Arlington, VA—They came in the bitter cold to leave flowers and notes beneath the mural of the dead. By the afternoon locals had lain flowers and roses on the sidewalk beneath the mural. The flora had by then frozen and wilted in the cold but the notes remained. “For I was a stranger and you welcomed me—Mathew 25:36,” read one note. “No One Deserves This,” read another.
Some of the pictures of the dead were already gone by the next day, either blown off the wall by the stiff cold wind during the night before, or taken down by someone eager to save a memento of the slain. For what had been 36 photos dwindled to 30. There was talk about replacing them amongst the creators. But would the replacements remain?
“For The Dead and The Living We Must Bear Witness”
Maybe the mural itself was not meant to last. Maybe the missing photos were in a better place and were never meant to be displayed on a billboard in the first place. Certainly the creators and team that put them there had intended them to remain displayed as a permanent reminder that they existed. Perhaps the photos were instead meant to be taken down and rescued from that cold place—to be preserved by someone needing them as a comfort in their bereavement.
Some forms of grief are rather strange and comparatively different from the norm. But what is a norm? Each grieves differently and so each must accept the ways of others in their bereavement. Who is to tell what is the normal way to grieve and what bereavement should look like?
In the moment of death of our own kin, we are forced to accept their absence forever. But the calculated killings by ICE are not being accepted by Minneapolis, for they are not required to accept them. They mustn’t accept them. So they are resisting them. They are resisting them with every fiber of their existence. Because there can be others. There will be others. They must resist them both for the living and for the dead.
Elie Weisel wrote, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” Why did he write that and what did he mean by it?
Weisel was a survivor of the holocaust. He survived Auschwitz to bear witness to it. The Nazis sent him there because his family was Jewish. But he survived and witnessed incalculable inhumanity. He later became a famous author who wrote about the indifference of others to atrocities. He became a messenger for peace and later he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work. He understood why it was imperative to remember the dead so the atrocity of the Holocaust would not be repeated.
ICE Has Morphed Into A Killing Machine
Every day, with each jump-out assault or deliberate attack against citizens that are nearby monitoring ICE actions, with each kidnapping and disappearance; with each needless spray of gas and chemicals into neighborhoods and onto protesters’ faces, and with every warrantless arrest of citizens exercising First Amendment rights or immigrants here legally, ICE inches the nation towards the unthinkable. It has become a barbaric machination of violence and oppression.
Green card holders are being taken, disappeared, and sent to ICE camps because of their race. The Department of Homeland Security has cast immigrants as criminals for being in the U.S. when their presence here is legal. Their reasoning that migrants have broken laws and are criminals by crossing the border is actually not a serious crime but a misdemeanor and immigration judges have been set up to determine the legality of immigrants in the cases of overstaying their visas and migrants seeking sanctuary.
These cases are not criminal matters. DHS reasoning and methods for taking them without warrants is the actual crime because it violates a basic principle of denying due process.
Statements from ICE about who immigrants are and about their character and the draconian methods they are using in their detention are like the statements and justifications the Nazis issued to justify persecuting, disappearing, and murdering Jews.
ICE camps are similar in degree to the Nazi concentration camps because the disappeared are dying there or possibly killed there and there can be no justification for it. There is no collective will in the leadership of the Nation to stop the runaway ICE machine so one can only conclude that it is condoned. The congress is in the negotiation stage of increasing DHS funding to a record $1.5 trillion.
ICE camps are kept locked from view and deliberately hidden from the rightful oversight they require by minority lawmakers seeking knowledge of the conditions inside the camps. This is because DHS does not want the truth about the camp conditions to be viewed or reported. Without oversight, how are the people to know truthfully that what is happening inside those closed spaces where 36 have perished.
What is known is that what ICE is illegally doing on the streets can be verified because citizens and independent media are available to video record events. The brutal actions of ICE on city streets, cannot be better than what is happening in the closed spaces of the camps where no one can bear witness.
“If There Is No Justice For The People…”
At the end of the banner, set apart from the tableau of the slain depicted, is another wheat pasted photo although this one is much smaller and easy to miss. A photo of Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary, is also on the wall.
An iconic figure in Mexican history, Zapata organized a robust agrarian resistance movement of the agrarian peasants which became known as the Zapatistas. He led them to fight wealthy land grabbers attempting to dominate the peasant class. He eventually inspired them to defeat the wealthy class and governmental dominating over the agrarian peasants during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. He was assassinated in 1919 but his legacy of leading resistance of the people to an oppressive government still lives on. His vision of giving control of land to workers was eventually realized. But it came to be decades after he lived.
In the spirit of Zapata, the banner calls citizens to resist ICE lawlessness. In the spirit of Weisel, it calls citizens forward to speak out against ICE lawlessness. As ICE lawlessness and violence escalates and spreads to other States, citizens have no other choice.
