It is almost the end of holy week, the annual Christian commemoration of betrayal, crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. The faithful of the whole world attend the services to hear the Gospel, see the reconstructions of key moments in the last seven days of his life and rejoice in the good news – or at least have a big brunch with the family and let children look for chocolate eggs and rabbits.
Easter is supposed to be a happy moment, but everything I can think of, it is the people who persecuted Jesus. At a time when Christians are called upon to embrace the message of Jesus of love and charity, our president continues to revel in a cruelty which is, well, biblical.
Even if you are not a Christian, you probably know the words and characters of Holy Week that illustrate the worst of humanity.
Judas, for example, is a traitor as terrible as the apostle who gave Jesus to the authorities. We accuse people to “wash their hands” when they are in charge of a bad situation but refuse responsibility – a reference to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who ordered the execution of Jesus despite his initial reluctance, as described in the Gospels. Commentators sometimes compare dictators to Herod, the king who ordered the massacre of children in his quest to kill the child Christ.
President Trump embodies all of this and worse with his campaign against undocumented immigrants and all that is associated with them at a distance.
Trump is trying to deny the citizenship of the right of birth, which is guaranteed by the 14th amendment, to babies born of parents who are not citizens or permanent legal residents. He seeks to cancel legal status for hundreds of thousands of migrants and illegally ordered the people of the country to register with the federal government under the threat of fines and prosecution. He also placed thousands of migrants on the list of deaths of the social security administration so that they were financially stifled from the country.
And we are only three months after his second term.
His subordinates see his macabre joy by making life miserable for undocumented immigrants.
The interior security secretary, Kristi Noem, has live deportations while wearing makeup better suited to a real housewife and sporting a brilliant rolex watch. The day of Valentine’s Day, the official Instagram account of the White House said: “The roses are red / purple are blue / come here illegally / and we will expel you”, with a pink background, hearts and heads of Trump and his border tsar, Tom Homan. Earlier this month, the White House shared a video on X of migrants handcuffed by ice agents, marked at “Na Na Hey Hey (kiss goodbye).”
This wickedness reached a crescendo with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a national Salvadoran who crossed the border at the age of 16 to escape the violence of the gangs. An immigration judge rejected his asylum application in 2019 but allowed him to stay in the United States since then, he got married, had a child and obtained a work permit.
Abrego Garcia is now imprisoned in Salvador, has moved from the United States without a court hearing and called an “terrorist” and an MS-13 member by Trump, even if he was never found guilty of a crime. The Trump administration admits that expulsion was an “administrative error”.
Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen, on the right, speaks with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in a hotel Thursday in the capital of El Salvador.
(American senator press office Chris Van Hollen / Associated Press)
But instead of doing everything they can return to the United States, they do everything possible not to – damage the law. And fucking the human cost of letting Abrego Garcia languish in a prison system where prisoners are piled up in cells and are increasingly used as a photo of the Republican legislators.
Don’t believe me. Federal judges have described Trump’s actions as “illegal” or “shocking”, a judge qualifying the insistence of the administration that he has no obligation to make Abrego Garcia in the United States a “error”.
There is a reason why Trump uses illegal immigration to push the law on the limits of America, if not spitting them downright: a large piece of the American population encourages it. His supporters believe that they are not affected – that only targeted people are criminals. And even if immigrants without a criminal record are mistreated – like Garcia and hundreds of others who did not have the chance to challenge their deportations – they did it anyway, because they should never have come to this country.
If Trump’s advisers are his apostles in the sale of his anti-immigrant crusade, the Pontius Pilate in this passionate game is the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, adored by the American as ultra of modern Latin-American men. Unlike the Roman prelate, however, Bukele is more than happy to keep his hands dirty with unfair persecution.
In an oval office conversation this week, Trump said that only Bukele could return Abrego Garcia to the United States, and President Salvadoran promised that it would not happen. When Trump suggested that Salvador should build more prisons to keep American citizens, Bukele has accepted, adding that to “release” the American people, “you have to imprison them”.
On social networks, Bukele made fun of a recent meeting between Abrego Garcia and the Senator of Maryland Chris Van Hollen, crunchy that Garcia had “miraculously raised” “death camps” and now sipped the Margaritas … in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!
Instead of shiving at these words, too many supporters of Trump – many of whom are professor Christians – simply raising their shoulders.
The persecution of Abrego Garcia and other expelled migrants reminds me of another Christian – the German theologian Martin Niemöller, who wrote the poem that begins: “First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak – because I was not a socialist.”
Niemöller denounced the complacency of his compatriots while the Nazis reached power by first targeting the most despised groups of German society. The prose is as famous as cliché, but Niemöller’s message is the same as us, Christians, take heart during Holy Week.
Tyrans never want to stop. It is only by standing with the least of us that we can win – if not, the evil rules.
So what’s the Americans?
California Daily Newspapers
