3-19-25
By Lee Goodman
I wore my concentration camp uniform to Tucson, Arizona, for a conference on migration. It was noticed. The next day, I wore normal clothes. Several people who I already knew came up to me and said they hadn't recognized me when they saw me in the uniform. All they saw was the uniform, not the person inside.
My wearing the uniform served its purpose. It drew attention to the way the Nazis treated migrants and the way the U.S. is treating them – as less than human. As anonymous objects, not individuals.
By the end of the day, yet another similarity between that dark period of history and today had appeared in the news. We learned that the Trump administration had disobeyed a court order to temporarily cease deportations that were being conducted under a law that dates back to 1798. Until now, that law had never been used except in time of actual war. It was most recently used to imprison German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during World War II. In modern times, its use has widely been viewed as a violation of fundamental rights. Today we are not at war, but Trump is using the law to deport people without their having any opportunity to challenge their deportations. It is being used exactly the way the Gestapo used laws that gave them unhampered power over innocent people.
We also saw in the news that the country the people were deported to had immediately shaved the prisoners' heads and threw them into a prison that is famous for its human rights abuses. The president of that country laughed when told that the deportees he had received were not supposed to have been sent to him, because their deportations violated a U.S. court order. “Oopsie,” he said.
The callousness of the foreign leader was shocking, but no more than the way our own president responded when asked why he had ignored the judge's order. Following a now clearly established pattern, the White House spokesperson said the president did not believe he was obligated to obey the order. Once again, he demonstrated that he believes he is not subject to our laws and not required to act the way our Constitution says a president must act.
When I first wore the uniform, I was concerned that I might be acting in an alarmist way. But on a daily basis, our president is making me feel that we need to be sounding the alarm louder and louder. The similarities between what the Nazis did and what our president is doing are increasing. Our government is knocking on doors in the night. People are being disappeared. Some of them will die.
It would be nice if more people were concerned about what is happening to migrants. The onslaught of anti-immigrant propaganda we have all been subjected to makes it understandable that more people are not. The illegal deportations this week should awaken people that migrants are not the only ones in jeopardy. If people can be deported without their having any opportunity to challenge their removal, all of us can be deported in the same way. Each of us could be shipped to a foreign country and imprisoned. None of us would be able to stop it.
The president's so-called border czar has been threatening to arrest anyone who interferes with efforts to round up, imprison, and deport migrants. Am I interfering, by writing that I oppose the deportation policies? Am I interfering by wearing a replica of a concentration camp uniform? If you share this writing on social media, are you interfering? We would argue to a court that we are not, but the people who are being deported are not allowed to go to court. They cannot object. Any one of us could be in the same helpless position. That is the horror of what our president is now doing.
On the plane home, I wore a button with a blue triangle on my shirt. A handful of people asked me about it, and I explained. Each of them told me they had not known that migrants in Nazi concentration camps wore blue triangles. Until now, we didn't need to know. Our country wasn't being run by people who act like Nazis.