The Land of the Free? Maybe.

Between 1892 and 1997, the United States deported 2.1 million people. By the end of next year, if present trends continue, the Obama administration will have deported that many in a mere six years.

Read those first few words again: between 1892 and 1997 – eighteen ninety-two to nineteen ninety-seven! That’s 105 years! Compared to six years!

Those words are from William Finnegan’s insightful and scary piece, The Deportation Machine (New Yorker, 29 April 2013). In it we learn that fact and a lot of equally distasteful others. The article is largely about Mark Lyttle, a North Carolina-born U.S. citizen who was “deported” by the Department of Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm (ICE). I put “deported” in quotes because citizens cannot be deported. As Finnegan writes,

banishment might be more accurate. ICE has no authority over U.S. citizens, and yet ICE had arrested Lyttle and jailed him for fifty-one days – perhaps “kidnapped” would be a more accurate term.

The United States government kidnapping its own citizens! What in the world have we come to?

Yes, Lyttle’s case was based on repeated government errors and, yes, it was eventually made right, but Finnegan asserts that we only know of Lyttle because he survived and because his family never stopped fighting for him.

Northwestern University professor Jacqueline Stevens has studied unjust deportations and detentions and argues that perhaps “one percent of ICE’s tens of thousands of prisoners are U. S. citizens.” She has documented more than forty who were deported. Again, remember that ICE has no authority whatsoever over American citizens.

This all began to get out of control on September 12, 2001. The war on terror and the Patriot Act have created the machinery by which the government has taken unprecedented control of people’s lives, both U. S. citizens and foreigners alike.

I’m a Democrat. I support the president. But this article has shaken me. It makes me understand and even sympathize a bit with the folks in the picture below; they’re from Seymour, CT, the town right next to ours. Their issue is of course different, and I am totally opposed to the private ownership of guns – any guns – but I understand a bit better their distrust of the government.