Kristi Noem jolted me from political complacency

Ever since Stew and I moved twenty years ago to a small ranch about a thousand miles south from the U.S. border, our reaction to political news from home has gradually morphed from outrage to resignation, or even worse, complacency.

The absurd has become ho-hum. Plans to be build a knock-off of the Arc de Triomphe in Washington bigger than the one one in Paris? Where are they going put it?

Amputate the East Wing of the White House and replace it with a ballroom that can hold a thousand guests? Be sure we have enough caterers!

Send a hospital ship to Greenland, a possession of Denmark, a country that has a health care system probably better than the U.S.? Who the hell asked for such emergency assistance anyway?

And what’s the rationale of the ongoing billion-dollar-a-day bombing campaign to pulverize Iran? I’ll have to get back to you with the war plans du jour.

To protect my mental health I have recently slipped into the lazy habit—odd for a person who used to work in a newspaper—of skimming the news sections of the media and even skipping the opinion columns. Tom Friedman or Maureen Who? So much blah, blah. What more is there to say about Trump?

Instead I confess that, more often than I care to admit, I find myself browsing Facebook for ridiculous video clips of an elephant giving birth to twins—one of them apparently an albino—or volunteers in Florida who rescue sea turtles tangled in fishing nets or barnacles.

Once in a while guilt makes me swear off such time-wasters and go on a “news diet”—a popular fad nowadays—to reset my brain, but I relapse two or three weeks later.

Then came Kristi Noem, until recently the front-line, perfectly coiffed Grand Inquisitor in charge of Trump’s campaign to deport anywhere from one, three, or twenty million immigrants, or who knows how many.

I initially dismissed Noem as a vapid ignoramus who couldn’t define “due process” during a congressional hearing and often changed outfits for publicity shots as if she were hosting the Oscars instead of seriously running an agency capable of ruining tens of thousands of people’s lives.

My favorite promo had Noem in a bulletproof vest, wielding a menacing military rifle inadvertently pointed at the head of the guy next to her. She ultimately was fired for lying about the expenditure of hundreds of million dollars on such advertising stunts, and ordering a luxury jet, supposedly for deportations, but oddly, also equipped with a queen-size bed.

What finally got under my skin, perhaps because I’m an immigrant myself, was her constant lying and demonizing of immigrants as the “worst of the worst”: roving gangs of criminals, drug dealers, pedophiles and generally monstrous beings that threatened public safety. In fact, one estimate found that only five percent of the immigrants arrested during recent sweeps had been convicted of a violent crime, a far cry from the millions of criminals Trump promised to deport.

Where we live in Mexico, practically every young man we know—beginning with our gardener Félix, two of his brothers and a nephew—has been to the U.S., sometimes for years, working to support their families back home. Not to molest children, traffic drugs or rape the local women, but to work in brutal jobs for as long as seventy hours a week, that largely profit their American employers.

Slanderous arguments began to crumble during the immigration sweeps of Minneapolis, which turned to be a free-for-all where federal immigration agents were reported smashing people’s doors, along with dozens of car windshields, and behaving so much as an invading army that left two protestors—both U.S. citizens—shot dead.

Yet Noem’s excesses did a favor to the immigrant community. The chaos in Minneapolis led to the reassignment of Greg Bovino, from “commander in charge” of the immigration troops in that city, to a backwater post in California.

Noem was bounced to a what sounds like the sinecure of “Special Envoy to the Shield of America,” an outfit one hopes is headquartered in a galaxy far away.

And most importantly it has shaken people like myself from the political complacency that feeds Trump’s authoritarian schemes. Support for his draconian immigration policies—one of the centerpieces of his campaign for reelection—has seriously eroded. That’s good news.