It is almost the end of Holy Week, the annual Christian commemoration of betrayal, crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. The faithful worldwide attend the services to listen to the Gospel, see recreations of the key moments in the last seven days of their life and rejoice in good news, or at least have a great brunch with the family and let children look for eggs and chocolate bunny.
Easter is supposed to be a happy moment, but all I can think about is the people who persecuted Jesus. At a time when Christians are called to embrace the message of love and charity of Jesus, our president continues to delight in a cruelty that is, good, biblical.
Even if you are not a Christian, you are probably familiar with the sayings and characters of Holy Week that illustrate the worst of humanity.
A Judas, for example, is a traitor as terrible as the apostle who gave Jesus to the authorities. We accuse people of “washing their hands” when they are in charge of a bad situation, but we reject responsibility, a reference to Poncio Pilato, the Roman governor who ordered the execution of Jesus despite his initial reluctance, as described in the Gospels. The commentators sometimes compare dictators with Herod, the king who ordered the massacre of children in his search to kill the baby Christ.
President Trump is embodying all this and worse with his campaign against undocumented immigrants and anything remotely associated with them.
Trump tries to deny the citizenship of birth law, which is guaranteed by the 14th amendment, to babies born of parents who are not permanent legal citizens or residents. He is trying to terminate legal status for hundreds of thousands of migrants and has ordered people in the country to be illegally registered with the federal government under the threat of fines and prosecution. He has also placed thousands of migrants in the list of dead people from the Social Security Administration, so they will be financially outside the country.
And we are only three months in his second term.
His subordinates simulate their geanfuga joy by making the miserable life for undocumented immigrants.
The Secretary of National Security, Kristi Noem, has twittened deportations live while wearing a more suitable makeup for a real housewife and wears a bright rolex watch. The Valentine's Day, the official Instagram account of the White House said: “The roses are red/violet are blue/come here illegally/and we will deport it”, complete with a pink background, hearts and shooting in Trump's head and his border tsar, Tom Homan. Earlier this month, the White House shared a video about X of handcuffed migrants escorted by ice agents, noted “Na Na Hey Hey (Know it goodbye).”
This evil has reached a crescendo with Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran citizen who crossed the border at age 16 to escape the violence of gangs. An immigration judge denied his asylum application in 2019, but allowed him to remain in the United States since then, he has married, he had a son and obtained a work permit.
Abrego García is now imprisoned in El Salvador, expelled from the United States without a judicial hearing and called a “terrorist” and MS-13 member by Trump, although he has never been convicted of a crime. The Trump administration admits that deporting it was an “administrative error.”
The Senator of Maryland, Chris Van Hollen, on the right, speaks with Kilmar Abrego García in a hotel on Thursday in the capital of El Salvador.
(American senator press office Chris van Hollen / Associated Press)
But instead of doing everything possible to return it to the US, they are doing everything possible to not, it is damn the law. And damn, the human cost of leaving Abrego García to languish in a prison system where inmates are crowded in cells and are being used more and more like photographs by Republican legislators.
Don't take my word for it. The federal judges have described Trump's actions as “illegal” or “shocking”, with a judge who calls the insistence of the administration that he does not have the obligation to return Abrego García to the United States a “fallacy.”
There is a reason why Trump is using illegal immigration to promote the law of the limits of America, if not, spit them on them: a large part of the American population is encouraging it. Their supporters think that they are not affected, that the only people attacked are criminals. And even if immigrants without criminal history are mistreated, such as Garcia and hundreds of others who did not have the opportunity to dispute their deportations, they had it anyway, since they should never have come to this country.
If Trump's advisors are his apostles in the sale of his anti -immigrant crusade, Pontius Pilate in this passion game is the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, worshiped by US law as the Ne Plus ultra of Latin American men of modern Latin America. However, unlike Roman prelate, Bukele is more than happy to keep his hands dirty with an unfair persecution.
In an Oval office chat this week, Trump said only Bukele could return Abrego Garcia to the United States, and the Salvadoran president promised that this would not happen. When Trump suggested that El Salvador should build more prisons to keep American citizens, Bukele agreed, adding that to “free” the US people, “you have to imprison some.”
In social networks, Bukele made fun of a recent meeting between Abrego García and the senator of Maryland Chris van Hollen, cracking that Abrego García had “arisen miraculously” from the “extermination fields” and “now drank margaritas … in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”
Instead of shaking before these words, too many Trump supporters, many of whom are professors, simply shrug.
The persecution of Abrego García and other deported migrants reminds me of another Christian, German theologian Martin Niemöller, who wrote the poem that begins: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak, because I was not a socialist.”
Niemöller was denouncing the complacency of his compatriots when the Nazis went up to power by first attacking the most despised groups in German society. Prose is as famous as Cliché, but Niemöller's message is the same as Christians took seriously during Holy Week.
Tyrants never want to stop. Only by standing with at least among us can win, otherwise, evil rules.
So what is, Americans?
