The Solomon Code

Roughly a month ago, I sat down with a young lady named Samantha, who had just graduated high school. She talked about how she’d been nervous coming to a new town, she talked about her friends’ struggles with mental health, and she talked about her own plans to go on to college and study clinical psychology so she could help people like them in the future.

A week later, the decision came down saying she needed to leave the country.

Not her specifically. The people making the decision never met her. But that didn’t matter. In the case of Mullin vs. Doe the Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 decision that even though the Trump administration conducted no research during its decision to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of Haiti and Syria, and even though both countries are, in fact, quite dangerous places where people are murdered regularly, that courts weren’t allowed to tell the presidency how to do its job. Presumably Congress might, if Congress were at all interested in doing its job. The fact that the administration responsible for this decision has called Haiti a “shithole country” and falsely claimed that Haitians were “eating the dogs,” that they have ceased citizenship processing for multiple countries while still accepting fees for services they aren’t conducting, that they prioritize the admission of (white) Afrikaaner refugees while refusing to admit any other nationalities, is dismissed in the majority opinion as irrelevant to the case.

It was, I am told, a very good decision, or at least a legally accurate one, the only one that the court could come to under the circumstances without overstepping its bounds. I am assured by multiple knowledgeable people that while the situation is problematic, the fault lies with Congress for not modifying the TPS status (and, of course, with Trump, but by this point everyone assumes the president will do terrible things and that it is the business of the rest of the government to clean up his messes, like a small child.) I should point out that while some legal scholars, including Trump-critical ones like David French, think the decision was accurate, I have recently read opinions from the Cato Institute that are… less enthused about the death of judicial review.

I will confess that hearing about the legal accuracy of the case does not cheer me. I suspect it will not cheer my young interview subject, whose dreams must necessarily die now, nor her father, who will have to resign from his job, nor the high school freshman from my school’s basketball team, whose antics amused so many of his classmates. I can’t directly speak to the mindset of the congregation that meets next door to my apartment building in the disused youth center, nor to the many workers employed at the local meat packing plant, but I suspect that being told about the intricacies of Washington law will not be of much comfort to them either. The fact that the Trump administration has now, in a baffling reversal, extended TPS work visas will certainly be a relief, but I doubt many will appreciate the Damocles-like position this leaves them in.

America loves celebrating its history of immigration, but it never seems to enjoy it actually happening. Listen to Neil Diamond’s “America” song (sung in memory of his Ukrainian grandmother, herself a refugee from upheaval) and you’re struck by the stirring refrain of people coming over waves and through great hardship to the beautiful land of promise known as America–but also struck by how little welcome such people would receive today.

When I was young I loved the library at school. I read a lot of the books there, all of which had been carefully curated by the concerned parents who ran our small Christian school. One genre that popped up repeatedly was the “coming to America” books, such as Long Way to a New Land, or The Journey of Pieter and Anna, or Coming To America. They pretty much all ran the same way. Child has a limited view of some hardship, usually hunger, in their home. Their family gets a letter of all the wonderful food and peace in America. They take the long boat ride, they see the statue, they arrive in America, celebration. Other books, like Mama’s Bank Account or The Long Way Westward would often focus on the difficulties of adapting to American life, learning English, fitting in at school with people who judged them, finding work and money wheverever they could.

A few of the books mentioned Ellis Island. None of them mentioned having to fill out paperwork for a Green Card (a program that didn’t exist until 1940.) None of the children in the stories watched their parents scrimp and save to pay the thousands of dollars needed for immigration processing fees, or wait for years on the Green Card before they could even apply for citizenship. Not because that’s brain-numbingly complex and disheartening, but because none of that existed. Certainly there’s no plot where Pieter or Anna or Carl or Jonas learn that a court case means the immigration police are going to load them on a boat and send them back to Holland or Sweden or Ireland. I guess that would have been too depressing for a kid’s book.

This past week, I watched my neices and nephews enjoying the Spielberg classic An American Tail. It’s a story about how a mouse family finds things too dangerous in their home country and journey to the land of America. Part of the plot, of course, is that America is not a promised land, but rather is full of dangers and risks all its own–but still worth going to. And the larger point is that America is still a place where the mice are free to use their wits to overcome hardship, leaving them better off, if still beset by troubles.

I wonder if Universal Pictures has any plans to reboot the franchise in live-action format, a la The Lion King and other such films. Modernize it, perhaps, for today’s audiences. Fievel Applies for a Green Card. Fievel Gets Bullied at School. Fievel’s Dad is Shot at a Traffic Stop by ICE Operatives.

A part of me wants to make mock-ups of these to demonstrate the point. Another part of me is afraid that people would actually welcome them. Americans are a lot more ghoulish than even my cynical conservative background had led me to believe.

The small town I live in has some charms, though not many. The main business, apart from the meat packing plant, comes from the score of weed dispensaries spotted amongst the collection of fast-food restaurants that truckers stop at on their way to Detroit or Lansing. A former children’s home north of the town for a while served as a massive incarceration facility–three jails joined under one roof, though this has now been scaled back to only one prison. It has one comic book store, an opera house that dates back to the 1800’s, an impressively pointy steeple on a historic presbyterian church downtown where Sojourner Truth once spoke, and a score of aging gabled houses that, depending on who you ask, used to belong to railroad barons or mob bosses. Older people will talk of the multi-storied department stores that used to fill the quaint buildings in the heart of the town, but nowadays most of the top floors are empty–even some of the street-level storefronts are in long disuse.

The general opinion on social media is that the town has too many people.

Or rather, too many of the *wrong sort* of people. “Send Them Back” signs were dotted everywhere during the lead-up to 2024. A board gaming session at the comic store was once interrupted by a local concerned woman wanting to talk to us about how immigrants were getting paid to march up from Columbia–she’d seen videos! A nice old lady from my church (who has since passed), once took me out to dinner to talk to me seriously about globalism being a sign of the end times and how chem trails were impacting us all. When I posted pictures from my interview with the young aspiring clinical psychologist, it sparked a few veiled “Where did you move here from” remarks and one not-so-veiled “Deport her!” A hairdresser I had once commented on how “this place looks like another country with that mosque going up”–a reference to the group of Yemeni refugees constructing their own school and religious building. One of the local groups posts about how Muslims are “dirty and lazy”, and a recent post about ICE being in the area was met with a chorus of “hell yeah, about time we had a sweep!” At a recent multicultural festival the town held, a young man and woman walked up and down the main street, swastika armbands prominently displayed. When fliers for the KKK were recently found next to the local school, some commenters asked why the donation number had been blurred out–they wanted to give.

When I was typing the first draft of this up, a news report came in–ICE had raided local apartments. Seized local families. Who, why, there wasn’t any details. Comments were predictable and demoralizing. “I’ll bring the donuts!” “We didn’t say just the criminals or just the worst, we said them all!” “They need to set up shop for longer!” People exulting in their neighbors being kidnapped and locked away as if it were a sort of reality show.

Ask these people what would happen to the meat-packing plant if “all” the immigrants left, and most people brush the question aside. “They’d bring in US Citizens,” is the repeated assurance. Where, exactly, these citizens would come from–Battle Creek, or Detroit, or Kalamazoo, and why they would choose to settle in Coldwater, is not clarified. It is rarely explained how the many “help wanted” signs in local restaurants feature into the person’s thesis that hundreds of lawful citizens are presumably bursting with the desire to move out to a random midpoint between Detroit and Lansing. Nor is it ever mused on what would happen to the current array of stores and restaurants if hundreds of their customers suddenly disappeared. The unquestioned assumption is that simply that if all the Haitians, and the Hispanics, and the Yemeni inhabitants of the town disappeared or were arrested, that prosperity would, somehow, result.

It would be easy to dismiss this as small-town ignorance. Group-think, aggravated by a rapidly-changing community and difficult economic times in need of a scape-goat. A bad situation, made worse by an unscrupulous man who encourages Americans to indulge in the worst version of themselves, who models cruelty to others as a virtue. Most Americans–most Republicans–I might plausibly be assured, are not so bigoted.

I would like to believe this. But I have to also confront the fact that many of them simply do not care.

Two years ago, it might be possible to claim a concern about the security of the national border. Two years ago, one could even claim that even if immigration laws are long, and torturous, and expensive, the solution was to revise them, not discard them. Those might be good points–if the last two years had actually shown any progress on revising immigration law to make the process simpler and easier, instead of more complex. It might, conceivably, be possible for conservatives to claim the arrests and cages and camps were simply the result of a dispassioned pursuit of the letter of the law, if they weren’t constantly arresting, caging, deporting, and even shooting, lawful residents and even citizens.

By this point, it’s obvious none of the people involved in the immigration enforcement actually cares very much about the letter of the law, or about the safety of communities. (People in my town pointed to a stabbing incident at the meat plant that involved a pair of immigrants, one of which DHS claims was illegal–though DHS claims a lot of things these days. I do note that none of the people seemed very interested in the many other crimes, accidents, and jailings in the township that seem to involve no immigrants at all). I have a hard time believing any of them are truly concerned with national security while Trump is out declaring new wars and offering gold-card EZ citizenship schemes.

And what’s possibly worst of all, no one even pretends to care about christian charity anymore.

Some people are happy about the license they now have to be openly hateful bullies. Others are going along with it because all the cool kids are doing it and they want to be part of the cool kids’ crowd. Others might think the work is too important to call out the bullying. But the vast vast majority are people who simply see the bullying and turn away. Not because they approve of it–but because it is not important enough to them to risk alienating the bullies.

I’m not the first to make this observation. Holocaust survivor and humanitarian Elie Wiesel said that “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.” His famous Holocaust memoir, Night, was originally titled And the World Stood Silent. Similarly, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is renowned for having said that “In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

One thinks of an even more poignant example–the parable Christ tells in Matthew 25:31-46, on separating goats from sheep–goats that are not condemned for explicit acts of cruelty, but for failing to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, heal the sick, house the weary. For apathy.

To be fair, I’m not sure I would care, either, if I weren’t talking with these people day by day and teaching them in class. By the time I came to this town I had a healthy intellectual disgust for Trump and his racist policies, but it still didn’t “hit” me until the day I spoke with a friend of mine, a leading member of the Haitian community, a big smiling man who had earnestly shown up every day for the English practice club.

“I had to quit my job,” he told me, in broken English. “It has been difficult.”

This was not the recent Supreme Court decision. This was a number of months ago, when the Secretary of Homeland Security first revoked the TPS status, without following any of the usual procedures for doing so. I hadn’t even heard about it. It wasn’t on my radar at all. But to stare at my friend, and feel with him the deep helplessness of his position, and mine to do anything about it, was perhaps the most profoundly depressing experience I’d ever had.

I was overjoyed when the federal court declared that Noem had acted improperly. I texted my friend about it. Maybe the case law was bad. I was still happy for him.

Maybe the Supreme Court is correct, legally speaking, to say it is not permitted to interfere, and doom my friends to be shipped back overseas into a dangerous warzone. Perhaps my town dying from population withdrawal and economic downturn will just be one of the prices paid for following proper governmental pathways in the midst of a administration that cares nothing for them. Certainly Congress deserves a larger share of the blame for being borderline impotent, and Trump the largest share for being a steaming racist sack of shit, Noem for enabling him, and Mullin for continuing the work. My own fellow townspeople, certainly, deserte the economic hardship they’re about to face. Perhaps this is just the way things need to go.

I wish that were a comfort.

It is not.