New York
In the time of an earlier mass resistance to injustice and immorality, we tenderfoot social activists began calling out truncheon-happy policemen for exactly what they were: “pigs,” meaning no offense to honest porkers.
—A bit of rude history before moving on to the piggery of today:
With the blessings of a jeering Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-1976), a phalanx of Chicago police officers chose the city’s 1968 Democratic Party national convention as an arena for vicious assaults on opponents of the war in Vietnam; the bone-crushing mayhem was broadcast live on television. Victims beaten by Chicago’s boys in blue (no girls allowed back in ’68) borrowed an epithet from 19th Century England to disparage London’s bobbies—“pig.”
From the comfort of their homes, TV viewers beheld scenes of helmeted Chicago cops bashing long-haired young men and women to the ground with batons, gloved fists, and rifle butts—tableaux of savagery backlit in photogenic mists of pepper spray and exploding cannisters of chlorobenzalmalononitrile. Young faces, braided in blood and uptilted to roving news cameras, cried out, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching…”
Legendary journalist Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017) would write of the rampage: “So these pigs in police uniforms punched and gassed and clubbed, and still I don’t know why they didn’t shoot. Certainly they wanted to. They were beside themselves.”
—Flash forward to this year of 2025, in which an American fascist movement is led by Donald J. Trump, a felonious führer perpetually beside himself and anxious to make government depravity fashionable.
A führer so irked by citizens exercising their constitutional rights to public protest that high-level White House witnesses report his once asking U.S. Army General Mark Milley, former Pentagon chief, “Can’t you just shoot them, shoot them in the legs or something? Crack skulls, beat the fuck out of them?”
With Herr Trump in charge—until he’s either hauled away to jail in manacles or plagues us until January 2029 when the second of his two presidential terms expires—the time has come again to call out pigs for doing what pigs do; pigs as in Schweine, as in Gestapo.
For today’s pigs—beefy goons of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), tricked out in combat gear, black masks, and machine guns—are inescapable reminders of 1930s Berlin. Accordingly, it is wise to heed the warning penned decades ago by Mississippi novelist William Faulkner (1897-1962):
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”
Assigned by Donald Trump to unleash the goons for anti-immigrant duty is Kristi Noem (at last, a girl!), the severely Botoxed and famously puppy-killing secretary of Homeland Security, within which ICE is a division.
She is but one of the of several right-wing zealots awarded high posts in the Trump regime—a gung-ho clan that includes the hyperkinetic, liquor-loving ex-TV personality Pete Hegseth as boss of the Pentagon and über anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services. Washington-watchers have tagged these and other Trump’s commandants as “kooks in jackboots.”
Ms. Noem answers to one Stephen Miller, chief policy advisor to the president. The watchers mock Mr. Miller as the love child of fictional vampire Nosferatu and Nazi death camp wardress Irma Grese, a/k/a “the bitch of Bergen-Belsen.”
Together, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem commit to a ghoulish ambition: execution of Donald Trump’s racist pledge to deport the fifteen million undocumented immigrants among us. The president and his cult damn them “criminal invaders” and “illegals.”
Save for melanin levels, contemporary immigrants are the same as Europeans arrived on American shores between the year 1492 and on through the 20th Century. All are desperate strangers come here to begin life anew in a strange new land.
Today’s desperate strangers seek relief from hunger and poverty and pogroms—the same as fair-skinned strangers of yore. Today’s immigrants are darker-complexioned strivers at work in the nation’s restaurants and car washes and textile mills and meat packing plants. They are the people who maintain lush suburban lawns and gardens surrounding comfortable homes of the privileged, the people who clean houses and pick crops as the sun blazes over farmlands; the people who tend to the human needs of our children and elders, wiping their bottoms as need be.
For Them, it was ever thus.
They are Those who would replace Us—so an idiotic conspiracy among the Trump cult has it. Therefore, They must go.
So say Ms. Noem and Mr. Miller.
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In particular, Stephen Miller brings shame to this country’s promise of refuge, as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty here in the New York harbor.
As a schoolboy, I was taught that the torch Lady Liberty holds high is meant to honor an American enlightenment achieved and aspired. Like my classmates, I memorized the sonnet inscribed on a plaque attached to the copper plinth upon which she stands—
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
with conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand glows
world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The poet Emma Lazarus wrote those lines in 1883, at age 15. Born to an immigrant family of Sephardic Jews from Portugal, she died of Hodgkin’s disease at age 38. She is buried at the Beth Olam Cemetery in Brooklyn, where visitors may give gravesite respects from Sunday to Friday.
Her poem, titled “The New Colossus,” remains for me and others a thrill to recite. Millions of visitors from every country of the world have read the words while tracing the plaque with their fingers. They do so because Emma Lazarus wrote the truth of what our country hopes to be; decent people have need of tangible truth.
What Stephen Miller has written, and said, are lies.
In a characteristically cynical mood one day in September of 2015, Mr. Miller admonished senators who sympathized with the plight of immigrants. According to the Congressional Record, he told them, “[T]his is a good chance to expose that ridiculous Statue of Liberty myth…Two decades after that poem was added, [President Calvin] Coolidge shut down immigration.”
—NOTE: Under Mr. Coolidge (1872-1933), the Immigration Act of 1924 established four decades of a quota system that greatly reduced entry applications generally, and specifically excluded non-white applicants. In “Mein Kampf,” author Adolf Hitler praised this American system as a model for the Third Reich.
In a sarcastic mood two months later, Mr. Miller confronted the same senators with additional snark: “[O]ne sure way to get rich in modern America is to offer yourself up as a virtue signal to those seeking to prove themselves members in good standing of the national religion—diversity.”
He brought such racialist ethos to his job in the first Trump administration when, in July of 2017, Mr. Miller drafted a presidential speech delivered in Poland to a pan-European audience that included this challenge: “Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
While Mr. Trump dutifully mouthed Mr. Miller’s words, he did not name any individual subversive immigrant or immigrants or any immigrant group(s) intent on subverting American civilization. As usual, reporters for mainstream media who attended the address failed to ask the president just what subversives he was talking about.
Nor did reporters inquire about names in June 2015 when Mr. Trump made a wholesale slander of immigrants while announcing his candidacy for the following year’s presidential election. Following a theatrical descent down a gold-plated escalator to the gold-plated lobby of his eponymous Fifth Avenue skyscraper, Trump Tower, he told a paid mob of onlookers that America was besieged with incoming hordes of menacing non-Aryans from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody’s else’s problems,” he growled. “It’s true. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists…”
Everyone with a crisp $50 bill in hand, meaning everyone in the lobby audience, applauded.
The reporters might have asked, “Please, Mr. Trump, name the incoming drug dealers and tell us when and where they were convicted. And please name at least one of the rapists.” Radio silence from the press corps.
Candidate Trump rambled on about an imaginary siege: “It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection. It’s got to stop, and it’s got to stop fast.”
That day ten years ago, Stephen Miller listened intently to what the candidate had to say on the topic of immigrants. No doubt, this was when he hatched the so-called “zero tolerance” deportation policy now in effect; a policy born of what he called his “simple decision” to institute a final solution, so to speak, on the fate of immigrants.
He believed his solution would be a surefire political sale, one the public would buy on the basis of big fat lies:
• At first, only the “worst of the worst” of those fifteen million “illegals” would be rounded up by ICE pigs and disappeared to prisons—more accurately, concentration camps—owned by private contractors;
• After a bit of fascist fanfare to rile up Trump cultists, the pigs in combat costumes could round up the throngs of criminal illegals” and send them packing.
As it turned out, research studies by the conservative-leaning, Washington-based Cato Institute determined that the number of serious criminals among black and brown immigrant communities in America pale in comparison to criminals among the wider, read white, population. There simply were not enough immigrant drug dealers, rapists, and so forth to fuel the fanfare.
So, Mr. Miller pushed the pigs to effect a daily quota of three thousand arrests. Meaning that the mostly Caucasian ICE squads would have to snatch suspects off the streets and at workplaces, churches, schools, and even homes—most of them brown or black suspects, none having involved in anything more nefarious than a traffic ticket.
Anyone who got in the way by somehow assisting the usual suspects, Mr. Miller determined, would likewise be manacled and/or manhandled by the pigs. To date, élites arrested or detained include the senior U.S. senator from California, a New Jersey congresswoman, a judge in Milwaukee, a candidate for mayor of New York City, and the sitting mayor of Newark.
Prominent among those not buying the fanaticism is David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist and Stephen Miller’s uncle—the brother of Mr. Miller’s mother, Miriam Miller, née Glosser. In an essay for the online magazine Politico, Mr. Glosser writes of his nephew’s hypocrisy in the context of his own Jewish ancestry:
“[The story] begins in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forbears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.
“He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name.
“An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906.
“…I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”
•
Speaking of pigs, it is useful at this point to consider piggy banks, especially the ever fattening one at Stephen Miller’s sprawling condominium at Washington’s luxurious CityCenterDC complex, owned in part by Qatar Diar, the Middle East nation’s sovereign wealth fund.
By contrast, Mr. Miller has seen to lodging immigrants in quarters that might cause them to regret their departure from the wretchedness of home. This is particularly the case if they arrived here with children.
Items:
• Between 2017 and 2021 the Trump administration’s “family separation” directive reported more that almost five thousand children were seized from their parents’ arms at the U.S.-Mexico border and transported to privately contracted, jerry-built sites where they slept on concrete floors beneath mylar sheets. Guards were on patrol, some of whom reportedly violated children sexually.
• In the interregnum between Mr. Trump’s first term of office and his resuming the presidency in January of this year, President Joe Biden tried reuniting immigrant children with their parents as best he could. Success was limited. As of December 2024, his administration reported that one thousand, three hundred and sixty children had still not been reunited with their mothers and fathers.
• According to an unnamed White House advisor quoted in Vanity Fair magazine about media coverage of family separation, “Stephen [Miller] actually enjoys seeking those pictures at the border.”
About those private contractors, think about this:
Incarceration is a booming business in America. Dozens of post-industrial states are full of towns where prisons have replaced factories as the anchors of local employment.
New prisons are popping up everywhere, providing lucrative returns for investors and brisk wages for workers.
Two examples: 1) North Lake Correctional Facility, the largest Midwestern immigrant lockup in the one-time timber production hub of Baldwin, Michigan, and 2) the soon-to-be completed “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida.
The name of the latter facility blends that of semi-aquatic reptiles with the notoriously cruel Alcatraz penitentiary perched atop boulders on an island in shark-infested waters off the San Francisco Bay, closed since 1962—but subject to reopening if Donald Trump has his way.
Alligator Alley is nearing completion in a remote stretch of Florida’s Everglades swamps. Besides it being a heaven for giant, semi-aquatic reptiles the swamps of Alligator Alley are slithering with four species of venomous snakes: the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, the Florida cottonmouth, the coral snake, and the pygmy rattlesnake.
Mr. Miller and others in the White House figure that at the immigrant arrest quota they have established—three thousand per day, mounting to one million, ninety-five thousand annually—investors will reap steadily handsome profits over the next fifteen years.
Like anything else in modern America, hoosegows like North Lake and Alligator Alley are run by computers. Enter now a key ICE contractor: the software giant Palantir Technologies of Denver, Colorado. According to financial disclosure reports required of White House officials, guess who holds a significant stake in Palantir.
Answer: Stephen Miller, whose holdings in Palantir stock are value at between $100,000 and $250,000 (€86,000—€215,000). Mainstream U.S. media has sniffed at this conflict as “eyebrow raising.” Under Donald Trump, the U.S. Justice Department has not so much as sniffed.
•
On the other hand, ordinary folks of America see where real problems lie. On Saturday, June 14, some five million of us turned out in big cities and small towns throughout the country for the massive “No Kings Day” protest against all things Trumpian, with immigrant fear-mongering at the top of a long list of objections to the president and his kooks in jackboots.
On the same day down in Washington, Donald Trump hosted a sad military parade à la North Korea’s annual show of martial hardware and strutting soldiers. There was not a single strutter among the six-thousand U.S. Army troops ordered to perform for Mr. Trump.
Instead, Mr. Trump’s army shuffled in silence past a reviewing stand flanked by an audience of less than thirty thousand, as calculated by the Metropolitan Police Department. Sullen-faced troops were accompanied by combat tanks that tore up streets. The rousing compositions of John Phillip Sousa were unheard.
The Washington event, falling purposely on an oddly-coiffed would-be king’s seventy-ninth birthday, cost the taxpayers north of $40 million (€34.19 million).
In New York, meanwhile, I joined my city’s “No Kings” march on Fifth Avenue.
We started off at fifteen blocks south of Trump Tower, inching our way down to Madison Square park, where some one hundred thousand of us dispersed after our boisterous, music-filled, entirely peaceful demonstration.
All the way down Fifth Avenue, the mood was joyous. We collectively understood that we outnumbered all the pigs that Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem could ever muster, that We the People held the power to banish a king, just as it says in the Declaration of Independence.
As I marched, I spotted exactly one police officer—a plainclothes cop who muscled his way through the crowd to help a protestor who had tripped and fallen to the pavement. We cheered the officer’s action; like us civilians, there was joy in his returned expression.
•
Yet the beat goes on, for the while, as do the beatings and worse. Darkness in the heart of America still lives, including in that of Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, Florida.
On “No Kings Day,” Sheriff Ivey gave warning to demonstrators in his jurisdiction that should they rudely interfere with his men: “We will kill you dead.”
In Los Angeles, home to the country’s biggest population of “illegals,” Kristi Noem herself dropped by, along with a hastily-organized force of National Guard volunteer troops and active duty Marine Corps soldiers to chill the anti-ICE enemy.
“We’ve come here to liberate the people of Los Angeles from socialism,” declared Ms. Noem, oddly.
It is unclear whether Angelenos feel liberated, let alone under the boot of socialism. But they, like the rest of us, are certainly afraid.
“Terrible things are happening…Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”
In 1943, a teenage girl named Anne Frank entered those foregoing words in the diary she kept while in hiding with her family during Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the years of World War 2. She might well have been referencing the plight of immigrants in America in 2025.
Shortly before she died at age 100, the French ethnologist Germaine Tillion (1907-2008) tells us what we now must do in America. A resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of her country, she spent time as a prisoner in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. Among lessons learned there and during her long brave life, she wrote—
“At the end of my journey, I realize how fragile and malleable man is. Nothing can be taken for granted. Our duty of vigilance must be absolute. Evil can return at any time, it smolders everywhere. And we must act while there is still time to prevent the worst.”
Will we, citizens of a nation where every one of us traces back to immigrant circumstance, heed these words?
The whole world is watching.
