How America Makes People into Monsters

The Trump administration invented an enemy for political gain. And at what cost?
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Earlier this week, The New Yorker recirculated a series of photos taken from Ajo, Arizona, where a janitor in the town's Customs and Border Patrol's processing center had begun, for reasons he couldn't articulate at the time, to collect some of the personal effects of migrants that CBP agents had confiscated upon detaining them. They're the sort of things a person might pack if they knew they were in for the most difficult trip of their lives. Cans of tuna fish to survive. Makeshift canteens insulated with discarded clothing. Blankets for desert nights. Spare shoes. Toilet paper, toothbrushes. All of these are deemed "potentially lethal, non-essential personal property" and disposed of. It doesn't seem all that different from going to prison.

One photo displays an assortment of rosaries, confiscated because they, again, are "potentially lethal, non-essential personal property." Even in a parade of indignities large and small like this one, that assortment of rosaries stands as a singular testament to institutional cruelty—that the United States government, which uses the words and symbolism behind the crucifix to justify many of its injustices, would strip the smallest token of faith a migrant could have, the one object in the world that might anchor them in their hopeless plight. A rosary is the one thing they can always carry in a life now defined by leaving things behind; a cross of irony, stripped away from them by white people whose ancestors came to colonize land that wasn't theirs, imposing a God they had claimed as their own.

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The work of America is finished. It isn't a place that welcomes immigrants, or desires to project compassion for them. It's a place where men in power mock children with Down's Syndrome on live television, where principles are abandoned by Department of Homeland Security officials for no discernible reason other than the fact that they've descended so far into casual cruelty that it's much more work to find their way back to anything resembling decency.

The real world is full of people loath to define anything as evil without the benefit of hindsight. Racism, bigotry, and cruelty—the sole purview of evil people—are rationalized and defended. Nazi—the only word we have for a real, historic, universally understood evil that took place here on Earth—is regarded as radioactive, something we must caution against associating with the well-meaning Americans among us. The people who just want their country back.

I think of those rosaries confiscated at the border, and all the stories I learned in grade school about how the Nazis would strip Jewish men, women, and children of jewelry as they were admitted into camps. They also just wanted their country back.

Herika MARTINEZ

The most effective way to create a monster is to rob people of their humanity, to frame them as a single faceless entity. The "illegals." The "criminals." The "rapists," and "animals" that "infest." Then they can be persecuted because they don't follow the rules. Because they look different. Because we don't speak that language here. Because they're changing things, and there's only one way to treat an infestation.

Real monsters, though, are harder to drive out. They wear suits and hide behind policies they cannot cite, wielding the power the public gave them. Power they promised to use on the monsters they conjured, the MS-13 gang members and children that end up filtered into chain-link cages.

“Because whiteness needs a villain in order to persist, and whiteness isn’t above inventing them.”

There's a panic in these actions, the panic of whiteness continuing to forcibly seize its tenuous grip on American politics and culture. It's why our government has openly admitted that its policy of separating children from their families is "a deterrent." It's why they've erected detention camps for the imprisonment of children, children they are ill-equipped to care for, children who are reportedly drugged in the care of shelters with alleged histories of abuse.

In their cowardice, they hide behind the law, and claim that because their victims are not citizens, they are justified. They inflict clear and tangible cruelty on the helpless and vulnerable, and then attempt to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant, still seeking to reap the benefits of the immigration they now have zero tolerance for. Whiteness will do that when it is scared, to the point that there is, effectively, little difference between a "legal" immigrant and an "illegal" one to the government. They defy asylum law and tell migrants they must enter through ports of entry, and then turn them away from those ports of entry, leaving them no recourse. Because whiteness needs a villain in order to persist, and whiteness isn't above inventing them.

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In Texas, Jose Nunez, a Sheriff's deputy for Bexar County Sheriff's Office, was arrested after being charged with assaulting an undocumented immigrant's child. It's alleged that he threatened to deport the child's mother if she made a complaint. A man with a badge who had the law on his side.

If you've ever talked to a cop who doesn't think you're worth any kind of respect, the way cops talk to brown kids by default, you'll know suspicion is America's primary attitude toward you. You did this, they'll say. We saw you do it, they'll lie. I learned this at age 12, when a cop showed up at my door and tried to separate me from my mother, falsely accusing me of being complicit in a break-in. In that moment, you realize that you are powerless.

I still get nervous at airports. I sigh and smile when I'm pulled aside and patted down, my bags rifled through. I clean up nice, I have a college degree and a nice suit I wear to weddings. But I still have to hide any irritation that I might feel when waiting in the long line at customs when returning from abroad, the one that takes hours to get through instead of minutes, like it should, because I am a citizen, even though that may no longer be enough.

In fiction, you can find all sorts of monsters. Some tower stories high and raze cities. Some hide in the shadows and devour the innocent. Some withdraw and are only given to violence when provoked by the fearful masses. If there's a thread that runs through them all, it's this: Most monsters aren't born. They're made. They're someone's fault, the work of evil—an evil that looks astonishingly human. That's always the twist: Real monsters look like us.