Several times a week, I find myself asking what we’re up to in “First they came…”. The most-recent population targeted had been the mentally ill, threatened with institutionalization and electronic surveillance, but now the Trump administration is planning to round-up the homeless in California and relocate them to, well, a concentration camp.
Inexplicably, “[s]ome administration officials expressed skepticism that the federal government wanted to get in the business of operating a large homeless shelter”, apparently unaware that their own administration has been practicing on migrants at the southern border—and by practicing I mean not just practicing the construction and maintenance of the concentration camps themselves, but practicing how long they can get away with it without any real challenge.
“We’re not rounding people up or anything yet,” one official told the Post. “You guys in the media get too ahead of yourselves.” Note that pointed inclusion of the word “yet”.
Except that if we don’t get ahead of ourselves, we end up too far behind to put a stop to any of it.
It would help, perhaps, if at some point reporters could stop calling such initiatives things like “controversial task” and instead maybe call them, oh, I don’t know, something more akin to “authoritarian threat to liberal democracy”. (I picture a reporter for The Washington Post writing, “German authorities priced train cars this week in advance of the controversial task of relocating some citizens.”)
At this point I wonder if Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer think that in order to freak out that, yes, this is creeping fascism, we have to be checking off the poem’s boxes verbatim, and that because they haven’t come for socialists, unionists, or Jews, nothing’s really happening. As near as I can tell, for the Democratic leadership in the House, immigrants, the mentally ill, and now the homeless just don’t rate.
A postscript that can’t possibly be relevant: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an almost-entirely domestic agency, has been training for urban warfare, simulating what it calls “battlefield conditions” for engagements in places like Chicago and Arizona.