Who knows what his children will do. But they refuse to break up the family.”

They’re going against all odds. The man’s parents were undocumented immigrants when they came to the U.S. in the mid 1990s, and there are no longer any family members left in Mexico to give them a hand. And just for good measure, “They already have been robbed in Mexico.”

This is what it looks like behind the facade of Donald Trump’s promise last year at the convention that nominated him to usher in "the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

In fact there is another story also published late last week, this time in The Denver Post, about an undocumented immigrant in Western Colorado who was, as The Post reported, “on his way to work in Montrose on July 2 when federal immigration agents surrounded the van he was in and yanked the longtime resident and father out.” His name is Locreto Flores.

Although he has lived and worked in the U.S. for some 20 years, and according to The Post’s records search has only three misdemeanor traffic cases against him, Flores was, just like the man in Tucson, “snatched up and deported,” first to a holding cell in Florence, Arizona, 550 miles from his home, then just seven days after he was picked up, to the Mexican border city of Nogales.

His immigration attorney describes the due process he was afforded: almost no contact with his lawyer, no bond motion before an immigration judge, and basically, “He was never given a hearing.” The lawyer only found that Locreto Flores was in Mexico when she called the facility in Florence and was told that he was being “prepared for deportation.” By the time she got the bond hearing for her client, he already had been spirited outside American jurisdiction. And because of that, Flores was denied bond.

And, just like my niece’s client and his family who already have been robbed in Mexico, this Colorado man’s bad luck only grows. He has a daughter— who is an American citizen— with leukemia. For some time, Locreto Flores has driven the girl five hours each way, to and from Denver, for treatments. No one knows how she’ll get those treatments now.

It is Catch 22 with human lives caught in the vice.

In a way, all our lives are caught in the vice.

Earlier this year, a team of research economists at Goldman Sachs issued this report about undocumented workers who are swept up and deported: “The US government’s changes in immigration enforcement target asylum seekers, parolees, people receiving Temporary Protected Status, and those crossing the border illegally.” They said that in some industries, like crop production, food processing, and construction, these people make up 15-20% of the workforce. “Abruptly losing a significant share of these workers could be very disruptive for many of these industries. There could be temporary production bottlenecks, shortages, and price increases.”

The newest case in point: just three days ago, The New York Times ran a story with this headline: “Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Hits Senior Care Work Force.”

It quoted nursing home operators and home care agencies, saying, “They have lost staff members as the Trump administration has moved to end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants with temporary legal status.” Some employees already have been deported. Some haven’t, at least not yet, but they’ve stopped showing up for work because they fear that they’re next. For seniors who depend on this kind of care, this is no small thing. Foreign workers make up more than a quarter of this workforce. A White House spokesperson says, “There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force.” But these jobs pay a median hourly wage below $17. The White House is dreaming.

But in the world of Donald Trump, they don’t let important facts get in the way. In a social media post on June 15th, he reiterated his pledge to ramp up deportations, calling on ICE “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” June 15th was Fathers Day. Think about that when you think about the man from Tucson and the man from Montrose. And all the other men already deported or due to be after Trump added in his post that ICE “must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”

No coincidence, those are all Democratic cities he’s targeting. As my niece said at the end of her post, “To be clear, we will see this in EVERY community, ALL the time with 150 billion dollars infused into ICE.”

We just got a lesson about all this from a prosecutor who has worked for almost a decade in the high-profile U.S. Attorney’s office in New York. Until Thursday, when she was fired. Her name is Maureen Comey, and if her surname sounds familiar, it’s because she’s the daughter of former FBI chief James Comey, whose “Russia Russia Russia” investigation became one of Donald Trump’s worst nightmares.

She sent her colleagues a message that said, “I was summarily fired via memo from Main Justice that did not give a reason for my termination. If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain. Do not let that happen. Fear is the tool of a tyrant.”

It’s that last line that sticks with me: Fear is the tool of a tyrant. Whether we live here illegally or were born here and are entitled to due process, none of us is safe. Over the past month Trump the Tyrant has actually talked about stripping the rights of citizenship from a few of his prominent critics: actress Rosie O’Donnell (born in the USA), and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (born in Uganda and naturalized in the USA), and even his one-time co-president Elon Musk, born in South Africa but naturalized here 22 years ago. Let that sink in: he might try to deport bona fide American citizens.

Fear is the tool of the tyrant. With Trump and his acolytes doing their evil deeds, what’s not to fear?

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net