Choosing Not to Look Away

 This has been a very special week for me. On Wednesday, I passed my comprehensive exams and am now officially "ABD" at Georgia State University. Yesterday, I met up with a co-editor of the NCPH blog History@Work and the current NCPH president and Director of Education at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights to see their new and updated exhibitions.  Visiting those exhibitions, and reflecting on the centuries of American history I had just mastered, I was reminded of the precarity of circumstances that protect what we have collectively determined are human rights. There is no doubt that the waves of fervor for human rights protections that crested right after World War II and again in the heady years of democratic victory over the Cold War have broadly waned in recent years, but that makes bearing witness all the more imperative.

That's why I am choosing to visit Lumpkin, GA, again tomorrow as a volunteer with El Refugio. The last time I visited in person was January 2020, after which I corresponded with a man incarcerated there until his release in April of that year. Since then, the number of immigrants in ICE detention has increased dramatically, with a 75% increase in just the past year. After the public backlash against its aggressive city-by-city immigration enforcement raids, the Trump administration has turned to less visible ways to expose immigrants, regardless of the current or former legality of their status, to the possibility of running afoul of the law and thus becoming subject to mandatory detention, a practice that ought to be considered "cruel and unusual punishment" when held up to the light of U.S. rights-based jurisprudence. These tactics are intentionally subtle, designed to be harder to notice for those not directly affected. 

Immigrant Detention Curve, 2019 - 2026, from Statista

The goal is to sew fear and increase "self-deportations." Even as specific cases pull at the heart strings of even the most dedicated proponents of the administration's anti-immigrant crusade, the underlying policy crafted by Stephen Miller aims to curtail immigration across the board regardless of the original claims (albeit false) of focusing on "criminality." If you change the laws to make it easier for immigrants to break them, then you get more "criminal immigrants."

This is an ugly moment, and more people need to see it for what it is. I will learn more about the state of affairs in Georgia tomorrow. I am grateful for the dedication of thousands of people across the country who insist on paying attention and reporting the truth. It is only by exposing the cost of these policies (both human and financial) that we have any hope of ending them and planting the seeds for what I can only imagine now as a just future.