Who Will Stand Up For Human Rights?
This International Human Rights Day, we must shout from the rooftops: the 20th-century promise of safety and dignity as a fundamental birthright for all cannot survive the threat of mass deportations.
Today marks the 76th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document borne of the shame of allied powers, including the United States of America, turning Jewish refugees back to an excrutiating fate in genocidal Nazi concentration camps during WWII.
The global promise of then-48 state signatories, endowed all human beings—no matter the color of their skin, the creed they follow, or the location of their birth—with the fundamental rights to safety and dignity. The 14th Article of the Declaration established, moreover, that if ever our safety and dignity comes under threat, we have the right to move in pursuit of protection, aka asylum, from said persecution.
Since its signing on December 10, 1948, the Declaration has inspired more than 60 human rights instruments, such as the 1951 International Refugee Convention and the 1980 US Refugee Act. Yet, today we watch in horror and incredulity as genocide unfolds before our very eyes, and half the US voting population returns to the White House a convicted felon and wannabe strongman who promises to trounce the safety and dignity of millions from day one through the threat of persecution under mass deportation.
Mass deportations cross the line.
My book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands,* puts on the record what actually happens on US-taxpayer-funded mass deportation “missions,” as they are called in the military parlance of the US Department of Homeland “Security.” The climax chapter, Locked In, recounts in chilling detail what it sounds like, smells like, and feels like to be trapped inside these Boxcars in the Sky—a truth I weave from the accounts of more than four dozen individuals I interviewed who were forced to endure such an extreme ordeal.
Crossing the Line may be the only public-facing document to illustrate the myriad human rights—and legal protections—that are violated everyday under the cruel knee of the US Deportation Machine. Why? Because “they” don’t want us to know.
Everyone should know.
Today’s anniversary of the United Declaration of Human Rights is meant to be a global celebration of our shared humanity. But it’s our shared inhumanity I am obliged to elevate today. Because in the upside down world of the “Foxified” USA, too few people understand that in the 2024 election they voted for the complete dismantling of society’s post-WWII promise to uphold human rights—including their own.
Mass deportations are not only cruel, they threaten the very soul of America
by Joyce M. Davis | Originally published in PennLive, November 13, 2024, this op-ed has been updated for brevity and with minor text changes.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to start mass deportations of as many as 11 million people. Many of them have family and friends in this country, and many are doing jobs Americans born here consider beneath them.
Author Sarah Towle says Americans need to understand exactly what the looming deportation of millions of people means. And it’s not pretty. In fact, Towle’s research shows our deportation policies are mean and vicious to vulnerable people, and far from what Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Krishna taught. If you’re a disciple of any of these, look it up for yourself.
In her book, “Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands,” Towle describes the torture many people have suffered after fleeing homelands where they faced certain death for themselves and their families.
Speaking at Grace United Methodist Church in Harrisburg just before the Nov. 5 elections, Towle laid out in stark detail the brutality men, women and children experienced when the lucky ones actually reached the southern border of the United States. Many of them had valid and verifiable claims for asylum under both U.S. and international law, she said. Most were not criminals, as she documented. They were ordinary people who had no choice but to flee for their lives, often with their precious children in tow. Put yourself in their shoes.
But whether they were caught trying to sneak across the border, or if they met an agent and asked for asylum, they often faced the same fate – being treated like sub-human criminals.
“They are [put into cages] kept so cold, ostensibly to kill bacteria, they are known as las hieleras, aka “iceboxes” or “cold houses,” she wrote. Then, they are put in “dog pens” where they could remain for days. Finally, most are sent to detention centers, where there is more torture.
“Adults are shackled in five-point restraints,” she wrote, “wrists and ankles bound in metal cuffs and ties into a hay [correct to heavy] waist chain . . . then they are handed off to ICE.”
Through dozens and dozens of interviews, Towle described government-sanctioned cruelty that should make most good Americans cringe.
Towle also made it clear in her book and to the people at Grace Church that these are not just policies the Trump Administration carried out. It seems to be the American way of dealing with immigrants from the southern border.
The administration of President Jimmy Carter, who taught Sunday School at the Marantha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., started the practice of putting people in cages.
Then, as Towle wrote, “Reagan turned cages into big business.”
Towle doesn’t give Democratic President Bill Clinton a pass, either. He kept the big immigrant torture business going. But “It was the younger Bush, 43,” Towle wrote, “who introduced the idea of imprisoning whole families …”
Bottom line is this has been America’s way of dealing with the downtrodden. And, with Trump’s mass deportation threat about to become reality, many fear we’re entering a new era of atrocities against people praying for understanding and compassion.
Pray that we, our children or our grandchildren never have to beg for mercy.
In “Crossing the Line,” Towle has done her best to provide enough excruciating details to help Americans understand and empathize with the huddled masses now yearning to be free. America once beckoned people thirsting for democracy. Now, we demonize them. There’s got to be a better way.
In “Crossing the Line,” Towle is trying to awaken America’s compassion and morality toward refugees. She is also reminding us of the values that created the world’s greatest democracy and the abundant life too many of us take for granted. All of this is now at risk if we lose our values, if we harden our hearts.
If we don’t hear Towle’s message, it’s not just the people yearning to be free who will suffer, but Americans inevitably will lose the very soul of a nation whose foundation is built on welcoming the downtrodden and providing a haven for the oppressed.
* The word “America” in my book title, FYI, does not reference the place, but the mentality upon which it was built: the same mentality that justified Native American genocide, the Atlantic Slave-trade, Manifest Destiny, and the unspoken US colonization of Latin America and the Carribean unleashed by the Monroe Doctrine. In other words, it refers to White Supremacy. The same mentality driving the cruel, upside down “logic” of mass deportations.