Human Rights
For months now, as part of its effort to justify and rally support for deportation, the Trump administration has cleverly referred to all undocumented immigrants as “criminals.” That strategy is as grossly inaccurate as it is brutally manipulative. Consider the facts behind this confusing mess.
Entering the U.S. by unlawful means, crossing the border without inspection at a legal point of entry, is indeed a crime. But it is a misdemeanor (8 U.S.C. § 1325). Reentry after deportation, crossing the border without inspection a second time, however, does rise to a felony (8 U.S.C. § 1326).
By contrast, overstaying the expiration on one’s visa (entering the country legally with inspection but remaining beyond the term of the visa) is a civil—not criminal—offense. According to the Center For Migration Studies, these people make up over 40 percent of the undocumented population in the United States. They are not criminals. They have not committed either a misdemeanor or a felony.
Congressional passage of Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” provides the latest evidence that human greed, despite its primitive nature, remains alive and well.
Perhaps most noticeably, the legislation provides for over $3 trillion in tax cuts that disproportionately help the wealthy and their corporations. This largesse is facilitated by slashing over $1.4 trillion in healthcare and food assistance for low-income Americans and increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion. Estimates reveal that at least 16 million Americans will lose health care coverage and 7 million people (including 2 million children) will lose food aid or have their food aid cut significantly. Meanwhile, according to the Yale Budget Lab, the nation’s top 0.1 percent―people with an annual income over $3.3 million―will receive tax cuts of $103,500 on average. Condemning the legislation, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared simply that it “takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.”
Following is a statement from Lynn Tramonte, Executive Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, after the deportation of Cincinnati teenager Emerson Colindres.
"They did it. The Trump administration deported Emerson Colindres. What kind of cold, callous heart do you have to have deport a young man like him, at the start of his future? Like his whole family, Emerson was on a path to a U visa. He lived most of his life here. His teachers love him, his teammates, his coaches. This didn't have to happen. The federal government could have made a different choice; they could have let him stay.
People move — is a part of life as old as time, as basic as breathing. But U.S. immigration laws have been written through scapegoating, not sensible debate. They are not logical, and do not work the way they did over a century ago, when my relatives came to this country. They also do not work the way most people think they should, or want them to.
The images on TV news are misleading. They can’t be otherwise. TV news seeks out the most dramatic visuals, and those are likely to be small fires and burning vehicles, police cars damaged, and riot-clad police.
These are images associated with violence, with insurrection, with riot. They help create a narrative, but they do little to explain what is actually happening in Los Angeles — and elsewhere. They obscure the truth by eliding complex discussion. And they feed into right-wing talking points that Democratic cities and states like L.A. and California are ungovernable, and that the federal government has to step in to restore order and protect average working Americans from insurrection.
Let’s be clear about what is happening, however. Federal immigration agents — masked and in military-style garb — descended on Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs to conduct workplace raids and the mass round-ups of undocumented workers. The communities responded with protests and active efforts to deny agents access to immigrant workers.
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First Things First
We want to take a moment to say we know this has been a really hard week. So many Ohioans have been grappling with bad news that dramatically affects their lives. For example, in the last few days alone:
On June 7, 2025, CNN will broadcast—on tape, from a live performance direct from Broadway--George Clooney’s homage to Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck, which is welcome news for audiences who are not able, or willing, to fork over the $900 plus fees for a decent orchestra seat to the stage version of Clooney’s 2005 docu-drama Good Night, and Good Luck.
For American progressives wallowing in a deep Trump funk, the callback to the integrity of Murrow and his gutsy take-down of Sen. Joseph McCarthy on the pioneering news magazine See It Now may offer hope that journalism can repeat its treasured origin story. The legend is imprinted in the famous illustration by Ben Shahn, Edward R. Murrow Slaying the Dragon of McCarthy, a depiction of the noble paladin killing the beast who threatened the realm. In the Clooney iteration, no one needs a playbill to read McCarthy as a stand-in for Donald Trump, but Murrow has no obvious successor ready to suit up in the new media ecosystem. Morrow and his like have gone the way of vacuum tubes and rabbit ears.
Has heroism died at Harvard? Could today’s students emulate what transpired at Harvard in 1938? In that year, there was an inspiring event that has been conveniently laid aside by the present faculty—and which deserves to be better known. It occurred on November 16, 1938. At noon that day, some 500 Harvard and Radcliffe students crowded into Emerson Hall to express their outrage at Hitler’s Kristallnacht.
And what was Kristallnacht? It was the Nazi “Night of Broken Glass.” Exactly a week earlier, on November 9, 1938, Hitler’s feared SS Blackshirts had launched his opening crusade against Jews in Germany, with a frightening terrorist act. Following his annexation of Austria and the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, Hitler had organized a looting and smashing of the glass windows of Jew-owned stores in Berlin and across Germany. It included the murder of several hundred Jews. Historians view it as a prelude to the Final Solution, the genocide that would claim the lives of six million Jews.
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In April, several federal agencies brought about arresting a Columbus man they claim is a member of Tren de Aragua, without offering any details . Since then, they've been blasting his picture all over social media.
When I saw his blurred face and rumpled clothes, flanked by federal agents in riot gear, my heart sank. I didn't see anyone to fear. I saw a regular man at the dawn of what should have been another day of work. In his blurred face, I also saw the ghost of a person who might soon be “disappeared” to a torture camp in El Salvador, by our own US government.