“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes … Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” — Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, 1942.
In times such as these, we need to remember that we are Utahns.
Violent protest is not our thing. We don’t throw bricks at police cars or set fire to taxis.
We don’t goad government officials who are already itching to crack down on dissent into repressive actions.
We do stand up for our rights and the rights of our neighbors. We do recognize that the right of due process and other constitutional protections are guaranteed to every “person,” not only citizens.
We do believe that families should stay together. That people who are not violent criminals should not be the target of armed gangs who may or may not be federal agents. Agents who may or may not have proof that the people they are carting off to who-knows-where really are criminals, or even people who are here without authorization.
We know that most human beings who live here without all the proper paperwork are not criminals at all. The real law that governs this, the bipartisan Immigration Act of 2005, treats most immigration violations as a civil action, not that different than a parking ticket.
We do understand that we are allowed — called — to oppose unconstitutional arrests and brutal tactics. We do that by refusing to remain silent. By exercising our First Amendment right to “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
And there are now some very serious grievances to be redressed.
ICE raids are about fear and suspicion, not law and order.
Federal officials’ efforts to arrest and deport as many non-citizens as they can — sometimes catching citizens, legal residents, tourists, approved asylum-seekers, even other law enforcement officers, in their human dragnets — have rightly angered immigrants and seventh-generation Americans alike.
Promises that the sweeps would be aimed only at violent criminals, foreign gang members and drug kingpins have not been kept — if they were ever seriously made. Clearly, there just aren’t that many dangerous foreigners in our land, and those there are are not working in slaughterhouses or garment factories waiting to be rounded up.
So the White House, apparently believing its own anti-immigrant propaganda, has sent agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (if that’s really who they are) to 7-Elevens and Home Depots, mostly in blue states, to beef up their arrest numbers.
The result is not law and order. It is fear and suspicion.
Even in Utah, good people are afraid to go to school, to go to work, to go to the supermarket, to go to church. Even those here legally have heard stories of legal residents or those granted temporary asylum being disappeared, shipped off to holding centers or to other nations. No legal representation. No due process. No law at all.
We are dangerously close to being called to hide our neighbors in attics or under false floorboards.
That is what people were protesting when they took to the streets in Los Angeles recently.
Some of those people went too far. Way too far.
But claims from various pants-on-fire social media accounts that LA was in flames were false. The president’s order to federalize 4,000 members of the California National Guard and call out a detachment of United States Marines, over the objection of state and local officials, was a wholly unjustified escalation of the situation.
The president, clearly, is spoiling for a fight. The people of California, even if it was only a handful of them, shouldn’t have given it to him. The people of Utah certainly should not.
Cox was wrong to support National Guard call-out in California.
It was sad indeed to hear Utah Gov. Spencer Cox fall in line with the president’s thuggish actions, to say that he approved of the administration ignoring the wishes of state and local authorities in Los Angeles and militarizing a situation that was nowhere near beyond the reach of local law enforcement to handle.
Better Cox had agreed with his mentor, former Gov. Gary Herbert, who rightly said Tuesday that if any president had called up the Utah National Guard without his consent, he would have been “very upset.”
It is not clear why Cox abandoned the Prime Directive of Utah Politics — to object whenever possible to “federal overreach” — and again was heard sucking up to the president. The sitting governor says he will not seek re-election and shows no sign of coveting any higher office or federal appointment and so, like Herbert, should be politically free to say the right thing.
Perhaps Cox hopes that, if he pledges his troth to MAGAism, ICE won’t notice the thousands of undocumented workers who keep the Utah economy humming along so well.
Cox, like Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, was correct to discourage any violent actions by Utahns who feel the need to protest.
But protest we should.
Our state and local political leaders should call out the excesses of the federal government. Our religious leaders — not only The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — should stand by their commitment to humanity and the sanctity of the family.
Our state’s leaders like to say that we are different. Gov. Cox once said that he hoped that Utah would “Stay weird.”
If, by that, our governor means rising above divisive politics and standing up — peacefully — for our common humanity, then we should be weird indeed.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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