White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How Fear Came to America in 2025

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Of all the things that happened in 2025 — a year dominated by the presidency of Donald Trump — not the least is that fear came to America.

It’s reminiscent of the fear that African Americans knew in the days of the lynch mob, or that Jews have felt from time to time, or that Hollywood felt during the blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s, or the fear that people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, who were mostly U.S. citizens, felt when they were rounded up and interred following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For some, it is a low-grade fear of reprisals, financial ruin and humiliation. And for some, it is a fear of ruin by litigation. But for others, it is fear of faceless arrest, the jail cell and plastic handcuffs.

All of this has made us a nation in fear and removed our faith in our laws, our Constitution, and our plain decency.

This is a new kind of fear which is acute in places, such as immigrant communities, but more universal than in the past.

It isn’t the fear of a foreign power or an alien ideology or a disease, but a fear generated domestically — generated by our own government. Fear in our workplaces, our schools, our movie studios, our newsrooms and our universities.

For the first time, this year we saw troops on the streets of cities when there was no civil unrest — as there was, for example, during the riots of 1968 which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

We saw troops deployed in cities where they weren’t wanted, opposed by the local government and local people. But those cities got the troops courtesy of a claim by the president that troops can manage law enforcement better than the local police. Or was there some more sinister purpose?

For the first time, we saw arrests without charge or evidence, carried out by masked ICE agents, of people simply suspected of being here illegally.

Often the suspicion is no more than the color of the arrestee’s skin, their dress and their demeanor. No crime needs to be proved by this army of the state, dressed to intimidate. To the ICE men and women, appearance is tantamount to conviction.

Nightly on television we watched agents drag away men, women and children without due process; they would be held and deported without charge, trial or having any avenue of appeal. Justice denied, nonoperational. Often deportees go to countries that are alien or different from their homelands.

Fear has come home.

Immigrants are frightened even if they are citizens. If you have olive-toned skin, you can be dragged and held incommunicado. No appeal, no trial, no court appearance, no access to help. Habeas corpus suspended.

Pinch yourself and ask: Is this the America we cherish for its freedom, its justice and its generosity of spirit?

The fear isn’t confined to those who might be swept up in the mindless cruelty of ICE but extends throughout society. People with stature fear that if they speak out, if they do what at other times they might have seen as their civic duty, they will endanger themselves and their families. All the government has to do is to start an investigation or threaten one and the damage is done, the first level of punishment is delivered.

Investigations can target anything from how you filled out a mortgage application to whether you wrote something which may be viewed as objectionable, and the punishment begins.

Fear stalks the schools where teachers and professors can be punished for what they say or teach, and where the institutions of higher learning are subject to political scrutiny. Politics has become the law, capricious and savage.

There is fear in business where so many companies rely on government loan guarantees or tax credits for their growth. There is fear that if they say anything that can be construed as disloyal, they will be punished.

Political opponents fear that their mortgage applications may be deemed to be irregular and they are to be censured or prosecuted. Political prosecution is now a government tool.

Others just fear that Trump will ridicule them in public with his schoolyard denigrations, particularly members of Congress. They fear they will be reprimanded and marked for defeat in the polls.

There is an awful completeness about the Trump rampage: his systematic ignoring of norms, shredding of the rights of the individual, destroying families and bringing about untold misery.

A question for all America: How is the spreading of fear — sometimes an acute fear and sometimes low-grade fear — throughout society beneficial and to whom?

We, the people, deserve to know.

Fear Is Afoot, Be Afraid America

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There is enough fear to go around.

There is fear of the indescribable horror when the ICE men and women, their faces hidden by masks, grab a suspected illegal immigrant. Their grab could come at the person’s home or place of work, while picking up a child from school or standing in the hallway of a courthouse.

That person knows fear as never before. That person’s life, for practical purposes, may be over: loved ones left behind, hope shredded. He or she may be shipped to a place where they won’t be able to survive.

Fear is there because, maybe decades ago, they sought a better life and voted for it with their feet.

There is no time to argue, no time to ask why, no time to say goodbye. No time to prove your innocence or your U.S. citizenship. It is raw fear — the fear that secret police have always used.

There is the fear of those who work in government — once one of the securest jobs in the country — that they will be fired because their legitimate work in another administration is an affront to this one.

This hammer has come down in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. The crime: supposedly being on the wrong side of history.

There is fear in the universities. Once a babel of free, even outrageous speech, they are cowed. Mighty Harvard, one of the shiniest stars in the education firmament, is dulled, and other universities fear they will be next. Everywhere academics worry that what they say in their classrooms might be reported as inappropriate — their careers ended.

There is fear in the law firms. A new concept is at work: an advocate is somehow guilty because of whom they defended. This violates the whole underpinning of law and advocacy, dating back to Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, now asunder in the United States.

Media is afraid. Disney, CBS and The Washington Post have bent before the fear of retribution, the fear that other aspects of their business will pay the price for freedom of speech. Journalists fear the First Amendment is abridged and won’t protect them.

There is fear, albeit of a lower order, across corporate America as it has become apparent that the government can reach deep down into almost any company, canceling contracts, withholding loan guarantees and, worse, ordering an “investigation.” That is a punishment that costs untold dollars and shatters good names, even if no prosecution follows.

Elected officeholders have reason to feel fear. President Donald Trump has suggested that Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago should be in jail. Is his compliant DOJ working on that? Fear is unleashed for the elected. Doing your job is no protection.

If you have expressed an opinion that could be judged as subversive, the state could come after you. Suppose you walk in a demonstration, exercising your constitutional right to assemble and petition? Suppose you wrote something on social media, so easily traced with AI, which is now out of step with the times? Satire? Opinion? News? Facts that are out of fashion? If you have posted, be afraid.

If you take a flight these days, the TSA will ask you to look into a camera. Then government has a fresh picture of you in its active system, ready for facial recognition software to identify you. It will ID you if you should be walking in a demonstration or just be near one. Your own picture, so easily captured by modern technology, can convict you.

What is the purpose of that picture? It has no bearing on the flight you are about to take. The same thing is true when you reenter the country from abroad. Smile for Big Brother.

Surveillance is a favored tool of the authoritarian state. I have seen it at work in Cuba, in apartheid South Africa and in the Soviet Union. Successive U.S. administrations have been quick to criticize the increasing use of technology for surveillance in China. No more.

Troops are being ordered into cities where the locals don’t want them. They come under the promiscuous use of the Insurrection Act of 1807.

Does America fear insurrection? No, but there is fear of federal troops in our cities.

The Supreme Ugliness of the Deportation Regime

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It is ugly today, it will be uglier tomorrow and months from now, it will be even uglier. The relentless rounding up of undocumented people living in the United States is the horror that can be ended, if there was a will to end it – and if it were not a source of political feedstock for unyielding positions so close to the Trump presidency.

Mind you, it was not all that pretty under the Obama administration. He signaled his heart was in the right place while the deportations continued. What Obama did was to protect, by executive order, the undocumented who were brought in by their parents while underage. Now there is a report of the first of these dreamers, Juan Manuel Montes, being arrested.

We get little snippets of how ugly the deportations are from time to time in the media: a child bawling her eyes out because ICE policemen have seized her mother. That poor woman is on her way to a country she left because there was little there for her when she committed the crime of settling without papers in the United States; when she availed herself of the opportunity which nearly all American settlers once did: to live and work in freedom and peace.

In writing about the inhumanity of deporting the undocumented, I know what I have opened myself up to a flood of abusive mail, denouncing me as a crypto-communist and much worse. Always the same theme and often the same words inform these communications: “What is it that they don’t understand about illegal?” That is crime enough for those who want mass deportations.

At present the threshold, we are told, is that the deportee should have at some time committed a felony. Under federal law, illegal residence here is not a felony but a misdemeanor. One such crime in some states is driving under the influence. A felony? Yup. By the way, it is a crime for which former President George W. Bush was convicted in 1976.

Things are going to go from ugly to hideous when the federal government brings its might against sanctuary cities. There is the raw combustible material of civil strife here — ugliness in the streets which has not been seen since 1968.

When neither of two options is acceptable, it is time to seek a third way: a compromise.

I have been advocating a compromise which was developed by a quiet, former IRS tax inspector and California university system auditor who lives in Malibu, Calif. He is Mark Jason and his idea is simple: cool things down and get some benefit for local authorities in areas where the undocumented are concentrated.

Jason and his Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, wholly funded by himself, would recognize the presence of the undocumented and give them a way to remain and live productive lives. His proposal is a 10-year work permit dependent on a tax of 5 percent to be paid by both the worker and the employer. Jason calculates a revenue bounty of $176 billion over 10 years. There would be no citizenship for the worker. This money, Jason says, ought to go to the localities where the undocumented live and to defray the costs of education, healthcare, policing and other essential services.

This third way, this 5-percent solution, would not satisfy the immigrant advocates who want a “path to citizenship” or those who want to throw the baggage out; the dreaded knock on the door, families shattered, dreams turned into nightmares.

I still think we must control immigration, prevent it at points of entry, not when a life has been established and families are at risk.

There is a horror greater than the illegality of an otherwise productive citizen. It is the supreme ugliness of the state sending its agents against the individual, whether it is the state seeking to bivouac troops in private homes, as the English did to the American colonists, or the agents of the state coming into a home to rip it asunder.

That is an ultimate ugliness, unspeakable, unbecoming and, dare I say, un-American.

Photo: NEW YORK CITY – FEBRUARY 11 2017: Several hundred protesters gathered in Washington Square Park to voice support for immigrants & Muslims in light of Trump’s travel ban.

Mass Deportations — the Surfacing of the Worst in Us

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The accelerated deportation of illegal immigrants is brainless, cruel, antagonizing to many allies and neighbors and, ultimately, banal. It is antithetical to our better natures and to the humane face of America that has made us an exemplar for human rights, a voice for the voiceless and, as Ronald Reagan said, “a shining city on a hill.”

It is American exceptionalism abandoned for petty prejudice.

There is linkage — there always is linkage — between the desecration of the Jewish Chesed Emeth Cemetery in University City, Mo., and those knocks on the door as the men from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) perpetrate the obscenity, ordered up by those in authority. Prejudice has been affirmed by government.

No country in this disturbed world can allow unfettered immigration, but to turn on those who have crossed the border for the simplest human reason — need — with the full force of the state and to send them to a place where they fled for a better life, for a dream — the American Dream — is to implement a crime against humanity.

Hate is easily inflamed. The darkest passion of human beings is to love to hate, to blame all of life’s ills on others and to seek to punish them for just being. It is what produced the sectarian violence in Ireland, perpetuated apartheid in South Africa, and caused the great horrors of the last century, including the Armenian massacre in Turkey and the Holocaust. Not only do people love to hate but hate becomes hereditary, handed down through the generations.

The United States has struggled against its incipient hates and even appeared, with the election of Barack Obama, to be able to put them aside. But we have come through a political season where hate has been dog whistled and it has come running.

If you think what you have just read is far-fetched, let me tell you that every time I write about immigration and the plight of the dispossessed, I am deluged with virulent, hate-filled emails. Once this evil genie is loose, no prejudice is out of possibility.

All my emails repeat this political phrase out of last year’s campaign, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” How many things that were illegal in my lifetime are now legal? Try segregated lunch counters and homosexuality, for starters. The goal posts move.

You can build a single act of illegality — in this case crossing a border to get a better life — into a crime of giant proportions without statute of limitations: a mark of Cain, an indelible stain. But it is not. The hard-pressed father and mother, breaking the law by working without papers, and yet holding it all together so that the children might have it easier, is the face of these criminals. Lives in extremis.

Study after study has shown that they are less likely to commit violent crimes or to disturb the peace than Americans whose ancestors arrived on these shores as immigrants in another time.

To break up families, to send people to countries where they are de facto foreigners with no means of supporting themselves and where they will encounter hostility and danger, in the name of legality, is preposterous. It is something that will pass into history as a time when our country — America the Great — did something totally unworthy of its better nature.

When the state moves people by the millions for its own purposes, terrible injustice and human suffering result.

We did that: We have the mark of slavery in our DNA. In small measure we expiated that, until this dark time. Shame!

For InsideSources

The Horror When the Men from ICE Come Knocking

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I wonder daily, really, what life is like on the other side of the windowpane that separates the legal resident from the illegal.

I wonder if the skinny, young Chinese woman working in the restaurant is legal. I have noticed her because she works so hard: She is there when it opens and when it closes.

The restaurant is family owned, so I wonder if she is there legally — a link in “chain migration” — or illegally, in a kind of servitude. The chain is forged when a legal family sponsors other family members, who can then come here preferentially, welcome and free.

If she came here otherwise, say on a tourist or student visa, and did not return to her home country, then she is in danger of a knock on the door, handcuffs and the horror of deportation. And if she is arrested for a crime, no matter what, she is closer to the door.

I also wonder about the Mexican family that detailed my old car so well in the July heat. Cash work without a paper trail tells part of their story. Did they walk across the border from Mexico together or separately? The women speak English, but not the men. Were they a family before or after coming here? Are some of them here legally; will children lose their fathers, wives their husbands, if there are deportations?

Meeting agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), wearing black windcheaters with “POLICE” on top of “ICE” emblazoned in white on the backs, must be a heart-stopping experience. These are federal enforcement agents, police, not paper-pushers. This is rough stuff, not community policing.

I listen to tales of deportations: families torn apart, and people sent to countries where they were born but had never resided. I wonder if these people are yearning for U.S. citizenship and the ability to vote. Mostly, I think they are yearning just to live here in peace, free from the fear of a knock on the door from ICE agents.

Mark Jason, a friend who lives in Malibu, Calif., has devised a way to deal with illegal immigrants that eschews the brutality of deportations and the emotional hostility that amnesty for them provokes in some Americans. He calls it the “Third Way” and for six years, he has been promoting it with his own money.

Like many good ideas, Jason’s plan is very simple: He wants to create a 10-year, renewable “Special Work Permit” with an additional dimension: holders need to earn the permit by complying with our laws and paying a 5-percent tax on their wages, and their employers will also pay a 5-percent tax.

Taxes collected from these permits would amount to $167 billion in 10 years, according to Jason’s think tank, the Immigrant Tax Group. “Payments could be facilitated by cell phone and computer technology, and the immigrants gain their freedom with certain rights and can assimilate more easily,” Jason said.

“These payments would be used to provide hospitals, schools, policing and prisons in the local communities where the immigrants live. This third way is a win-win that can be implemented simply,” said Jason, who is a retired budget analyst for California’s university system and a former IRS agent.

If I am right about the status of the young Chinese woman and the Mexican family, they could all live the American dream, working without the fear of a knock on the door: the knell that sounds for all who live in fear of the state and its agents, who have terrified down through the centuries.