ICE is in town, and it’s heating up
On January 6th, I am sitting in my car across from Mount Pleasant Cemetery. It is a normal day, though the start of an unseasonably warm week. I have just dropped my mother off at a meeting, and I am sitting in the car listening to Trump rewrite the January 6th Insurrection, calling the rioters peaceful and spirited and just overall great guys. It really is a lovely day outside. It’s the kind of day when you just know Winnie-the-Pooh and his buddies are off galavanting somewhere. A fresh warm spring honey day. Then again, in other ways, it’s a day like any other. The car needs more gas in it, more air in its tires. The dog is sick again. I’d like to listen to music and fly my new kite, then go play a card game with friends.
I’m knee-deep in the day. It is only noon and it is sticky, the thick muggy air pulling at me. I am glued to the seat. I watch car after car go by. I change the radio from Trump’s drivel, and Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” is suddenly blaring through the speakers. It is six days into the new year, and I am approaching my 25th birthday. It is 2026 and I am cemented in this moment, feet in cinder blocks. Suddenly, we are in Nazi Germany. And the next day, Renée Good is shot three times in the face at close range. Two weeks later, Alex Pretti is shot at even closer range. And it is another lovely day in Southern Maine and I am watching Heated Rivalry on the TV, but we are in slavery-era America, and the slave catchers are going door to door, ripping people out of cars, spattering blood on the streets the tourists walk down in the Old Port, running red down the famous cobblestones of our town.
For months I have grappled — like many of us have, I’m sure — with feeling like a bystander in Nazi America. I have asked myself who I want to be, how I want to rise up and meet this moment. The answer for me is different than it is for others. But despite American Individualism being bullshit, this is one of those rare moments when every little thing does count. When we can overcome that individualism, and rise up as one. We can recognize that the Trump administration, like their Nazi forebears, are scapegoating one marginalized population to cover the sins of those in power. That America is a dying empire, our global reputation worsening with every atrocity committed at home and overseas, with every threat against our allies and attack on sovereign nations. We are a declining power, for better or for worse, because the greed of a few is polluting the minds of many, their insidious lies trickling, dripping slowly into the water supply, until it is the water we all drink. Until hordes of young men think they must be alphas, must eat raw meat and subjugate women and minorities to be a real man. Until the hate that Trump and Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk and all these other profiteer motherfuckers use convinces these men that the reason women won’t touch them and they can’t get a decent job in a late-stage capitalist nation is not a personal fault, nor a fault of the system, but those god-darn libtards and feminists and immigrants. And if you can’t get a good-paying job, if you’re too dumb or poor or unmotivated to go to college, if you’ve gone to college only to find it does not secure the promised American Dream, that despite Trump’s promises, our economy is not in fact thriving, then come on over, here’s $50,000 and a gun.
The pushback is incredible from our little city, our big state with a small population. Mutual-aid and activist groups have so many people wanting to help that they can’t utilize everyone. ICE is followed as much as possible by regular people horrified to see their neighbors beaten, separated from their families, frozen, starved, profiled, and denied medical care and due process. Horrified to see protestors shot and intimidated at their houses, being told they are now registered as domestic terrorists simply for filming ICE, for disagreeing with our dear President.
But the systems that have always protected the powerful are still in place. The police arrested six protesters the other night who were making a racket outside of hotels ICE was reportedly staying in. I heard unconfirmed reports that police were readying rubber bullets or pepper balls. The Press Herald reported that the protestors were charged with disorderly conduct, that an officer said they were disturbing sleep, that “the time for a protest is during the day,” rather missing the point. They are pretending we still live in a Constitutional Democracy, where the rule of law has any meaning. Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce is now openly criticizing ICE, and the Portland police have a no-cooperation policy, but actions speak louder than words. How are you speaking?
