Ad
Columnists View from the Center Bear Smart The Travel Troubleshooter Dear Abby Student Aide Of Sound Mind Others Say Powerful solutions You are What You Eat Out Standing in the Fields What's up in Durango Skies Watch Yore Topknot Local First RE-4 Education Update MECC Cares for kids

ICE, or how to waste billions to sabotage the economy

Someone should sic DOGE on that pork barrel with a fuse, ICE. POTUS’s “big, beautiful bill” wastes billions of taxpayers’ money funding the largest, most expensive police force in the world, aimed at busting, wait for it, construction workers, carpenters, ranch hands and crop pickers, chefs and servers, janitors and maids, even servicemen and women who risk their lives defending this country.

Rob Schultheis

And why? To gratify Stephen Miller, who must have been scarred for life when, as a wee goose-stepper, a faulty piñata dumped an overstuffed Zorro dummy on his head at his 6th birthday party.

No matter that, these are not really criminals. Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes by far than fifth-generation Americans. You are much more likely to be mugged by a deranged Mayflower descendant in a MAGA HAT than by Juan Lopez, who probably works at three jobs to send a few bucks south to feed his starving family.

But fascism and facts are antithetical; autocrats deal in myths, false, malign ones. They don’t let truth get in the way of their snake oil and pipe dreams. “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?” Like con men or bad magicians, they prosper by fooling people.

The undocumented immigrant phenomenon began as a right-wing, conservative scheme to bust unions and guarantee a supply of cheap, docile labor. A pal of mine in Baghdad, a U.S. Army infantryman, had been a union butcher in civilian life, till his large corporate employer brought in nonunion Central Americans, slashed wages and snickered all the way to the bank.

This has been going on a long time. In 1948, three dozen Mexican braceros died while being deported when the plane they were on crashed outside Los Gatos, California. Their bodies were unceremoniously buried in an anonymous mass grave. Woody Guthrie’s outraged ballad told the story: “You won’t have a name when you ride that big airplane – all they will call you is deportees …”

Funny thing about dehumanizing others, you end up dehumanizing yourself. You cease being human and you become a nation of Orwell’s pigs.

Today, Los Gatos is being repeated a hundred thousandfold, but there are no songs of protest. “A savage servility slides by on grease,” in Robert Lowell’s words. Silence is acquiescence and acquiescence is guilt. “Alligator Alcatraz” isn’t funny. It comes from the same obscene phrase book as “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

ICE isn’t just economic madness, it is morally poisonous. It is a betrayal of everything this country stands for and drags America in the dirt.

Rob Schultheis has covered Afghanistan and the Middle East for Time, CBS, NPR and The New York Times. He also writes about climbing, the arts and environment from his home in Telluride. Reach him at robschultheis1@gmail.com.