Every Fourth of July, Erwin Knoll, the late editor of The Progressive magazine, would host a party. He’d grill burgers and brats and tack copies of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights to trees in his backyard in Madison, Wisconsin.
The U.S. government has never had a fiercer critic than Knoll. And yet, having come to New York City as a child after fleeing Nazis in his native Austria in 1939, he cherished these foundational documents of American democracy, even though his adopted nation has always fallen short of its lofty ideals.
I think about Knoll’s July Fourth celebrations, some of which I had the good fortune to attend, as I contemplate what it means to celebrate the nation’s 249th birthday during a period that will deservedly be remembered as one of the most shameful in U.S. history.
Hard-working immigrants arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in workplaces, courthouses, churches, and schools. Farm workers chased in the fields. Foreign students scooped off the street and thrown into detention facilities for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.
President Donald Trump said he would be going after murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals. But immigrants are in fact far less likely to fall into this category than those born in the United States, and so the dragnet has been drawn around everyone who lacks legal status (and even some U.S. citizens). Of the more than 200,000 people booked into ICE detention facilities between last October 1 and mid-June, 93 percent were never convicted of a violent crime, and 65 percent had no criminal history whatsoever.
Consider the case of Narciso Barranco, a landscaper in Santa Ana, California. On Saturday, June 21, while doing some landscaping work outside of an IHOP, he was accosted by a group of heavily armed and masked federal immigration agents. They chased and pepper-sprayed him, threw him to the ground and punched him in the head repeatedly as he cried out in pain.
Videos of Barranco’s mistreatment have been seen around the world. The Department of Homeland Security claims he attacked agents with his weed whacker, which the available evidence does not substantiate.
Barranco, forty-eight years old, originally from Mexico, has been living, working, and paying taxes in the United States since the 1990s. His three sons are all U.S. Marines, including two on active duty. He was in the process of applying for what’s known as parole in place, which permits family members of active-duty military to stay in the United States on an annually renewable basis.
“I feel betrayed,” said Alejandro Barranco, Narciso’s oldest son, to NBC News. “My dad has no criminal history. He wasn’t doing anything bad. He was just working. The way they attacked him, I don’t think it’s right.” Alejandro, a former Marine who served in Afghanistan, noted that his father’s first concern when they spoke was to make sure the IHOP manager knew Alejandro would be taking over and the job would get done.
“It doesn’t make me love my country less,” Alejandro told MSNBC. “It makes me love it more because I see all these people standing up for my dad, and it’s just [what] this country is all about, you know, coming together as a community, loving each other and helping each other out so that this country can look the best, whether it’s landscape or just people in general.” As of this writing, Narciso Barranco remains in custody at an ICE facility in Los Angeles.
One day, after we have gagged on the bitter fruit of expelling essential workers who were doing jobs most Americans don’t want—cleaning hotel rooms, working in meat processing plants, taking care of the sick and elderly—we will look back on this chapter of our history with collective regret. Already, millions of Americans have signaled their rejection of Trump’s policies, taking to the streets all across the nation. Millions more will join them as the abject cruelty and unmitigated folly of his administration’s agenda becomes even more apparent.
So this Fourth of July, fire up that grill, post those copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and commit to bringing an end to this horror show as soon as possible.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive, and distributed by Tribune News Service.