thenation--2020-04-14--How the Deportation Machine Criminalizes Immigrants

At 20 years old , Michael had the look and build of a much younger person .
Across the back room of a dusty Harlem police precinct in 2010 , I could see defiance and fear in his eyes .
I suspected that he did not yet understand the stakes .
Deportation was the last thing on his mind .
Adapted from No Justice in the Shadows : How America Criminalizes Immigrants , by Alina Das .
Copyright © 2020 .
Available from Bold Type Books , an imprint of Hachette Book Group , Inc. A few hours earlier , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him to the precinct to answer a few questions .
My students and I had been representing Michael for a few months , so we went with him .
The staff had us wait in a side room , where we learned that Michael ’ s ex-boyfriend had accused him of stealing his cellphone .
As the detective deliberated over whether to arrest him , Michael ’ s anger bubbled over .
“ It ’ s not true , ” he said , his voice rising .
Michael had paid for the cellphone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ broke up , he had taken it back .
Michael began furiously texting his ex .
“ You shouldn ’ t contact him until we sort this out , ” I whispered .
I wondered whether Michael ’ s ex realized what he had set in motion by calling the police .
Michael already had a criminal record comprising a handful of minor charges .
Shoplifting , for when he and a friend were found with two hats in a department store .
Fare evasion , for when he got pulled out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even though he was not in school .
Petty crimes had led to two misdemeanor convictions .
Now Is the Time to Dismantle Our Deportation Machine Given everything Michael had gone through in his young life , I was surprised his record wasn ’ t more serious .
Thrown out of his home as a teenager after his mom found out he was gay , Michael joined the roughly 1,600 gay , lesbian , bisexual , and transgender kids who live on the streets of New York City .
Homeless LGBT youth are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drug addiction .
Six out of 10 consider or attempt suicide .
With social workers , shelter space , and other interventions in short supply , homeless LGBT youth in New York City are much more likely to come into contact with police than with any other government agency .
Michael ’ s misdemeanors were clearly acts of survival .
But rather than getting help , he got a criminal record .
So far he had managed to avoid jail time , getting community service or a small fine for his offenses .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a cellphone could be charged as grand larceny—a felony punishable by up to four years in jail .
If the police pursued the charges , they would hold Michael at the precinct overnight , and a judge would decide whether or not to set bail in his case the next day .
If the judge set bail , Michael would need someone to post it right away .
Lacking family to post bail , he would likely be sent directly to Rikers Island , New York City ’ s most notorious jail .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ scared and alone , was terrifying .
The violent and abusive conditions there are horrific .
But that wasn ’ t Michael ’ s only problem .
For decades , immigration agents had operated a small office at Rikers , scouring the population of pretrial and sentenced individuals alike for deportable immigrants .
It was one of many programs that federal immigration officials used to turn the criminal legal system into a pipeline for deportation .
Michael was a green card holder , a permanent resident whose relatives in Jamaica sent him to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States when he was just a kid .
The convictions he picked up when he became homeless were minor .
But immigration officials often consider even petty crimes to be “ crimes involving moral turpitude.
” And two such crimes were all it took to render Michael not only deportable but subject to mandatory detention while he fought his case .
If Michael was sent to Rikers , immigration agents would place a hold on his release known as a detainer .
He would remain in Rikers until immigration agents could take him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , if Michael went to Rikers , the only way he was leaving was in chains .
Even if we posted bail in his criminal proceedings , immigration agents would send him to an immigration jail , where he would be ineligible for release .
And there he would stay—fighting deportation to Jamaica , where being gay is a crime .
Federal immigration officials proudly describe the criminal legal system as a force multiplier for deportation .
Since the punitive overhaul of immigration law in the 1980s and ’ 90s , the federal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , criminal courts , corrections , probation , and parole departments to identify and deport more people than federal immigration officials ever could alone .
What emerged was a new infrastructure for deportation .
Immigration officials rolled out program after program—notably the Criminal Alien Program , Secure Communities , and 287 ( g ) —justifying each on the basis of public safety .
These programs , they claimed , would target the worst of the worst .
In reality , the programs ensured that any immigrant who comes into contact with the criminal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to deportation—including people who never end up being convicted of a crime or who receive only minor records .
The resulting crime-based deportation machine is designed to extract maximum suffering from someone like Michael .
Being black , gay , and homeless already leaves him vulnerable to severe biases in the criminal legal system .
Being all of those things and an immigrant extinguishes what little fairness and equity might be left .
At every stage of criminal proceedings , the threat of deportation narrows his choices , making it more difficult for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And even if he gets through his criminal proceedings without being funneled into the deportation pipeline , the threat of deportation still lurks around the corner .
All of this is by design .
Ever since the immigration and criminal legal systems merged , escape from the deportation pipeline has been the exception , not the rule .
Draconian laws , harsh programs , and human failings weld together to ensure the perpetual punishment of millions , and any semblance of justice crumbles in the process .
At the precinct , the detective @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who had been waiting with Michael for the past two hours .
He had hoped we would have given up by now .
We had been trying to explain why Michael shouldn ’ t be formally charged .
We debated whether to disclose that Michael was at risk of deportation .
It was always a calculated risk , and in most parts of the country you wouldn ’ t bring it up .
Many officers would simply pick up the phone to call ICE if they thought they had someone who was deportable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It was clear that Michael was young and caught up in a bad situation .
The police , like everyone in the criminal legal process , had some discretion .
But telling the officer was no use .
“ We ’ re taking him in , ” the detective declared .
The charge was , as we feared , grand larceny .
I put my hand on Michael ’ s shoulder .
The waiting had worn on him , and he was angry at his ex .
The detective led him toward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the precinct .
We began what was a familiar routine in cases like Michael ’ s : frantic calls and emails to local public defenders ’ offices to see who might be at the next day ’ s court hearing .
We had to make sure the criminal defense attorney understood Michael ’ s immigration history .
Michael couldn ’ t plead guilty to grand larceny , and he couldn ’ t go to Rikers .
‘ It ’ s Like Living in Solitary Confinement , but Out in the World ’ ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ At the time and place of Michael ’ s arrest—2010 in New York City—the biggest deportation threat came from ICE ’ s Criminal Alien Program .
The program facilitates partnerships and data collection between federal immigration officials and state and local corrections departments across the country to identify immigrants for deportation .
Rikers had partnered with immigration officials for decades .
Immigration agents would interview people in the jail , often without identifying themselves , and after gathering information , the agents would issue a detainer—an “ immigration hold ” that kept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In the five years preceding Michael ’ s latest arrest , Rikers had handed over 13,000 New Yorkers to ICE through the Criminal Alien Program .
Nationwide , the number was in the hundreds of thousands .
It was the first major program that made the identification and deportation of “ criminal aliens ” a priority , transforming the criminal legal system in the process .
But it would not be the last .
The spark that lit the fuse for the explosion of crime-based deportation programs came in 1986 .
New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lambasted federal authorities for a so-called “ criminal alien problem.
” Congress directed the Immigration and Naturalization Service to identify immigrants in jails and prisons for deportation .
In response , the Criminal Alien Program was born .
Originally called the Alien Criminal Apprehension Program , the initiative took a boots-on-the-ground approach to federal and local cooperation .
It sent federal immigration agents to local jails and prisons to check the names of incarcerated people against the federal immigration databases .
If they found someone who might be deportable , they would issue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jail or prison to notify the INS of any upcoming release date so that the individual could continue to be held for immigration custody .
These efforts only whetted Congress ’ s appetite for more inquiries into the “ criminal alien problem.
” At a Senate hearing devoted to the topic in 1995 , Delaware Republican William Roth presented a report that estimated that there were 450,000 immigrants in jails and prisons , some of whom the INS failed to identify .
It described these individuals as having committed serious crimes that were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The report ominously theorized about their “ ‘ outlaw ’ status , often leading them into the shadowy realms of criminal lifestyles.
” Although numerous studies had debunked any correlation between immigrants and increased crime rates , many members of Congress accepted the narrative and demanded to know why more “ criminal aliens ” were not being deported .
The INS blamed a lack of financial resources , and the report concurred that more federal funding was needed .
But the report also pointed to the INS ’ s poor record-keeping .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ often unreliable or unavailable , leading agents to miss deportable individuals during screenings .
And because those screenings were limited to jails and prisons , people at other stages of the criminal process—such as those sentenced to probation—were often overlooked .
Expanded biometrics became the solution .
Whenever the INS encountered an immigrant , federal officials began collecting fingerprints and placing them into a more centralized system .
The system allowed the INS to match those records against any fingerprinting systems run by local law enforcement and collected , in part , by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ however , biometrics collection was a painstaking process .
Millions of older immigration records lacked fingerprint data , and not all local jurisdictions had the capacity or desire to pool their fingerprinting records for deportation purposes .
Those gaps began to close in 2008 when the George W. Bush administration announced Secure Communities , a pilot program in which fingerprints taken during the local arrest and booking process were automatically shared with the Department of Homeland Security , which had taken over many of the responsibilities of INS in 2003 .
The data @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and if the person was deportable—either because of undocumented status or a criminal record—ICE could issue a detainer asking the local jurisdiction to hold the person instead of releasing her on bail or at the end of her criminal case and any sentence .
Given the number of people who were potentially deportable—an estimated 11 million who were undocumented and some unknown percentage of the 14 million authorized immigrants who may have been deportable on criminal grounds—not everyone could be detained and processed for deportation .
‘ Maybe if I Had Papers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Undocumented During a Pandemic So the Department of Homeland Security prioritized : “ Criminal aliens ” went to the top of the list , and Secure Communities became a way to ensure their deportation .
ICE billed the program as a “ historic opportunity to transform immigration enforcement and improve public safety by focusing on those aliens who pose the greatest threats to our communities.
” When President Barack Obama came into office , he expanded Secure Communities .
In unveiling ICE ’ s strategic plan for the rollout , federal officials @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Secure Communities would allow ICE to “ prioritize enforcement actions on those posing the greatest threat to public safety.
” By linking local fingerprinting data to federal databases , ICE could better target “ criminal aliens ” for deportation .
During the initial expansion , the Obama administration suggested that localities could choose whether to join the program .
Many signed up .
But soon enough , studies began to reveal that a large number of people targeted through the program had minor criminal convictions or none at all .
Secure Communities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Some localities responded by declining to participate in the program .
Eventually several larger jurisdictions , including the states of New York , Illinois , and Massachusetts , opted out entirely .
That ’ s when ICE revealed that participation was not optional .
Localities could not , it argued , pick and choose which federal agencies could have access to their fingerprinting data or for what purposes .
Since all localities chose to share their data with the FBI to screen for open cases and criminal history , participation in Secure Communities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ By 2013 , Secure Communities was operational in every jurisdiction in the country .
If Secure Communities had been in place in New York City at the time of Michael ’ s arrest , his fight to stay off ICE ’ s radar screen would have been over before it began .
That ’ s how Secure Communities works—a fingerprintable arrest is all it takes .
It does not matter if the criminal charge is eventually dismissed .
It does not even matter if the arrest was illegal—based on unconstitutional racial profiling , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officer .
The point of Secure Communities is to piggyback on any arrest .
Many of the localities that had attempted to opt out from the fingerprint-sharing aspect of Secure Communities at the front end now pivoted to challenge the detainer practices at the back end .
What authority , immigrant advocates argued , does a city or state have to hold someone after his release date just because ICE has requested it ?
In such cases no judicial warrant accompanied the detainer , and the detainer provided no process for people to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people began successfully suing federal and local officials for what amounted to warrantless arrests , ICE was forced to admit that detainers were simply voluntary requests .
It was up to localities whether to honor them .
The mounting pressure from immigrant communities prompted some cities and states to pass “ sanctuary ” legislation , which officially prevented local police or corrections officers from holding immigrants on detainers in the absence of a judicial warrant or other requirements .
Some jurisdictions went even further , preventing ICE from gaining access to their jails @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for example , kicked ICE out of Rikers and all other city jails in 2015 .
True to form , ICE simply changed its tactics .
In sanctuary cities , ICE expanded its operations to target “ criminal aliens ” through more home raids , courthouse arrests , and other forms of immigrant policing .
It launched Operation Safe City , a massive series of community raids targeting sanctuary cities in 2017 .
ICE did not hide its retaliation .
“ Sanctuary jurisdictions that do not honor detainers or allow us access to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from immigration enforcement and creating a magnet for illegal immigration , ” ICE Acting Director Tom Homan said in a statement .
“ As a result , ICE is forced to dedicate more resources to conduct at-large arrests in these communities.
” Despite pockets of local resistance , Secure Communities continues to give ICE what it desires : the name and criminal history of any community resident who comes in contact with the criminal legal system .
With that kind of access , even in sanctuary cities , there is no true sanctuary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to people , spaces , and data from local jails and prisons , programs like the Criminal Alien Program and Secure Communities provided the basic structure for an arrest-to-deportation pipeline in the United States .
But they are not the only tools that ICE uses .
As bad as things have been for immigrants like Michael in places like New York , the situation has been much worse in parts of the country where local police have engaged in immigration enforcement of their own .
Immigrants like Juana Villegas saw firsthand how bad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she was driving through the small suburban town of Berry Hill , Tennessee , when a flash of lights and a siren alerted her to a Davidson County police car behind her .
Juana pulled over .
The officer asked for her license and registration .
Being undocumented , she had neither .
The officer promptly arrested her for a misdemeanor traffic offense and took her to Davidson County Jail .
Most people would be released from jail to fight a traffic charge in court .
But Davidson County had recently entered into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Named after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act , a 287 ( g ) agreement permits the federal government to deputize local police and corrections officers as immigration agents .
Although 287 ( g ) had been on the books since the harsh immigration law reforms of 1996 , no locality took the federal government up on its offer to enter into a 287 ( g ) agreement until after September 11 , 2001 .
Juana had no criminal record before her arrest .
But she was undocumented .
Armed with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Davidson County officials decided to keep her in custody so that ICE could pick her up for deportation .
Juana was nine months pregnant .
Three days into her custody , her water broke .
Rather than release her , Davidson County officials continued to honor the ICE detainer request .
Police officers took her to a local hospital , shackled her leg to the bed during delivery , and then returned her to jail without her baby or a breast pump .
As her baby developed jaundice and she developed a breast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in custody .
Two days later , she was taken to criminal court , where she was sentenced to time served for unlicensed driving and released pending deportation proceedings .
For Trump , Cruelty Is the Point Juana fought back .
She spoke out against her treatment and the practice of shackling incarcerated women during labor .
She sued Davidson County , and six years after her arrest , she received a special visa to remain in the United States with her son .
Juana ’ s treatment shocked the conscience of Davidson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 287 ( g ) agreement in 2012—using Secure Communities as cover for why the agreement was unnecessary—and paid a six-figure settlement for shackling Juana .
Her victory was a rare one .
If it weren ’ t for legal intervention , she would have disappeared into the deportation pipeline like millions of others .
People with minor criminal records are routinely targeted by the arrest-to-deportation pipeline .
A 2011 study of 287 ( g ) programs demonstrated that roughly half of the people issued detainers through the program were convicted of misdemeanors or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Secure Communities revealed that more than half of people deported through the program were convicted of misdemeanors or traffic offenses , or had no conviction at all .
And a 2015 study of the Criminal Alien Program demonstrated that the vast majority of people deported through the program—80 percent—had either no conviction or a minor conviction .
By piggybacking off the criminal legal system , these programs transform routine encounters with local police into deportation cases for millions of people living in the United States .
And contrary to public messaging , federal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ system has little to do with public safety and everything to do with widening the deportation pipeline .
With every year that passes , the criminal and deportation systems become more tightly intertwined .
Whether in a federal courthouse in Texas or a state criminal court in New York , people of color who lack immigration status find themselves staring down a double punishment , with few safeguards to protect them .
A few might find a way to break out of the pipeline—but more often than not , deportation is the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lucky few .
His public defender understood what was at stake , and worked with Michael and with us to protect him from deportation consequences .
She secured his release on bail before ICE could issue a detainer .
After what felt like endless court dates and stalled conversations with the District Attorney ’ s office , the charges against Michael were dismissed .
Michael was able to avoid a conviction that could have sent him to an immigration prison and eliminated his ability to fight deportation .
But the fear remains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for deportation .
It can come back to haunt a person at any time .
Michael can do everything the criminal legal system expects of him and more—and it still may never be enough .
Only citizenship can truly provide immigrants like Michael with freedom from the threat of deportation .
But the process of citizenship , like everything else in the immigration system , requires scrutiny into a person ’ s criminal record .
Michael was eligible for citizenship , but in ICE ’ s view he was also deportable .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ process the immigration system prioritizes .
This is one of the reasons many people delay the process of applying for citizenship—they prefer to wait for a time when they can clean up their record or have a better defense against deportation if necessary .
In the meantime , they remain vulnerable to the deportation pipeline .
As a lawyer , I fear the midnight call from clients like Michael , people who are heavily policed because of what they look like or where they live .
Another arrest , another charge .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a new criminal case begins .
Success depends on the existence of so many actors beyond the person whose life is at stake : a zealous defender , a sympathetic prosecutor , a reasonable judge .
Without them , will we find a way to prevail ?
If not , the pipeline will work as it was intended .
It will thrust people into cages , just long enough to banish them permanently .

At 20 years old, Michael had the look and build of a much younger person. Across the back room of a dusty Harlem police precinct in 2010, I could see defiance and fear in his eyes. I suspected that he did not yet understand the stakes. Deportation was the last thing on his mind. Adapted from No Justice in the Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants, by Alina Das. Copyright © 2020. Available from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
A few hours earlier, a detective had called Michael, summoning him to the precinct to answer a few questions. My students and I had been representing Michael for a few months, so we went with him. The staff had us wait in a side room, where we learned that Michael’s ex-boyfriend had accused him of stealing his cellphone.
As the detective deliberated over whether to arrest him, Michael’s anger bubbled over. “It’s not true,” he said, his voice rising. Michael had paid for the cellphone, and when he and his boyfriend broke up, he had taken it back. Michael began furiously texting his ex.
“You shouldn’t contact him until we sort this out,” I whispered. I wondered whether Michael’s ex realized what he had set in motion by calling the police.
Michael already had a criminal record comprising a handful of minor charges. Shoplifting, for when he and a friend were found with two hats in a department store. Fare evasion, for when he got pulled out of the subway for using a student-rate MetroCard even though he was not in school. Petty crimes had led to two misdemeanor convictions. Related Article Now Is the Time to Dismantle Our Deportation Machine Alina Das
Given everything Michael had gone through in his young life, I was surprised his record wasn’t more serious. Thrown out of his home as a teenager after his mom found out he was gay, Michael joined the roughly 1,600 gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender kids who live on the streets of New York City. Homeless LGBT youth are vulnerable to violence, hunger, and drug addiction. Six out of 10 consider or attempt suicide. With social workers, shelter space, and other interventions in short supply, homeless LGBT youth in New York City are much more likely to come into contact with police than with any other government agency.
Michael’s misdemeanors were clearly acts of survival. But rather than getting help, he got a criminal record. So far he had managed to avoid jail time, getting community service or a small fine for his offenses. But this time was different. Stealing a cellphone could be charged as grand larceny—a felony punishable by up to four years in jail. If the police pursued the charges, they would hold Michael at the precinct overnight, and a judge would decide whether or not to set bail in his case the next day. If the judge set bail, Michael would need someone to post it right away. Lacking family to post bail, he would likely be sent directly to Rikers Island, New York City’s most notorious jail. Current Issue View our current issue
The idea of Michael in Rikers, scared and alone, was terrifying. The violent and abusive conditions there are horrific. But that wasn’t Michael’s only problem. For decades, immigration agents had operated a small office at Rikers, scouring the population of pretrial and sentenced individuals alike for deportable immigrants. It was one of many programs that federal immigration officials used to turn the criminal legal system into a pipeline for deportation. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Michael was a green card holder, a permanent resident whose relatives in Jamaica sent him to stay with his mother in the United States when he was just a kid. The convictions he picked up when he became homeless were minor. But immigration officials often consider even petty crimes to be “crimes involving moral turpitude.” And two such crimes were all it took to render Michael not only deportable but subject to mandatory detention while he fought his case.
If Michael was sent to Rikers, immigration agents would place a hold on his release known as a detainer. He would remain in Rikers until immigration agents could take him into immigration custody. In other words, if Michael went to Rikers, the only way he was leaving was in chains. Even if we posted bail in his criminal proceedings, immigration agents would send him to an immigration jail, where he would be ineligible for release. And there he would stay—fighting deportation to Jamaica, where being gay is a crime.
Federal immigration officials proudly describe the criminal legal system as a force multiplier for deportation. Since the punitive overhaul of immigration law in the 1980s and ’90s, the federal government has used local police, prosecutors, criminal courts, corrections, probation, and parole departments to identify and deport more people than federal immigration officials ever could alone.
What emerged was a new infrastructure for deportation. Immigration officials rolled out program after program—notably the Criminal Alien Program, Secure Communities, and 287(g)—justifying each on the basis of public safety. These programs, they claimed, would target the worst of the worst. In reality, the programs ensured that any immigrant who comes into contact with the criminal legal system gets on a fast track to deportation—including people who never end up being convicted of a crime or who receive only minor records.
The resulting crime-based deportation machine is designed to extract maximum suffering from someone like Michael. Being black, gay, and homeless already leaves him vulnerable to severe biases in the criminal legal system. Being all of those things and an immigrant extinguishes what little fairness and equity might be left. At every stage of criminal proceedings, the threat of deportation narrows his choices, making it more difficult for him to pursue a just result. And even if he gets through his criminal proceedings without being funneled into the deportation pipeline, the threat of deportation still lurks around the corner.
All of this is by design. Ever since the immigration and criminal legal systems merged, escape from the deportation pipeline has been the exception, not the rule. Draconian laws, harsh programs, and human failings weld together to ensure the perpetual punishment of millions, and any semblance of justice crumbles in the process.
At the precinct, the detective warily eyed me and the law student who had been waiting with Michael for the past two hours. He had hoped we would have given up by now. We had been trying to explain why Michael shouldn’t be formally charged. We debated whether to disclose that Michael was at risk of deportation. It was always a calculated risk, and in most parts of the country you wouldn’t bring it up. Many officers would simply pick up the phone to call ICE if they thought they had someone who was deportable. But some officers could be sympathetic. It was clear that Michael was young and caught up in a bad situation. The police, like everyone in the criminal legal process, had some discretion.
But telling the officer was no use. “We’re taking him in,” the detective declared. The charge was, as we feared, grand larceny.
I put my hand on Michael’s shoulder. The waiting had worn on him, and he was angry at his ex. The detective led him toward the holding cells at the back of the precinct.
We began what was a familiar routine in cases like Michael’s: frantic calls and emails to local public defenders’ offices to see who might be at the next day’s court hearing. We had to make sure the criminal defense attorney understood Michael’s immigration history. Michael couldn’t plead guilty to grand larceny, and he couldn’t go to Rikers. Migrant Voices ‘That First Night in America, I Couldn’t Sleep’ John Washington ‘It’s Like Living in Solitary Confinement, but Out in the World’ John Washington ‘We Are So Much More Than Victims’ John Washington
At the time and place of Michael’s arrest—2010 in New York City—the biggest deportation threat came from ICE’s Criminal Alien Program. The program facilitates partnerships and data collection between federal immigration officials and state and local corrections departments across the country to identify immigrants for deportation. Rikers had partnered with immigration officials for decades. Immigration agents would interview people in the jail, often without identifying themselves, and after gathering information, the agents would issue a detainer—an “immigration hold” that kept the person in custody for deportation.
In the five years preceding Michael’s latest arrest, Rikers had handed over 13,000 New Yorkers to ICE through the Criminal Alien Program. Nationwide, the number was in the hundreds of thousands. It was the first major program that made the identification and deportation of “criminal aliens” a priority, transforming the criminal legal system in the process. But it would not be the last.
The spark that lit the fuse for the explosion of crime-based deportation programs came in 1986. New York Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato had lambasted federal authorities for a so-called “criminal alien problem.” Congress directed the Immigration and Naturalization Service to identify immigrants in jails and prisons for deportation. In response, the Criminal Alien Program was born.
Originally called the Alien Criminal Apprehension Program, the initiative took a boots-on-the-ground approach to federal and local cooperation. It sent federal immigration agents to local jails and prisons to check the names of incarcerated people against the federal immigration databases. If they found someone who might be deportable, they would issue a detainer, which directed the local jail or prison to notify the INS of any upcoming release date so that the individual could continue to be held for immigration custody.
These efforts only whetted Congress’s appetite for more inquiries into the “criminal alien problem.” At a Senate hearing devoted to the topic in 1995, Delaware Republican William Roth presented a report that estimated that there were 450,000 immigrants in jails and prisons, some of whom the INS failed to identify. It described these individuals as having committed serious crimes that were often connected to “their illegal situation.” The report ominously theorized about their “‘outlaw’ status, often leading them into the shadowy realms of criminal lifestyles.” Although numerous studies had debunked any correlation between immigrants and increased crime rates, many members of Congress accepted the narrative and demanded to know why more “criminal aliens” were not being deported.
The INS blamed a lack of financial resources, and the report concurred that more federal funding was needed. But the report also pointed to the INS’s poor record-keeping. Name-based and decentralized, INS records were often unreliable or unavailable, leading agents to miss deportable individuals during screenings. And because those screenings were limited to jails and prisons, people at other stages of the criminal process—such as those sentenced to probation—were often overlooked.
Expanded biometrics became the solution. Whenever the INS encountered an immigrant, federal officials began collecting fingerprints and placing them into a more centralized system. The system allowed the INS to match those records against any fingerprinting systems run by local law enforcement and collected, in part, by the FBI.
In the 1990s, however, biometrics collection was a painstaking process. Millions of older immigration records lacked fingerprint data, and not all local jurisdictions had the capacity or desire to pool their fingerprinting records for deportation purposes.
Those gaps began to close in 2008 when the George W. Bush administration announced Secure Communities, a pilot program in which fingerprints taken during the local arrest and booking process were automatically shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which had taken over many of the responsibilities of INS in 2003. The data sharing triggered a review of immigration records, and if the person was deportable—either because of undocumented status or a criminal record—ICE could issue a detainer asking the local jurisdiction to hold the person instead of releasing her on bail or at the end of her criminal case and any sentence.
Given the number of people who were potentially deportable—an estimated 11 million who were undocumented and some unknown percentage of the 14 million authorized immigrants who may have been deportable on criminal grounds—not everyone could be detained and processed for deportation. Related Article ‘Maybe if I Had Papers, It Would Have Been Different’: Undocumented During a Pandemic Heather Gies and John Washington
So the Department of Homeland Security prioritized: “Criminal aliens” went to the top of the list, and Secure Communities became a way to ensure their deportation. ICE billed the program as a “historic opportunity to transform immigration enforcement and improve public safety by focusing on those aliens who pose the greatest threats to our communities.”
When President Barack Obama came into office, he expanded Secure Communities. In unveiling ICE’s strategic plan for the rollout, federal officials repeated the justification from the Bush administration: Secure Communities would allow ICE to “prioritize enforcement actions on those posing the greatest threat to public safety.” By linking local fingerprinting data to federal databases, ICE could better target “criminal aliens” for deportation.
During the initial expansion, the Obama administration suggested that localities could choose whether to join the program. Many signed up. But soon enough, studies began to reveal that a large number of people targeted through the program had minor criminal convictions or none at all. Secure Communities had become a dragnet for deportation.
Some localities responded by declining to participate in the program. Eventually several larger jurisdictions, including the states of New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, opted out entirely. That’s when ICE revealed that participation was not optional. Localities could not, it argued, pick and choose which federal agencies could have access to their fingerprinting data or for what purposes. Since all localities chose to share their data with the FBI to screen for open cases and criminal history, participation in Secure Communities was part of a package deal. By 2013, Secure Communities was operational in every jurisdiction in the country.
If Secure Communities had been in place in New York City at the time of Michael’s arrest, his fight to stay off ICE’s radar screen would have been over before it began. That’s how Secure Communities works—a fingerprintable arrest is all it takes. It does not matter if the criminal charge is eventually dismissed. It does not even matter if the arrest was illegal—based on unconstitutional racial profiling, for example, or a corrupt police officer. The point of Secure Communities is to piggyback on any arrest.
Many of the localities that had attempted to opt out from the fingerprint-sharing aspect of Secure Communities at the front end now pivoted to challenge the detainer practices at the back end. What authority, immigrant advocates argued, does a city or state have to hold someone after his release date just because ICE has requested it? In such cases no judicial warrant accompanied the detainer, and the detainer provided no process for people to challenge whether it was valid. Once people began successfully suing federal and local officials for what amounted to warrantless arrests, ICE was forced to admit that detainers were simply voluntary requests. It was up to localities whether to honor them.
The mounting pressure from immigrant communities prompted some cities and states to pass “sanctuary” legislation, which officially prevented local police or corrections officers from holding immigrants on detainers in the absence of a judicial warrant or other requirements. Some jurisdictions went even further, preventing ICE from gaining access to their jails. The New York City Council, for example, kicked ICE out of Rikers and all other city jails in 2015.
True to form, ICE simply changed its tactics. In sanctuary cities, ICE expanded its operations to target “criminal aliens” through more home raids, courthouse arrests, and other forms of immigrant policing. It launched Operation Safe City, a massive series of community raids targeting sanctuary cities in 2017. ICE did not hide its retaliation. “Sanctuary jurisdictions that do not honor detainers or allow us access to jails and prisons are shielding criminal aliens from immigration enforcement and creating a magnet for illegal immigration,” ICE Acting Director Tom Homan said in a statement. “As a result, ICE is forced to dedicate more resources to conduct at-large arrests in these communities.”
Despite pockets of local resistance, Secure Communities continues to give ICE what it desires: the name and criminal history of any community resident who comes in contact with the criminal legal system. With that kind of access, even in sanctuary cities, there is no true sanctuary from deportation.
By giving ICE access to people, spaces, and data from local jails and prisons, programs like the Criminal Alien Program and Secure Communities provided the basic structure for an arrest-to-deportation pipeline in the United States. But they are not the only tools that ICE uses. As bad as things have been for immigrants like Michael in places like New York, the situation has been much worse in parts of the country where local police have engaged in immigration enforcement of their own.
Immigrants like Juana Villegas saw firsthand how bad it could get. In 2008, she was driving through the small suburban town of Berry Hill, Tennessee, when a flash of lights and a siren alerted her to a Davidson County police car behind her. Juana pulled over. The officer asked for her license and registration. Being undocumented, she had neither. The officer promptly arrested her for a misdemeanor traffic offense and took her to Davidson County Jail. Most people would be released from jail to fight a traffic charge in court. But Davidson County had recently entered into a 287(g) agreement. Named after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a 287(g) agreement permits the federal government to deputize local police and corrections officers as immigration agents. Although 287(g) had been on the books since the harsh immigration law reforms of 1996, no locality took the federal government up on its offer to enter into a 287(g) agreement until after September 11, 2001.
Juana had no criminal record before her arrest. But she was undocumented. Armed with their 287(g) agreement, Davidson County officials decided to keep her in custody so that ICE could pick her up for deportation.
Juana was nine months pregnant. Three days into her custody, her water broke. Rather than release her, Davidson County officials continued to honor the ICE detainer request. Police officers took her to a local hospital, shackled her leg to the bed during delivery, and then returned her to jail without her baby or a breast pump. As her baby developed jaundice and she developed a breast infection, local law enforcement kept her in custody. Two days later, she was taken to criminal court, where she was sentenced to time served for unlicensed driving and released pending deportation proceedings. Related Article For Trump, Cruelty Is the Point Julianne Hing
Juana fought back. She spoke out against her treatment and the practice of shackling incarcerated women during labor. She sued Davidson County, and six years after her arrest, she received a special visa to remain in the United States with her son.
Juana’s treatment shocked the conscience of Davidson County. The county withdrew from the 287(g) agreement in 2012—using Secure Communities as cover for why the agreement was unnecessary—and paid a six-figure settlement for shackling Juana. Her victory was a rare one. If it weren’t for legal intervention, she would have disappeared into the deportation pipeline like millions of others.
People with minor criminal records are routinely targeted by the arrest-to-deportation pipeline. A 2011 study of 287(g) programs demonstrated that roughly half of the people issued detainers through the program were convicted of misdemeanors or traffic offenses. A 2012 study of Secure Communities revealed that more than half of people deported through the program were convicted of misdemeanors or traffic offenses, or had no conviction at all. And a 2015 study of the Criminal Alien Program demonstrated that the vast majority of people deported through the program—80 percent—had either no conviction or a minor conviction.
By piggybacking off the criminal legal system, these programs transform routine encounters with local police into deportation cases for millions of people living in the United States. And contrary to public messaging, federal immigration officials are well aware that this system has little to do with public safety and everything to do with widening the deportation pipeline.
With every year that passes, the criminal and deportation systems become more tightly intertwined. Whether in a federal courthouse in Texas or a state criminal court in New York, people of color who lack immigration status find themselves staring down a double punishment, with few safeguards to protect them. A few might find a way to break out of the pipeline—but more often than not, deportation is the end result.
Michael emerged as one of the lucky few. His public defender understood what was at stake, and worked with Michael and with us to protect him from deportation consequences. She secured his release on bail before ICE could issue a detainer. After what felt like endless court dates and stalled conversations with the District Attorney’s office, the charges against Michael were dismissed.
Michael was able to avoid a conviction that could have sent him to an immigration prison and eliminated his ability to fight deportation. But the fear remains. There is no statute of limitations for deportation. It can come back to haunt a person at any time. Michael can do everything the criminal legal system expects of him and more—and it still may never be enough.
Only citizenship can truly provide immigrants like Michael with freedom from the threat of deportation. But the process of citizenship, like everything else in the immigration system, requires scrutiny into a person’s criminal record. Michael was eligible for citizenship, but in ICE’s view he was also deportable. In those cases, you can guess which process the immigration system prioritizes. This is one of the reasons many people delay the process of applying for citizenship—they prefer to wait for a time when they can clean up their record or have a better defense against deportation if necessary. In the meantime, they remain vulnerable to the deportation pipeline.
As a lawyer, I fear the midnight call from clients like Michael, people who are heavily policed because of what they look like or where they live. Another arrest, another charge. The old criminal record comes back to life as a new criminal case begins. Success depends on the existence of so many actors beyond the person whose life is at stake: a zealous defender, a sympathetic prosecutor, a reasonable judge. Without them, will we find a way to prevail? If not, the pipeline will work as it was intended. It will thrust people into cages, just long enough to banish them permanently.


thenation--2020-04-14--The Lesson of the Coronavirus? There’s No One Left to Trust.

It would appear that Donald Trump has fully transitioned from moving too slowly to meet the threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak to moving too quickly to “ reopen ” the country .
First , he said that Covid-19 was just like the flu ; then , he said it would “ wash through ” by April and everybody should go to church on Easter .
Now he ’ s saying that we should be “ back to normal ” by May .
I don ’ t believe him , because , unlike a moderate or a goldfish , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happened more than 20 seconds ago .
But it ’ s not just Trump .
I don ’ t believe anyone these days .
Unfortunately , Trump isn ’ t the only one who ’ s made bad decisions or issued rosy projections that have cost lives .
He ’ s had a lot of help .
Our country operates under a theory of rapacious capitalism , and that has been on full display during this crisis .
We saw employers who demanded that nonessential workers come into work , thereby fueling the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state governments react slowly to close down business and public meeting places .
We saw religious leaders urge people to come to services , and community leaders urge people to go to the mall , until the stark and deadly reality of the virus began to take lives , and they ( well , some of them anyway ) began grudgingly to change their tune about the seriousness of the pandemic .
Now , this same collection of leaders is in charge of telling us when the crisis has passed—and we ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to reopen the country , even as so many of them failed to act quickly enough to shut it down in the first place .
What kind of gullible fool do they take me for ?
Even George W. Bush wasn ’ t that kind of trusting sap , as he reminded people when he famously bumbled : “ Fool me once , shame on you… Fool me… uhh… you can ’ t get fooled again.
” Apparently , though , I am much more skeptical of our leadership than the average American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that 90 percent of Republicans trust Donald Trump for accurate information about the coronavirus outbreak , while just 14 percent of Democrats do .
The president could tell them that Kool-Aid kills Covid-19 , and almost all Republicans would drink it .
Nothing reasonable can be done about this , and the sooner we stop treating Republican voters like rational actors the better .
But it was the ratings for various other institutions and actors in that CBS poll that made my jaw drop .
The question presented was : “ Who do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you accurate information about the virus and what to do during the Outbreak ?
” Among all respondents , Trump ’ s trust rating was only at 44 percent , but check out the numbers for everybody else : Wait—what ?
We live in a world where 73 percent of Americans trust their family and friends for coronavirus tips ?
Somewhere , somebody is relying on the wisdom of their college weed connection to figure out if it ’ s safe to go to a house of worship .
I ’ d sooner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meteor before I relied on my friends and family to tell me when it ’ s safe to go to a museum .
In truth , I do not trust anybody on this list .
I live in New York , and thus feel blessed by having a competent governor who isn ’ t a Republican trying to fight coronavirus with thoughts and prayers .
But do I trust Andrew Cuomo to tell me the straight truth about when the crisis has passed ?
Not really .
Cuomo could be heard railing against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” of hospital beds at any point before the last six weeks or so .
And Cuomo has worked to cut Medicaid funding in the state .
And don ’ t even get me started about the years ’ -long blood feud between Governor Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio .
My parents ’ marriage was filled with less acrimony and mistrust—and my parents divorced 30 years ago .
Cuomo and de Blasio dithered on whether and when to close schools .
The subway has been a mess during both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a Covid trap for transit workers .
These two didn ’ t get it right in February when decisive action could have mattered , and now they can ’ t even get their stories straight on whether schools should be closed down for the rest of the year .
Forgive me if I feel like the health and safety of my children shouldn ’ t be the rope in their latest contest of grown-up tug-of-war .
Do I trust the Centers for Disease Control and medical professionals to declare the crisis “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s not that I don ’ t trust science .
I ’ ll go to the mattresses for Sir Isaac Newton because , well , gravity is kind of always pulling you toward the ground anyway .
What I don ’ t trust is the ability of medical professionals or the CDC to consistently stand up to Trump and his administration .
The CDC seemingly folded to political pressure in March when it removed stats tracking American coronavirus cases .
It bungled the rollout of coronavirus testing and has never provided enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t have enough tests .
The CDC is the agency I ’ d like to trust , but I can ’ t because I don ’ t know if they are being manipulated by Trump .
As for other medical professionals , at this point I ’ m going to need to know whom a doctor voted for before I listen to anything they say about when I can go out .
That ’ s because the cultlike fealty to Trump seems to overpower even advanced medical training .
Just look @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has utterly debased himself in service of Trump .
First , he downplayed the virus when Trump wanted him to , and now he ’ s out there shucking and jiving and telling people of color not to do drugs “ for Big Mama , ” as if he ’ s only met other black people by reading a white person ’ s review of a Tyler Perry movie .
I don ’ t want to be here , but the politics of doctors becomes important when you see Republican doctors actively misinforming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s good graces .
I could do this for every institution .
I work online , so obviously I don ’ t trust anything that I only see on the Internet .
A butcher does not eat other people ’ s sausages .
The national media decided long ago that Trump was too good for their ratings and subscriptions to say or write anything about him without creating a false equivalency between facts and Trump ’ s “ alternative facts.
” So they ’ re out of the circle of trust @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surprised that so many Americans trust religious leaders in this moment , history tells me that the absolute last people I should listen to during a plague are the purveyors of organized religion .
Doubting Thomas is in my quarantine house and has the remote .
I live in a trust desert .
Like anybody else , I ’ m desperate for somebody to trust .
I want to believe that shimmering off in the distance is really an oasis , not a mirage .
But I ’ m not so desperate as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response to the coronavirus has ranged from slow to bungling , to straight-up criminal .
The people who took too long to tell me to shelter in place have not earned the right to tell me when to come out of hiding .
SCOTUS Just Set the Stage for Republicans to Steal the Election Immigrants Are Bearing the Brunt of the Coronavirus Crisis More in this series And yet , they will .
At some point , somebody in a suit will tell me that it ’ s “ safe ” to go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bar , or the home improvement store .
Am I supposed to believe them ?
At some point , somebody wearing medical scrubs ( for dramatic effect ) will tell me that as long as I practice good hygiene , I can go to a ballgame or go vote .
Will they have thought through whether Covid-19 is coming back with a vengeance this fall or next spring ?
Do they know if people who , miraculously , made it through this period without being exposed are more at risk from the next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long are people even contagious ?
Republicans will follow their dear leader off a cliff if that ’ s what he orders them to do , but how are the rest of us supposed to stand up to institutions that don ’ t value our lives all that highly ?
The day is coming when Trump will declare “ Mission Accomplished ” over the coronavirus .
The day is coming when business leaders will order everybody back out in public , and back to work , to prop up the stock market .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ still dying from Covid-19 but that death toll no longer makes the nightly news .
Essential workers have already been sacrificed to the virus in the name of keeping buses running or the cable on .
Blue-collar workers have already been asked to pay this price .
And soon the rest of the workforce will be asked to do the same .
Still , even if Donald Trump and every employer and economist in the country decides that lives should be lost so profitability can resume , they can ’ t just tweet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is no “ on ” button .
If people are forced to go back to work , and risk death doing it , many will .
But going back to work and returning to normalcy are two different things .
Regaining the public ’ s faith that we are safe outside our homes will be hard .
No matter how many Republicans defiantly shake hands and sneeze on each other at a future “ Grand Reopening ” Trump rally , this country is going to need more than a Dr. Oz segment on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to function at full capacity again .
My birthday is in May , after Trump ’ s new made-up date for defeating the coronavirus and getting back to normal .
I usually celebrate with karaoke , but this year ?
Am I really about to go to a small room where my friends and I sing and spittle into a microphone that we all pass around to each other ?
No , thanks .
If the risen Christ told me it was safe to do karaoke this year , I think I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dude and savior , let me tell you about this thing called TikTok.
” It ’ s going to be a long time before I get back to normal .
Have fun opening up the country without me .
Agoraphobia feels like a rational response when all the people who have lied to you before tell you that it ’ s now safe to play outside .

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
It would appear that Donald Trump has fully transitioned from moving too slowly to meet the threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak to moving too quickly to “reopen” the country. First, he said that Covid-19 was just like the flu; then, he said it would “wash through” by April and everybody should go to church on Easter. Now he’s saying that we should be “back to normal” by May.
I don’t believe him, because, unlike a moderate or a goldfish, I have the capacity to remember things that happened more than 20 seconds ago. But it’s not just Trump. I don’t believe anyone these days.
Unfortunately, Trump isn’t the only one who’s made bad decisions or issued rosy projections that have cost lives. He’s had a lot of help. Our country operates under a theory of rapacious capitalism, and that has been on full display during this crisis.
We saw employers who demanded that nonessential workers come into work, thereby fueling the spread of the virus. We saw state governments react slowly to close down business and public meeting places. We saw religious leaders urge people to come to services, and community leaders urge people to go to the mall, until the stark and deadly reality of the virus began to take lives, and they (well, some of them anyway) began grudgingly to change their tune about the seriousness of the pandemic. Current Issue View our current issue
Now, this same collection of leaders is in charge of telling us when the crisis has passed—and we’re supposed to trust their judgement about when to reopen the country, even as so many of them failed to act quickly enough to shut it down in the first place. What kind of gullible fool do they take me for? Even George W. Bush wasn’t that kind of trusting sap, as he reminded people when he famously bumbled: “Fool me once, shame on you… Fool me… uhh… you can’t get fooled again.”
Apparently, though, I am much more skeptical of our leadership than the average American is. A recent CBS/YouGov poll showed that 90 percent of Republicans trust Donald Trump for accurate information about the coronavirus outbreak, while just 14 percent of Democrats do. The president could tell them that Kool-Aid kills Covid-19, and almost all Republicans would drink it.
Nothing reasonable can be done about this, and the sooner we stop treating Republican voters like rational actors the better. But it was the ratings for various other institutions and actors in that CBS poll that made my jaw drop. The question presented was: “Who do you trust and not trust to give you accurate information about the virus and what to do during the Outbreak?” Among all respondents, Trump’s trust rating was only at 44 percent, but check out the numbers for everybody else: Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Your state’s governor 66%
Religious leaders and clergy 51%
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 82%
Medical and health professionals 88%
National media 43%
Social media and online sources 23%
Your friends and family 73%
Wait—what? We live in a world where 73 percent of Americans trust their family and friends for coronavirus tips? Somewhere, somebody is relying on the wisdom of their college weed connection to figure out if it’s safe to go to a house of worship. I’d sooner ask a dinosaur how to stop a meteor before I relied on my friends and family to tell me when it’s safe to go to a museum.
In truth, I do not trust anybody on this list. I live in New York, and thus feel blessed by having a competent governor who isn’t a Republican trying to fight coronavirus with thoughts and prayers. But do I trust Andrew Cuomo to tell me the straight truth about when the crisis has passed? Not really. Cuomo could be heard railing against New York’s “excess capacity” of hospital beds at any point before the last six weeks or so. And Cuomo has worked to cut Medicaid funding in the state.
And don’t even get me started about the years’-long blood feud between Governor Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. My parents’ marriage was filled with less acrimony and mistrust—and my parents divorced 30 years ago. Cuomo and de Blasio dithered on whether and when to close schools. The subway has been a mess during both of their tenures, even before it was a Covid trap for transit workers. These two didn’t get it right in February when decisive action could have mattered, and now they can’t even get their stories straight on whether schools should be closed down for the rest of the year. Forgive me if I feel like the health and safety of my children shouldn’t be the rope in their latest contest of grown-up tug-of-war.
Do I trust the Centers for Disease Control and medical professionals to declare the crisis “over”? Absolutely not. It’s not that I don’t trust science. I’ll go to the mattresses for Sir Isaac Newton because, well, gravity is kind of always pulling you toward the ground anyway. What I don’t trust is the ability of medical professionals or the CDC to consistently stand up to Trump and his administration. The CDC seemingly folded to political pressure in March when it removed stats tracking American coronavirus cases. It bungled the rollout of coronavirus testing and has never provided enough tests. Even now, we still don’t have enough tests. The CDC is the agency I’d like to trust, but I can’t because I don’t know if they are being manipulated by Trump.
As for other medical professionals, at this point I’m going to need to know whom a doctor voted for before I listen to anything they say about when I can go out. That’s because the cultlike fealty to Trump seems to overpower even advanced medical training. Just look at Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who has utterly debased himself in service of Trump. First, he downplayed the virus when Trump wanted him to, and now he’s out there shucking and jiving and telling people of color not to do drugs “for Big Mama,” as if he’s only met other black people by reading a white person’s review of a Tyler Perry movie. I don’t want to be here, but the politics of doctors becomes important when you see Republican doctors actively misinforming the public in order to stay in Trump’s good graces.
I could do this for every institution. I work online, so obviously I don’t trust anything that I only see on the Internet. A butcher does not eat other people’s sausages. The national media decided long ago that Trump was too good for their ratings and subscriptions to say or write anything about him without creating a false equivalency between facts and Trump’s “alternative facts.” So they’re out of the circle of trust.
And while I’m not surprised that so many Americans trust religious leaders in this moment, history tells me that the absolute last people I should listen to during a plague are the purveyors of organized religion. Doubting Thomas is in my quarantine house and has the remote.
I live in a trust desert. Like anybody else, I’m desperate for somebody to trust. I want to believe that shimmering off in the distance is really an oasis, not a mirage. But I’m not so desperate as to drink the sand. The institutional response to the coronavirus has ranged from slow to bungling, to straight-up criminal. The people who took too long to tell me to shelter in place have not earned the right to tell me when to come out of hiding. COVID-19 SCOTUS Just Set the Stage for Republicans to Steal the Election Elie Mystal Immigrants Are Bearing the Brunt of the Coronavirus Crisis Cinthya Santos Briones, The Nation and Magnum Foundation Undercounting Covid-19 Deaths Is a Deadly Mistake Jeet Heer
And yet, they will. At some point, somebody in a suit will tell me that it’s “safe” to go back to the office, or the bar, or the home improvement store. Am I supposed to believe them? At some point, somebody wearing medical scrubs (for dramatic effect) will tell me that as long as I practice good hygiene, I can go to a ballgame or go vote. Will they have thought through whether Covid-19 is coming back with a vengeance this fall or next spring? Do they know if people who, miraculously, made it through this period without being exposed are more at risk from the next wave of the novel coronavirus? How long are people even contagious?
Republicans will follow their dear leader off a cliff if that’s what he orders them to do, but how are the rest of us supposed to stand up to institutions that don’t value our lives all that highly? The day is coming when Trump will declare “Mission Accomplished” over the coronavirus. The day is coming when business leaders will order everybody back out in public, and back to work, to prop up the stock market. The day is coming when people are still dying from Covid-19 but that death toll no longer makes the nightly news.
Essential workers have already been sacrificed to the virus in the name of keeping buses running or the cable on. Blue-collar workers have already been asked to pay this price. And soon the rest of the workforce will be asked to do the same.
Still, even if Donald Trump and every employer and economist in the country decides that lives should be lost so profitability can resume, they can’t just tweet the country back “open.” There is no “on” button. If people are forced to go back to work, and risk death doing it, many will. But going back to work and returning to normalcy are two different things. Regaining the public’s faith that we are safe outside our homes will be hard. No matter how many Republicans defiantly shake hands and sneeze on each other at a future “Grand Reopening” Trump rally, this country is going to need more than a Dr. Oz segment on Fox News before it’s ready to function at full capacity again.
My birthday is in May, after Trump’s new made-up date for defeating the coronavirus and getting back to normal. I usually celebrate with karaoke, but this year? Am I really about to go to a small room where my friends and I sing and spittle into a microphone that we all pass around to each other? No, thanks. If the risen Christ told me it was safe to do karaoke this year, I think I’d say to him, “My dude and savior, let me tell you about this thing called TikTok.”
It’s going to be a long time before I get back to normal. Have fun opening up the country without me. Agoraphobia feels like a rational response when all the people who have lied to you before tell you that it’s now safe to play outside.


thenation--2020-04-14--One of the 20th Century’s Great Novels of Dislocation

The Slovene novelist Lojze Kovačič is a member of that improbable cohort—Joseph Conrad , Samuel Beckett , Vladimir Nabokov , Aleksander Hemon , Yiyun Li—whose greatest works were written in an adopted language .
Born in 1928 , in Basel , to a Slovene father and a German mother , Kovačič grew up speaking Swiss German .
At the age of 10 , he and his family were expelled from Switzerland after his nationalist father refused Swiss citizenship .
They were forced to settle in Slovenia , then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , and Kovačič came of age @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( He memorably described his first experience with the Slovenian language as chewing an unfamiliar and still-raw food . )
An exile ’ s pessimism would come to define his literary disposition .
His fictions froth with anger , wonder , loathing , and shame , the imaginative products of deracinated consciousness .
Though largely unknown to English-speaking audiences , he is one of the 20th century ’ s great novelists of dislocation , nowhere at home , ever between cultures and languages , and always at odds with himself .
His sprawling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a bildungsroman in which the young protagonist ’ s disorientation is paralleled by the larger displacements of war .
Book One , first published in Slovenia in 1983 , and translated into English for the first time in 2016 , reimagines the forced expulsion and resettlement the author experienced in his youth .
The Kovačič family flees Basel by midnight train , decamps briefly at an uncle ’ s farm in rural Lower Carniola , and eventually settles in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana , there beset by near constant hardship and provocation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bubi , makes and loses friends , develops a pidgin Slovenian , forms a gang , nearly fails out of school , and thinks a great deal about God and about sex .
His mother is petulant and paranoid , his sister nostalgic for the bourgeois amenities of Basel .
His father , a master furrier and an anti-Semite , welcomes the Axis forces ’ conquest of Yugoslavia in 1941 as a means of restoring European order .
Bubi comes to realize that his family ’ s improved standing during the occupation of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ascension : As German speakers , they are symbolically aligned with the conqueror , whether envied or hated or feared .
The first volume ends with the appearance of clownish Italian soldiers loitering about the streets and romancing the local women .
Book Two , recently released by Archipelago , examines Bubi ’ s attempts to forge an identity amid the many political , social , and aesthetic ideologies vying for precedence in his life .
As the tide of war turns , his Germanness , formerly a privileged status , now marks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ force of his language is illustrated in a striking formal choice by translator Michael Biggins : German dialogue remains untouched , with each line asterisked .
The reader must scan to the bottom of the page to find the translation .
( Slovenian dialogue is rendered in English directly within the text . )
While this can become challenging to read in scenes with multiple German speakers , as when the Kovačič family is in conversation , it also enacts a kind of auto-estrangement that underscores the novel ’ s central preoccupation : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ second volume opens with the Kovačič family living in near indigence as the occupation wears on : Mashed turnips amount to a feast ; the stubs of cigarettes are dutifully collected in the streets ; the dearest objects are sold for a pittance .
Their destitution necessitates a hardscrabble opportunism .
Bubi goes door to door selling stray bits of fur as his family battles angina , pulmonary edema , nervous ailments , and consumption .
A found crate of melba toast becomes a prize beyond measure .
“ You had to guard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ which ought to be ashamed of itself , considering what people had to go through.
” Like another massive autobiographical novel cycle , Karl Ove Knausgaard ’ s My Struggle , shame is the profoundly warping force at the center of Newcomers .
“ Of all the humiliations of exile , ” Bubi says , “ the most mortifying is that eternal begging and apologizing…for this !
for that !
…one day all you ’ re left begging for is everyone ’ s pardon…you ’ re in everyone ’ s way , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has passed , you can ’ t change yourself.
” Selfhood is the novel ’ s engine of degradation .
It gathers within itself all differences , all blunders , all incongruities .
The contortions required by Bubi ’ s attempted assimilation offer a pronounced slant on the coming of age story .
Slow maturation is replaced by a pained , willful abrasion .
Silence is preferable to the clumsiness of speech , and shadow more welcome than exposure .
Newcomers boils with this strictly enforced interiority .
Bubi ’ s is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The Letters Behind One of American Poetry ’ s Most Infamous Books Does This Nearly 1,000-Page-Long Sentence Encapsulate the Anxiety of American Life ?
Ingeborg Bachmann ’ s Experimental Gem ‘ Malina ’ Is a Novel Like None Other Kovačič writes in staccato bursts , his short sentences skewering thought while it still lives .
His constant use of ellipses may call to mind the Céline of Death on the Installment Plan or Guignol ’ s Band , although he is less interested in capturing the patterns of particular speech than in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He conjures a cinematic flow of images , each possessing an appealing , almost picaresque dynamism .
Life flowers continuously in unexpected places—black markets , hospitals , unheated apartments , children ’ s forts—as a sort of chaotic and implacable pressure .
Thieving , fistfights , odd jobs , ecstasy ( both religious and sexual ) , and philosophy are all swept up in Bubi ’ s story and assorted into scenes of agitated vitality .
Amid almost total ostracism , sex and art comprise Bubi ’ s primary forms of belonging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tatjana , with whom he loses his virginity in the ruins of a house : “ This was something so new and so terribly alive that I couldn ’ t compare it to anyone or anything else…not to a tank , not to food , not to the war , and not to movies.
” His libidinal fevers create a makeshift , if largely imagined , form of connection .
He dreams of unimaginable congress .
He falls in love with neighbors and teachers and street waifs .
He also discovers his latent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At school , he barters rations for his hand-drawn comics .
Bubi begins reading widely , too ( Fyodor Dostoyevsky , Knut Hamsun , Andre Gide ) and curses his own floundering attempts at creating fiction : “ I wasn ’ t able to write it the way it happened , ” he tells one of his teachers .
“ The part of it that ’ s behind the event , the part that ’ s unusual , strange , unreal.
” Writing is “ more impenetrable than rock , ” he says @ @ @ @ @ @ @ having formed like a callus from the frictions of his alienation .
His passions furnish their own kind of continuity .
Unlike so much else in his life , his sexual and intellectual obsessions make him intelligible to himself .
They confirm that he exists .
As a form , the novel ’ s integrative possibilities surely hold special appeal for the exile .
For Bubi , as for Kovačič , fiction represents the hope and the hazard of self-fashioning .
Newcomers , like all great literary art , manufactures coherence from a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It would be too great a leap to say that Kovačič grants his exile a dimension of the universal .
But in the intricate mapping of his lonely depths , he has also fashioned something of a ladder .
Kovačič has often been compared to Proust for his ability to recapture the past , though there is something of Tolstoy in him as well—the dense feeling of reality his work evokes—and of the writer Danilo Kiš , whose “ family cycle ” so richly recalls the wartime Hungary of his childhood .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kovačič belongs in their company .
Newcomers is a novel of grand and appalling power .
It is a human-smelling work , slick with sweat , trembling with appetite .
And deeply sad in its loneliness and privation , too .
It wounds us in the way our own memories do .
It is a marvelous and humane feat of clarity and consolidation .

The Slovene novelist Lojze Kovačič is a member of that improbable cohort—Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksander Hemon, Yiyun Li—whose greatest works were written in an adopted language. Born in 1928, in Basel, to a Slovene father and a German mother, Kovačič grew up speaking Swiss German. At the age of 10, he and his family were expelled from Switzerland after his nationalist father refused Swiss citizenship. They were forced to settle in Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Kovačič came of age in a state of profound estrangement. (He memorably described his first experience with the Slovenian language as chewing an unfamiliar and still-raw food.) An exile’s pessimism would come to define his literary disposition. His fictions froth with anger, wonder, loathing, and shame, the imaginative products of deracinated consciousness. Though largely unknown to English-speaking audiences, he is one of the 20th century’s great novelists of dislocation, nowhere at home, ever between cultures and languages, and always at odds with himself. His sprawling three-volume autobiographical novel, Newcomers, is a bildungsroman in which the young protagonist’s disorientation is paralleled by the larger displacements of war. Books in Review Newcomers: Book Two By Lojze Kovačič Buy this book
Book One, first published in Slovenia in 1983, and translated into English for the first time in 2016, reimagines the forced expulsion and resettlement the author experienced in his youth. The Kovačič family flees Basel by midnight train, decamps briefly at an uncle’s farm in rural Lower Carniola, and eventually settles in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, there beset by near constant hardship and provocation. The adolescent narrator and Kovačič-cipher, Bubi, makes and loses friends, develops a pidgin Slovenian, forms a gang, nearly fails out of school, and thinks a great deal about God and about sex. His mother is petulant and paranoid, his sister nostalgic for the bourgeois amenities of Basel. His father, a master furrier and an anti-Semite, welcomes the Axis forces’ conquest of Yugoslavia in 1941 as a means of restoring European order. Bubi comes to realize that his family’s improved standing during the occupation of Ljubljana is tied to Hitler’s ascension: As German speakers, they are symbolically aligned with the conqueror, whether envied or hated or feared. The first volume ends with the appearance of clownish Italian soldiers loitering about the streets and romancing the local women.
Book Two, recently released by Archipelago, examines Bubi’s attempts to forge an identity amid the many political, social, and aesthetic ideologies vying for precedence in his life. As the tide of war turns, his Germanness, formerly a privileged status, now marks him as a pariah. The alienating force of his language is illustrated in a striking formal choice by translator Michael Biggins: German dialogue remains untouched, with each line asterisked. The reader must scan to the bottom of the page to find the translation. (Slovenian dialogue is rendered in English directly within the text.) While this can become challenging to read in scenes with multiple German speakers, as when the Kovačič family is in conversation, it also enacts a kind of auto-estrangement that underscores the novel’s central preoccupation: the perpetual incoherence of exile.
The second volume opens with the Kovačič family living in near indigence as the occupation wears on: Mashed turnips amount to a feast; the stubs of cigarettes are dutifully collected in the streets; the dearest objects are sold for a pittance. Their destitution necessitates a hardscrabble opportunism. Bubi goes door to door selling stray bits of fur as his family battles angina, pulmonary edema, nervous ailments, and consumption. A found crate of melba toast becomes a prize beyond measure. “You had to guard against fantasy,” Bubi says, “which ought to be ashamed of itself, considering what people had to go through.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Like another massive autobiographical novel cycle, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, shame is the profoundly warping force at the center of Newcomers. “Of all the humiliations of exile,” Bubi says, “the most mortifying is that eternal begging and apologizing…for this! for that!…one day all you’re left begging for is everyone’s pardon…you’re in everyone’s way, a burden to everybody…even once your misfortune has passed, you can’t change yourself.” Selfhood is the novel’s engine of degradation. It gathers within itself all differences, all blunders, all incongruities. The contortions required by Bubi’s attempted assimilation offer a pronounced slant on the coming of age story. Slow maturation is replaced by a pained, willful abrasion. Silence is preferable to the clumsiness of speech, and shadow more welcome than exposure. Newcomers boils with this strictly enforced interiority. Bubi’s is a mind throbbing with its own unexpressed accumulation. More From Dustin Illingworth A Fragmentary History of California November 21, 2022 Antonio Di Benedetto and the Sound of Madness April 27, 2022 The Pleasures of Shirley Hazzard’s Intricate Fictions January 14, 2021
Kovačič writes in staccato bursts, his short sentences skewering thought while it still lives. His constant use of ellipses may call to mind the Céline of Death on the Installment Plan or Guignol’s Band, although he is less interested in capturing the patterns of particular speech than in creating the compression and speed of consciousness. He conjures a cinematic flow of images, each possessing an appealing, almost picaresque dynamism. Life flowers continuously in unexpected places—black markets, hospitals, unheated apartments, children’s forts—as a sort of chaotic and implacable pressure. Thieving, fistfights, odd jobs, ecstasy (both religious and sexual), and philosophy are all swept up in Bubi’s story and assorted into scenes of agitated vitality.
Amid almost total ostracism, sex and art comprise Bubi’s primary forms of belonging. He meets a local girl, Tatjana, with whom he loses his virginity in the ruins of a house: “This was something so new and so terribly alive that I couldn’t compare it to anyone or anything else…not to a tank, not to food, not to the war, and not to movies.” His libidinal fevers create a makeshift, if largely imagined, form of connection. He dreams of unimaginable congress. He falls in love with neighbors and teachers and street waifs. He also discovers his latent gifts as a painter and author. At school, he barters rations for his hand-drawn comics. Bubi begins reading widely, too (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Knut Hamsun, Andre Gide) and curses his own floundering attempts at creating fiction: “I wasn’t able to write it the way it happened,” he tells one of his teachers. “The part of it that’s behind the event, the part that’s unusual, strange, unreal.” Writing is “more impenetrable than rock,” he says, though he doggedly persists, tenacity having formed like a callus from the frictions of his alienation. His passions furnish their own kind of continuity. Unlike so much else in his life, his sexual and intellectual obsessions make him intelligible to himself. They confirm that he exists.
As a form, the novel’s integrative possibilities surely hold special appeal for the exile. For Bubi, as for Kovačič, fiction represents the hope and the hazard of self-fashioning. Newcomers, like all great literary art, manufactures coherence from a life that rarely supplies anything like it. It would be too great a leap to say that Kovačič grants his exile a dimension of the universal. But in the intricate mapping of his lonely depths, he has also fashioned something of a ladder.
Kovačič has often been compared to Proust for his ability to recapture the past, though there is something of Tolstoy in him as well—the dense feeling of reality his work evokes—and of the writer Danilo Kiš, whose “family cycle” so richly recalls the wartime Hungary of his childhood. These are admittedly august names, but Kovačič belongs in their company. Newcomers is a novel of grand and appalling power. It is a human-smelling work, slick with sweat, trembling with appetite. And deeply sad in its loneliness and privation, too. It wounds us in the way our own memories do. It is a marvelous and humane feat of clarity and consolidation.