Marietta Daily Journal

November 20, 2015

Kevin Foley

 

Flying to Los Angeles a few weeks ago, I thought about Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to round up and deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America.

If you have never traveled to Los Angeles from Atlanta, you approach the airport from the east and begin flying over the L.A. suburbs starting at San Bernardino, which lies about 65 miles from downtown Los Angeles. That gives you some idea of the sheer vastness of greater Los Angeles’ 5,000 square miles.

Looking down at what had to be millions of houses and apartment complexes, I tried to visualize how identifying, processing and deporting the estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants living in metro Los Angeles might look.

As we began our final approach, I concluded such an undertaking is utter fantasy that only the most gullible voter would believe possible.

America has rounded up human beings in the past, starting with slaves brought here against their will from Africa where they were bought and sold like cattle. Later, Native Americans were forced off their ancestral lands and onto reservations. The “Trail of Tears” was but one episode in this long-running tragedy.

During World War II, we rounded up Japanese-Americans, took away their property, and caged them in remote internment camps. German-Americans, meantime, suffered no such injustice.

In the 1950s, America launched “Operation Wetback,” which brutally deported hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.

Nowadays, most right-minded Americans understand race was the common denominator behind these atrocities and are ashamed they happened here.

Yet Donald Trump promises to repeat this disgraceful history if elected president.

“You’re going to have a deportation force,” the Republican presidential candidate told an interviewer, “and you’re going to do it humanely, and you’re going to bring the country — and, frankly, the people, because you have some excellent, wonderful people, some fantastic people that have been here for a long period of time.”

Like most of what Trump sputters, the last half of his statement makes no sense, but the first half is, frankly, chilling.

In picturing Trump’s “deportation force” deployed throughout a sprawling Los Angeles, I envision something that looks an awful lot like the Nazi Schutzstaffel (“Protection Squadron”) or more familiarly, SS, and the Gestapo secret police who rounded up Jews, political opponents, intellectuals, homosexuals and everyone else Hitler deemed “undesirable.”

I see families torn apart as men, women and children are dragged from their homes in the dead of night with only what they can carry. They’re held in concentration camp-like “detention centers” and “processed” by uniformed clerks.

Eventually, armed guards herd them onto buses with bars on the windows and they’re driven to some military airfield where they’re “humanely” loaded by other armed guards into 747s bound for some remote airport south of the border.

All that’s missing, frankly, are the snarling German Shepherds.

Having missed many undocumented immigrants in their first sweep, hundreds of deportation force police go door-to-door telling family, friends and neighbors it’s their “patriotic duty” to turn in “aliens.”

When that doesn’t work, the threats and intimidation follow: “Listen, Senora, if you don’t want to find yourself on the next plane to Oaxaca, you better start talking! Where’s Diego hiding?!”

All that’s missing, frankly, are the black leather coats.

Meantime, Trump’s deportation force accountants are busy calculating the value of the homes, furnishings, cars, bank accounts and other property appropriated from the deported as “criminal forfeitures.”

And this nightmarish scenario plays out in cities across America, from sea to shining sea, including that bastion of freedom, hope and justice, Washington D.C.

The nativists might applaud Trump’s final solution, but those of us who look at undocumented immigrants and see desperate human beings trying to improve the lives of their families are appalled that someone aspiring to be the leader of the free world could suggest something so immoral and, frankly, so insane.

Yes, the undocumented immigrants committed broke our law in entering the country illegally. But our legal system also affords mercy. Let them come forward and pay a substantial fine. Perhaps they also perform a term of public service.

Let them pay federal, state and local taxes instead of accepting wages under the table from dishonest employers. Tell them if they’re convicted of a felony, they’ll face deportation.

Let’s at long last acknowledge the reality they are here and give them the opportunity to be productive guest workers while learning English. Eventually, put them on a path to citizenship after they satisfy their public debt.

You may call that “amnesty.” I call it, frankly, the American way.

Kevin Foley is an author, writer and public relations executive who lives in Kennesaw.

Read more: The Marietta Daily Journal – Trump s final solution deportation force