What cost, all this fear?

Fear does not make us safe.

On the last day of May, a group of high school students were on their way to volleyball practice in Milford, Massachusetts. Three unmarked cars pulled up behind them and agents got out to interrogate them. High school students. By the time the incident was over, their 18 year old friend had been taken into custody. This student, who has been in this country since he was a young child, was set to graduate with his peers. Instead he is now incarcerated with an ever growing cohort of people whose only “crime” is being born in another country.

Imagine the impact on this young man who is now imprisoned and separated from family and friends. Imagine his fear, wondering if he will be deported and permanently separated from the place he calls home and the people he calls his community. Imagine the fear of his peers as they watched the abduction happen. And of course, the fear of so many other immigrants who wonder whether they will be next.

What cost, all this fear?

The fear abounds all over the country, and the fear is here too — right in my backyard.

Here in Massachusetts we have the images of an ICE agent in New Bedford using an axe to break in an immigrant’s car window or others walking around the Berkshires with guns and tactical gear searching for immigrants. Weapons carried by masked men charged with feeding the voracious appetite of an administration ever hungry for more power and control. Men empowered to rampage through communities and given license to enter schools and churches and homes and restaurants and courthouses in search of more immigrants to abduct. Men who operate under a system where arrest quotas are tantamount and success is measured in the number of people who are stripped of their freedoms.

And there doesn’t seem to be a limit to their cruelty. I am still haunted by the images of children being ripped from their families at the southern border during the first Trump administration. I was so worried that the evil practice of family separation would make a comeback in a second Trump regime. Of course it has, but now looks like children being left without their deported parents. It looks like using a grandchild to bait and arrest a Worcester, MA woman in a scene that traumatized all who witnessed it. It looks like a Texas mom being manhandled and handcuffed outside an immigration court as she cries over her son, wondering who will be there to pick him up at school. This image will also now haunt me forever.

So much trauma. And so much fear.

The fear is now causing people to stop going to work or send their kids to school. Local businesses that serve immigrant communities have seen a drop in customers and revenue. People are terrified to attend immigration related appointments for fear of being picked up by ICE and terrified they will get into trouble if they don’t follow immigration regulations.

The perpetration of so much violence and fear is horrendous, made even more so by the pride Trump takes in inflicting it. The propaganda videos of shaven and shackled men paraded for the camera and then stuffed into cages demonstrates the sheer depravity of this administration. The gloating and glee that is imbued in the glossy production of these films is indicative of how much fear itself is the goal.

Because that is what abusers do, use fear and hurt to elicit power and control. Our Abuser-in-Chief is an expert in this. And too many voters saw fit to give him a platform to wield fear — and he wields it like that ICE agent in New Bedford wielded his axe.

There is a steep price to be paid for all this fear. Immigrants themselves will pay with their freedom and possibly their lives as they perish in custody or back in the countries they fled. Their families will pay with their trauma and grief. They will pay with their decimated hopes for the future they wanted to build in this country. Their children (at least those who are not also deported) will pay in amounts impossible to quantify. Their communities — no OUR communities — will pay with the loss of friends, neighbors, and community members. Our economy will pay with the workers that provide services and goods that every community in the whole country needs.

The cost of all this fear, felt most acutely by those targeted by the evil machinations of a profoundly violent administration, will ultimately cost us all. And I don’t just mean economic cost. What happens to a country that is based on a foundation of fear? Where workers are afraid to go to work, children are afraid to go to school, and people start to question leaving their homes at all? Where masked men with guns can roam neighborhoods racially profiling folks in search of anyone that might “look like” an immigrant? Where so many of us question whether they are actually ICE agents or white supremacists taking advantage of the willfully induced chaos to cosplay law enforcement and terrorize people of color?

What kind of society does this make us?

If you are someone that has taken issue with immigrants coming to this country, I ask you whether you can truly be okay with what is happening now. Can you look at the video of a mom weeping because she won’t be there to pick up her son from school and think: yes, this is what’s needed for public safety? Can you think about the Milford, MA high school student who spent graduation day in an ICE cell and feel that this is what our country needs to be great?

For those of you who are white U.S. citizens like me, and are also horrified at what is being done to our immigrant friends and neighbors, we have a job. A few of them, actually. We have to tell the stories of harm and trauma to those who do not see it, or do not care to look at it. We have to counter the dehumanizing language pushed by a dehumanizing administration. We have to call out the false narrative that immigrants are criminals, a narrative that is being used to justify terrorizing them. And we have to refute the lie that widespread fear is good for public safety.

Fear will never make us safe.

Safety is created when people have the resources they need to thrive. It grows in communities that look out for each other, where social cohesion is robust and people see everyone else’s children as their responsibility. It is palpable in neighborhoods where everyone can walk the streets without worry. We have so much work to do in this country to actually achieve this for all people in all communities. But we will never get anywhere close to that in a society where our friends and neighbors fear being disappeared.

One more note about fear. Particularly for those of us who enjoy the safety of whiteness and citizenship. We have to think of what we will do when, not if, but when we see ICE in our community. It’s scary to think about, but think about it we must. In a recent article about ICE agents impersonating utility workers in Tucson, Alba Jaramillo of Tucson’s Human Rights Coalition said:

“We cannot leave it in the hands of law enforcement to do what’s right. We can’t even leave it in the hands of our elected officials to protect us or to make public statements. It’s up to us to organize and to use our Rapid Response network to defend our own community. We shouldn’t be living in a country where we have to do that but sadly, our protection is now left in our hands.”

It may be scary, but we have to be a part of that protective community. Read up on the rights of immigrants and their supporters, and practice what you will do when ICE comes to your community. Getting over our fear of doing so is a way we fight the harms of an administration that believes fear is the only answer.

Fear does not make us safe, but showing up for each other does.