The Trump Administration recently announced the arrest and summary deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants, apparently based upon unproven allegations of criminality, under the guise of the “Alien Enemies Act” of 1789. It is, however, indisputable that the archaic Statute is relevant solely in times of war and respecting the Nation’s enemies.
The extrajudicial, and unconstitutional event was shockingly redolent of the Hitler regime in the 1930s, in that it was conducted in an arbitrary, fascistic manner, employing Gestapo-style, strong-arm tactics and without due process. The Venezuelan immigrants were arrested, manhandled, handcuffed, shackled, and head-shaved, without the benefit of the usual and appropriate procedure of, legally stated, valid charges, indictment, right of attorney, and a fair trial by an impartial jury, as mandated by our Nation’s criminal law strictures, and with the initial assumption of “innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Such autocratic, fascistic, and shockingly Kafka-like action of the Trump Administration and its ersatz “Storm Troopers,” ICE, set off a tectonic shock to mainstream American citizens, traditionally imbued with the governmental procedures of due process under the law; Constitutional and Statutory Law. Instead of the mandatory application of the Nation’s equitable criminal procedure, the reductive determination of prima facie guilt was summarily concluded by the ubiquitous presence of tattoos on the arrested individuals. Notably, and, perhaps, relevantly, the only empirically identifiable tattoos are those burnt into the arms of those we have encountered who are the singular survivors of the Jewish death camps in Europe during the Second World War.
In addition to the absence of any rational determination of guilt, the abhorrent procedure was shockingly and distastefully redolent of the arrest of German Jews by the Gestapo in 1930’s Germany, easily identified by their mandatory wearing of a sewn “Star of David” on their outside apparel; and the determined and painful cry, of the survivors, “Never Again!” Such a Gestapo atmosphere has no acceptable place in our Democratic Republic, albeit the election of an egoistic, amoral, self-described “Dictator For One Day.”
Two slim but welcome rays of hope dispelled the dark hopelessness of the event. The first was the judicial grant of an injunction against this atavistic evil procedure by a responsible and dedicated Federal Judge, and the second was the notable relief experienced when Chief Justice Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Administration’s absurdly autocratic-based application to sanction (“impeach”) the dedicated jurist who granted the injunction.
We cannot refrain from noting the telling fact that the Presidential Cabinet’s new Secretary of Defense, irrespective of his known toxic alcoholism, sexual abuse and lack of experience was, nonetheless, selected by Donald Trump to oversee the ubiquitous and vital operations of the Pentagon, the Army, the Navy, Airforce, Marines and other existentially significant Federal and State services, has publically revealed numerous emphatically expressed, large body tattoos, emblematic of his adamant support of White, Christian Militias, the latter inarguably constituting an ongoing serious threat to our Democracy.
-p.
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