Editorial: MAGA morphs into Make America Cruel Again

Chicago Tribune

5 hours ago

The horrifying weekend scenes in Los Angeles — National Guard on the streets, the governor of California threatening to sue the president of the United States for breaching state sovereignty, vehicles set on fire, attacks on law enforcement officers, ordinary people getting hurt, kids seeing all kinds of horrors from people they have been taught to trust — were deeply disturbing to the point where we wondered how on God's green earth this country can hold it together for three-and-a-half more years of this level of presidential overreach, this amount of hatred and division.
But we do know this. We sure don't want to see any kind of repeat of those scenes in Chicago. Everyone had better pick their words carefully.
Nobody can argue that Donald Trump, as president of the United States, does not have the authority to deport those who crossed the border without authorization and who have received due process in a court of law. Nobody can argue that he did not disclose his intention to do so during the presidential campaign. Nobody who believes in the rule of law can say that federal agents should be physically prevented from following their orders (withholding cooperation is something entirely different). And nobody can say that the Trump administration is the first to remove such people.
But the brute nature of the methodology, the scale of the operation and the horrifying accompanying theatrics should shock every American, even those who consider themselves part of the MAGA movement. They supposedly signed up for American greatness, not abject cruelty. This is the danger of a fundamentally performative president, a leader for whom the political benefits of calling in the National Guard clearly outranks the far greater risks, which is that such a decision destabilizes a city and forces everyone into ever more extreme positions.
The scorched earth rhetoric from federal officials has been like something out of dystopian fiction. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, posted on social media that 'this is a fight to save civilization.' On the contrary, Mr. Miller. His ultimate boss, Trump, said 'a once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,' which is so much balderdash, mere red-meat language designed for political purposes and not effective immigration policy, which requires disincentives, sure, but also nuance, complexity and a sense of the historical realities.
There was a mandate from the American people for securing the border, deporting those who break or have broken the law and for fixing immigration. There was no mandate for brutality.
We lay some of the blame for what happened in Los Angeles this weekend on both political parties, given that it is at least in part a consequence of their collective failure to pass any kind of comprehensive immigration reform that would have secured the borders, prevented overwhelming numbers of unauthorized folks entering and offered a fair and compassionate solution for the many people here without legal permission who have lived productive U.S. for years. That's on Democrats, who allowed the border to get out of control during the first part of the Biden administration, as well as Republicans.
Many left-wing Democrats came to favor de facto open borders over the past several years, or at least no criminal-style enforcements of immigration violations, and Democrats knew they could not get that past a plurality of Americans in a general election. Rather than confront that internal division and reach a compromise, they punted for years. By the time Trump had total fealty from the Republican Party and could (and did) derail any such effort merely for his own political gain, it was too late. And now, with cruel, scorched-earth zealots in charge, we have the worst of all possible worlds for America's great cities and for many people whose only crime was trying to escape poverty and seeking out a better life.
Anyone with even an ounce of common sense could see that Trump's apparent intention of deporting 12 million people in the country without legal permission, concentrated as they are in the core of America's biggest cities, is both unethical and impractical, given the above. The current rhetoric makes no distinction between recent arrivals and those who have lived here productively for years, and it paints otherwise law-abiding folks with the same brush as criminals, which is un-American.
Leaders of blue cities and governors of blue states now find themselves caught somewhere between wanting to stop these deportations, over which they know they have no formal legal control, and their Welcoming Cities ordinances that forbid only cooperation with federal authorities. They, too, have political considerations to weigh. But they should not be the prime concern.
Caught in the middle are local police departments, whose job is not to aid federal immigration officers but to maintain law and order. On the one hand, they have to deal with the tactics of an increasingly militarized ICE, as aided by the National Guard. They also have to deal with progressive politicians ready to accuse them of cooperation at every juncture. No, cops should not leave when protesters (or rioters, depending on your preferred politics) take to the streets. They have a different job to do, which is to keep our cities safe.
So we are serving advance notice, Mr. President, that we don't want to see the National Guard, or the Marines, or any other branch of the U.S. military on the streets of Chicago. We urge you to dial down the rhetoric and the threats and we call on Democratic officials to do the same, which is not to say they should refrain from disagreeing with the manner of these actions. We urge those in your administration to negotiate with local officials, to treat everyone with dignity and respect, and to understand, for the love of God, that our children are watching and listening.