As if we needed another reason why Canadians must never accept our nation being taken over by the Trump Administration, yesterday morning’s Globe and Mail quoted a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirming that “it is now the organization’s policy to place asylum seekers and migrants redirected from Canada into custody and transfer them to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility for removal from the country.” We know all about the horrors and utter disregard for human rights in those “ICE” facilities from Vancouverite Jasmine Mooney’s story posted below.

So what does that mean? When any person for whatever reason is deemed at the border not to be admissible to Canada for purposes which may include filing a claim to refugee status, they will be immediately arrested, confined in what we would consider to be nightmarish conditions and then summarily flown back to the country of origin from which they fled in fear of death, torture or persecution, essentially being handed back to the perpetrators. There is nothing shameful about filing a refugee claim. It is a human right guaranteed in international treaties by most decent nations. And the necessity for having had to flee is typically the misfortune of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time in a nation which disregards human rights. Mr. Trump’s specious characterization of migrants as criminals ignores Christian history which holds that Jesus and his family fled to live as migrants in Egypt during his childhood.

Think about what that means for Canadian border service officers, most of whom are fundamentally nice people seeking to do the right thing within the bounds of the regulations which they are sworn to uphold. Knowing that their decisions are likely to lead to death and suffering of innocent people would constitute a sufficient burden on many of those officers’ consciences to put them at risk for PTSD.

Canada is by nature a generous caring nation, one in which empathy for others is honoured rather than scorned. That’s why we’ve been a model to the world in terms of settling successive waves of quite diverse migrants while actually benefitting economically both from their skills and their offsetting our aging population. Tragically, the Trump Administration has chosen to move the USA in the opposite direction, with inhumane treatment of migrants serving as a convenient starting point. From a Canadian perspective, Trump’s obvious moral bankruptcy is more than a little unfathomable given the overwhelming support which he enjoys from evangelical Christians. Somehow Jesus’ injunctions for the faithful to care for the poor and the oppressed has proven to be entirely ignorable! Were Jesus to return to the US today, he too would quickly find himself imprisoned in an ICE facility.

The Department of Homeland Security provides a frightening example of how a nation’s security forces and bureaucracy can be quickly turned by a newly-elected government into agents for an emerging dictatorship. Morally bankrupt senior appointees can and do create a climate of fear, which allows previously unacceptable abuses of power to become the new normal. Like public servants in Nazi Germany, Putin’s Russia and elsewhere, government staff are not themselves at first morally bankrupt but become agents of evil simply by quietly following immoral orders. All of which serves to spread the rot.

For one of the most recent examples, search for “YouTube 2HIN3twj0LM”. The Trump Administration is intent on ending a major immigration parole program that had allowed more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live and work legally in the US. Every migrant enrolled in that program has just received a terrifying email requiring them to have either left by April 24th or be apprehended, taken to an overcrowded ICE facility and summarily deported. Many of the recipients were in fact US citizens who happen be the points of contact from migrants lacking email addresses. The fact that they were legally in the US (as confirmed by a judge) appears to be irrelevant, which is characteristic of autocracies in which the great leader’s and his entourage’s whims overrule laws.

Authoritarian nations like Nazi Germany, Russia and China were not fated to develop the way they did, to the point that every citizen is little better than a prisoner. What they lacked was sufficient citizens with both intact moral compasses and the courage to speak out against abuses, rather than the illusory safety of keeping one’s head down. We can do little to directly affect the democratic tragedy which is unfolding in our neighbour and former friend/ally to the south, but we can and must collectively stand up and be counted in our values and our support for continued Canadian sovereignty. Should we fail to do so, we too could find ourselves like those poor migrants under the US Homeland Security boot with absolutely no remaining rights.

The “Kingston Stands With Canada” group of which I am a part will have a table at the Earth Day celebrations at the Memorial Centre on Sunday April 27 from 11 am to 4 pm. If you’re interested in wearing whichever of our dozen Canada lapel button designs strikes your fancy, please see us there.

Credit: The above image was produced by the Microsoft Create free AI in response to my simple “moral bankruptcy” query.