My lawn guy got picked up recently.
Although we never discussed it, he’s apparently undocumented. He has been living in Florida since coming here from Guatemala more than a decade ago, scratching out a meager living with his own lawn care service.
His wife is also Guatemalan and they have two young daughters who were born in the U.S. His wife, as I write this, is about to have their third child. And up until his last service in June, she helped him, blowing leaves with a gas-powered machine on her back, her very swollen belly scorching under a Florida sun.
“Fernando,” who was stopped for the heinous crime of driving with a burned-out taillight, is currently trying to scrounge up lawyer money in a desperate bid to stay here. But, sadly, he may be sent back to Guatemala following his upcoming hearing.
In any case, it’s unlikely he’s sleeping much at night, like millions of others in his situation.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and his supporters seem downright gleeful in terrorizing this resilient but ultimately defenseless demographic of undocumented immigrants, unleashing masked enforcers to round them up and ship them back to places like Haiti and Venezuela, where their lives are threatened by violence and poverty.
Recently, authorities picked up 75-year-old Isidro Perez, a Cuban refugee who had been here since the mid-1960s and was living out his final health-challenged days on a houseboat in the Keys.
He’d been busted for trafficking marijuana in the 1980s, and even though he served his time, five ICE officers ambushed him at a community center and hauled him away in handcuffs.
Three weeks after being caged in an overcrowded detention center where he told relatives he had to sleep on a hard floor, Isidro died, likely from a chronic heart condition.
If you support this kind of enforcement, I ask you to try putting yourself in the place of one of these immigrants, having risked all, often including life savings, for a chance to carve out a life in what has historically been a land of opportunity.
They aren’t “animals,” as Trump has derisively called them; they are human beings struggling to find a place in the world where their kids can have a better life.
Despite Trump’s demonizing rhetoric, undocumented immigrants contribute more to this country than they get back in social services — including nearly $100 billion in taxes a year, according to a recent study by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. And a National Institute of Justice study found that their crime rate is less than half of U.S.-born citizens.
Beyond the numbers is the human toll of Trump’s merciless campaign. Imagine living with an endless anxiety that your whole life could be upended at any moment as masked thugs muscle you away from your home and family and banish you back to your distressed homeland or some other country as far away as Africa. And mostly without due process.
How is this allowed to happen in the U.S., a country that has always prided itself on “liberty and justice for all”?
Anyone who isn’t horrified by the similarities between the ICE tactics and the secret police of 20th century dictatorships, targeting a scapegoated demographic and demanding to see their “papers” or risk being forcefully transported to some kind of hell-on-Earth, must be either in denial or a fascist.
This isn’t who we are as a nation, but it is what we’ve become. We must stand up to the bullying, proclaim our outrage and do whatever we can to reverse our descent into the abyss of tyranny.
Gary Greenberg of Boca Raton is a freelance journalist and author.
