When is the last time the U.S. government, or a fragment thereof, has truly been held accountable – not merely legally or politically, but morally accountable – for an act of violence, for its addiction to violence? Ever?
And what might that even mean?
These are not questions I’ve ever even asked until a few hours ago, when I began learning about a lawsuit that has been filed against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE director David Venturella. Technically, it’s a freedom of speech lawsuit, but it’s also so much more than that. At least that’s how it seemed to me, the more I learned about it.
The suit pulls back horrible January and the invasion of Minneapolis, a.k.a., Operation Metro Surge, when armed and masked members of ICE and Customs and Border Protection began occupying the Twin Cities for the purpose of snatching and deporting (“allegedly”) undocumented immigrants, creating immense fear and chaos everywhere, and leading to huge protests.
As everyone knows, two of the protesters were murdered: Renee Good on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24. This was too much. The nation was outraged. The murders, combined with the fact that most of the arrestees were found to be in the U.S. legally, quieted down the invasion – though hardly ending the arrests and deportations.
Five months later, David Streever, of Rochester, N.Y., was contacted – much to his stunned surprise – by agents from the Department of Homeland Security, who gave him a “Warning Notice: You May Be in Violation of Federal Law.”
Turns out, many months earlier, in the wake of the two protest murders, he had sent an email, titled “What’ Next,” to Todd Lyons, who was the acting ICE director at the time. As quoted in the New York Times, this is part of what Streever wrote:
The director “will never know peace (and) will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher” – referencing the Nazi SS security chief, who is considered to be a principal architect of the Holocaust.
“Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness,” the email read.
“You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
Sit with these words for a while. Yeah, I found them shocking. I even momentarily wondered if they had gone too far. But notice: There’s no actual threat in the words. Instead, the email is both a moral condemnation and a psycho-spiritual warning. Murder always comes back to haunt the perpetrator. As Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is filing the freedom-of-speech suit, put it: This is not a threat in any way, but a plea to the ICE director to recognize what he has done. And, I would add, take responsibility for it, rather than try to make it vanish by turning the deaths – plus the shattered lives of thousands of deportees – into abstractions.
Indeed, Streever’s email challenges the basic, media-perpetuated belief that nationally committed deaths – mostly via war – are indeed an abstraction, and the more there are, the more abstract they become. I’m glad the email has gone public. This is a far bigger issue than freedom of speech, but the lawsuit is making this forgotten exchange public.
“But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
This applies collectively. In the last three years, about 60 detainees have died in detention cells, according to ICE’s own statistics, described on their website as “detained alien deaths.” But these deaths are not abstractions. Nor are the thousands of alleged “aliens” arrested – pulled from their families – every day. Can we open the national soul, just as Streever pleaded with the ICE director to open his soul? This means being aware that the consequences come home . . . and beyond that, those who died were loving people who deserved to live.
Consider these words of Bita Iuliano, writing recently about the military jets flying over the nation’s capital, where she lives, that were part of the country’s 250th birthday celebration. Seven hours of flyovers were scheduled for July 4. “These flyovers,” she writes, are “an exercise of an illusion of force, domination, and strength. All to further prop up hyper nationalism and militarism. But we were lucky it was just for a ‘show.’”
She went on: “As an Iranian immigrant, as I watched my children tremble and cover their ears at the roar of bombers and fighter jets over our home, so loud the walls vibrated, I was struck by a haunting duality. My heart broke because I knew what that sound means to children just like them back in Iran.”
The Iranian children, she pointed out, knew, as they covered their ears and cuddled, that this could be the last day of their lives. For too many of them, that’s exactly what it was.
This is militarism. The enemy dead are hidden behind patriotic propaganda and soon vanish from collective awareness. They’re subhuman; they’re evil. They’re radical leftists. We have no choice but to kill them, over and over and over. At least 7,300 Iranians (so far). More than 70,000 Palestinians.
People have a right to protest this, to voice their opinions. They also have the right to make moral values public – no matter how much fear this creates for those who are “above” such values.