The Orkney News has many readers in the U.S. and we watch with great unease at what is happening there and the rise here of anti-migrant rhetoric, and racism. This excellent piece is written by one of our American readers and we thank him for allowing us to publish it in The Orkney News.

Ice is Seizing the Best of us.

By Ben Shallop.

On a drizzly September afternoon in Lynn Massachusetts dozens of people gathered inside the Lynn Arts Gallery in support of Emmanuel “Manny” Kenga, a member of our North Shore community seized by ICE agents for no cause whatsoever. He is an asylum seeker in the country legally, he has fulfilled every asylum requirement asked of him throughout the asylum process, and he was detained by ICE agents after showing up to a required appointment at the Burlington Massachusetts ICE offices. The ICE Agents who seized him told him that there was no problem with his asylum application, but they were seizing him anyway.

The story of Manny’s encounter with ICE agents is sadly now nothing out of the ordinary anymore in today’s America. These kinds of grotesque actions by ICE agents are daily visited upon our neighbors and communities so frequently that many are starting to become numb to it. In the same way mass shootings in America have become so much the norm that they often barely make the headlines anymore, masked thugs cosplaying as law enforcement but with no legal oversight kidnapping our neighbors is just part of our reality now. It’s normal. It happens multiple times a day in communities across what was once not ironically called “the Land of the Free.”

Manny’s story hit harder with me though. It really cut through the numbness of this daily barrage because I can relate to the gaping hole left in his community by his sudden absence from it. You see, Manny was working as a Home Health Aide for elderly people on the North Shore and in his spare time he volunteered to deliver meals for senior citizens in our communities. My own father, a retired US Naval officer, has Alzheimer’s. My family and I have grown to rely heavily on the work of immigrant health care workers to care for him.

I am not alone in this, and I know that I will more than likely be confronting similar situations again as other older relatives age. It’s just part of being a Gen X American. The Baby Boomer generation (so called because of the massive increase in pregnancies and births following World War II) simply didn’t have a lot of children. Now that they are both living longer and that there are more of them than any generation that preceded them, there is a disproportionate burden placed on the shoulders of their children to care for them. American born and raised Gen Xers and Millennials simply don’t have the resources and familial support networks enjoyed by our parents to care for aging loved ones for the simple reason that there just aren’t as many of us around.

Enter immigrants. At every step of my father’s sad journey here we have relied on immigrants. Nurses, Doctors, social workers, and home health aides all have been disproportionately immigrants. All truly wonderful caring and hardworking people from places as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Pakistan, Syria, and more. Of the dozens of medical professionals and support staff that my family has grown to depend on through this horrible ordeal I can maybe count on one hand the number of caregivers outside of our family who were born American citizens.

My father served 20 years in the United States Navy. As the son of a sailor I have certainly seen my fair share of “Vet-washing” in the form of flag waiving and platitudes thanking him for his service, but in this final chapter of his life it is immigrants who every single day wake up and rise to the challenge to make this time as comfortable for him and my family as possible. It is truly impossible to express in words how grateful I am for their service. I couldn’t do this without them…and it sickens me to no end that those who wave the flag the hardest and bloviate those platitudes the loudest are so often the same people who cheer as these masked thugs target the very people who are actually doing the hard work to care for those same vets they pretend to honor.

After several days in ICE custody, Manny was eventually allowed to call his family. His greatest concern was not for his own well being, but for the elderly he so honorably serves. “Who will deliver the food?” he asked. And so, in a corner of the room where people from across the North Shore had gathered to both speak out against what had happened to him and learn what we could do to help there was a sign up sheet where people could volunteer to cover his route for a day and deliver meals to seniors. The first people to put their names to the list were other immigrants. I can think of know more powerful representation of the gaping hole ICE leaves in our communities and families than that list of empty timeslots for meal delivery services for area seniors….and I can think of no more beautiful demonstration on the power and resilience of our North Shore communities than to see so many people, both immigrants and people whose family have been here for generations, sign up to take those shifts.

Contrast that to the story of the 4 year old with stage 4 cancer seized by ICE with her mother and deported to Honduras without any medication. Or the recent incident where ICE agents took a 5 year old with autism hostage in order to entice her father into going with them “voluntarily.” Or the ICE agents who seized a construction worker named Alejandro Reyes in Lynn, drove him to a cemetery, and then beat him upon learning that he had proper documentation to live and work here. Or any of the seemingly countless horrifying videos of ICE agents physically ripping families apart and the daily parade of atrocities being inflicted upon our communities by agents of our own government.

Our Constitution is not ambiguous on this issue. The 4th Amendment clearly states that; “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” yet ICE is violating this every single day. The 5th Amendment states clearly that “No person shall….be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Note that it says “person” and not “citizen.” This is for the very simple reason that the right to due process must by necessity apply to all if any are to have it. It does beg the question; why do we allow this to continue unchecked?

When commenting on the importance of equal branches of government, John Adams stated that the purpose was to create a nation that “may be a government of laws and not of men.” Once a branch of the government (in this case the Federal Executive) ceases to be able to be held accountable to the law it inevitably loses legitimacy. Even Chief Justice John Roberts recently expressed concerns that the rule of law is “endangered,” which is ironic given that undermining the rule of law is basically his entire legacy at this point. Given the reality of where we find ourselves here today, we must look to our state and local governments to protect ourselves, our neighbors, our communities and our constitutional rights. Our local governments must step up to put a stop to this, even if that means directing local law enforcement to arrest and detain Federal Agents who break the law (such as committing assaults, kidnapping, impersonating police officers, and more). Remember neither Manny Kenga, nor Alejandro Reyes, nor the 4 year old with cancer, broke any law….but the ICE agents who brutally seized them certainly did and they need to be made to answer for their crimes. Undoubtedly that is an incredibly awkward thing to do, but if Democracy and the Rule of Law is going to survive, then we need legal entities like our state and municipal governments to enforce the law when the federal government is operating with such impunity. If we fail to do so, then we will have lost our once proud Republic to a sort of bizarre Tyrannical Anarchy where no law has any meaning.

And shamefully we will have lost it, and our best neighbors, without lifting a finger to stop it.

*ICE = Immigration and Customs Enforcement