Would my mother be stopped at the border?
How MAGA immigration hate powers paranoia
Jeffrey Denny
In our four years together, my beloved and I have had only one tiff.
It was just last week, mild, short, and mostly out of frustration, not anger. She’s a psychologist and I do communications. So we’re good at discussing our differences constructively.
Our tiff arose from Trump’s immigration crackdown. And Medium.com.
We were multitasking, planning a Canadian getaway (not due to Trump), while reading about Trump’s latest illegal actions against legal immigrants.
She worried that Trump’s SS might stop us at U.S. reentry, check my phone, open my Medium app, see how I’ve been critical of Trump, and detain us. She asked me to delete the app at least for our return.
“That’s paranoid,” I huffed like HuffPo. “They’re not coming after Clooney’s doppelgänger and established citizen like me. If they start arresting me for criticizing the president, which is not just my right but my job as a citizen, then our nation is already gone. Self-censorship is what dictators want. I’m not deleting anything out of fear of fear itself.”
I winked “already gone” to lighten the mood because we both like The Eagles. For good measure, I added, “and then you’ll have to eat your lunch all by yourself.”
This darkened the mood.
What came across from my high steed was that I didn’t care about her feelings, however ungrounded in fact or statistically unlikely. While an enlightened gent, I committed the stereotypical boneheaded Male Error #1.
Lest you insensitively throw the misandrist card that, yeah, all men are stupid like me, a guy pal said I was wrong. I needed to apologize and agree to delete the Medium app.
“But, but,” I sputtered like a Trump cabinet appointee confronting the Senate, “That’s like erasing my agency and identity!”
“That’s globalizing,” my pal replied. “Blowing up a small thing into a universal principle.” Which is a losing game. Like love, according to the late Amy Winehouse.
So I caught, defeathered, marinated, and grilled crow from my cornfield and ate it by apologizing to my beloved for being dismissive of her concerns and promising to delete the app for our reentry. Or at least remove the face recognition on my phone because Trump’s jack-booted government thugs will need a warrant to open it.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “The likelihood we’ll be stopped at the border is practically zero.” She was in a different mood. She won.
Like all other things marriage-wise, this led to my mother.
True story: She came to America in the early 1950s as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria at age 12 with her parents and three siblings.
They lost everything in WWII, even their home. They were living in an abandoned military barracks with other families, blankets hung between them for privacy.
Catholic Charities brought them to America and gave her parents jobs in the church — her father as a janitor, her mother by working in a nunnery.
My mother married an American at 17, had “Catholic twins”— my sister and me by age 18 — and divorced my father, probably when I was four. I don’t remember much. She never spoke of it. She remarried when my sister and I were in grade school. And later divorced that guy.
Along the way, my mother finally applied for citizenship, took the test that, judging from their ignorant beliefs and comments, many immigrant-hating MAGAs could never pass, and proudly became a citizen.
This is a big moment for immigrants becoming Americans. I once helped with remarks for a top U.S. official presiding over a citizenship ceremony. He talked about his journey as he celebrated theirs. Let me tell you: The gathering would’ve been a dream for ophthalmologists treating dry eye syndrome because there wasn’t one in the room.
But recalling my late mother’s citizenship moment, it dawned on me: What if Trump was president when she came to America?
She emigrated quite literally from a foreign enemy, one that formally declared war on America and killed — even mass murdered — young Americans fighting for U.S. and global freedom (not like chicken-hawk righteous MAGA armchair patriots). You can’t get more foreign enemy than Nazi Germany.
Would Trump America let my mother in? Or later detain, deport, and send her off to a prison camp to suffer and die? Would he and his MAGA mob deny her fundamental American rights, declaring her guilty until she could prove her innocence?
Would ICE invade her home, or church, or workplace, demanding to check her papers like the Nazis did back home?
What if she struggled with a bureaucratic paperwork SNAFU because an authoritarian who rose to power by fueling and fooling populist resentment against government slashed it willy-nilly to centralize power, like a certain Reich Chancellor son of a Schicklgruber?
If my mother couldn’t produce the right papers, should she have gone back to war-torn Europe and done immigration the right way? Like MAGAs declare their grandparents did, even without proof of it?
As Trump fights 14th Amendment birthright citizenship to please MAGA immigrant descendants who demand closing the borders because the new workers who power our economy aren’t white like them, could I be stopped at the border, detained, and deported? If I can’t prove my immigrant mother was in America legally when I was born?
Yep. That’s paranoid.
But as the late Hunter S. Thompson said, which is even truer under Trump, “There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.”
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
