Should We Be Helping Immigrants Hide from ICE Agents?

When masked government officials kidnap people off the street and deny them basic rights, should mainstream Americans reassess our roles and responsibilities? The Bulwark raises tough questions

By Jonathan V. Last The Bulwark

I got an email from a buddy this morning that brought me up short. I want to share it with you:

“Are you absolutely sure that as Christians this isn’t the time to hide Anne Frank? Shouldn’t I be willing to help migrants avoid deportation/detention at whatever legal perils await me? If not now then when . . . when it gets twice as bad or three times as bad or ten times as bad?

“Sorry if this sounds weird, but everyone likes to think that given the opportunity they would be Mississippi freedom riders or on the bridge at Selma. Well what if it’s that time for me?”

My knee-jerk reaction was, No. We’re not anywhere near Anne Frank territory.

But then I started thinking through the logistics of Trump’s deportations. And I have some questions.

No due process. Let’s say you’re an immigrant with questionable legal status. You’re married and your spouse is the same. You have lived in America for many years, paying taxes and whatnot, and own a house. You have two kids and they are American citizens—for now.

You and your spouse show up for a routine court date and are snatched by a group of men in masks who claim (without showing identification) that they are agents of the state. You are put in jail. And let’s assume that you are deported. Perhaps to El Salvador.

What happens to your children in the hours after you are arrested? Who picks them up from school? Who feeds them? Where do they sleep?

What happens to your assets?

If you own a home, what happens to it? Is it sold? By whom? Through what process? Where to the proceeds of the sale go?

What about your bank accounts? Do you have access to your savings?

How about your property? Your car, the furniture in your house, your clothes, your computer. What happens to all of that?

I assume there is some theoretical legal answer to these questions—but I would be surprised if theoretical legal procedures are being universally applied to property rights at the moment since they aren’t being applied to more fundamental questions, such as due process and regular order.

New classes of immigrants. If you were a heartless POS, maybe your answer would be something like, “People who didn’t follow every law and regulation before settling in America should have known that they risked losing everything.”

But this administration has also created new classes of “illegal immigrants” out of people who had legal status: They’ve revoked student visas without informing the visa holders. They’ve terminated Temporary Protected Status for refugees from Venezuela and Afghanistan.

These people were here legally—until Trump made their presence illegal.

Ask that same set of questions about these folks: What happens to their property, their money, their belongings? I guess we’re still not at Anne Frank territory. But we’re awfully close to the period in which German Jews were having their businesses seized.

Aren’t we?

The law’s not always right. There’s another problem with the view that “the law is the law, so tough.”

Jim Crow was “the law.” That didn’t make it right. People took stands against the law for the specific purpose of creating pressure to change it.

All of which is why I think I’m inching closer to Brad Lander territory. Maybe people—especially our elected leaders—should be engaged in massive and repeated acts of civil disobedience regarding this deportation regime.

Maybe the rest of us should be, too?

.Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that “we” decide that yes, it is time to start hiding immigrant families in our attics. (Newsmakers’ editor’s note: does anyone have an attic in Santa Barbara?)

I don’t know what that would look like, but the first thing that comes to mind for me is: money.

Helping people takes resources. The kind of resources that, at scale, have to come from a network.

The challenge is that raising and distributing money might have to be off-the-books. I doubt you could have a formalized non-profit working as a clearinghouse for donations, because it would immediately be a target of the government. You might not even be able to organize at the GoFundMe level.

Instead, organization would have to be local and community-based. One obvious starting point: churches.

In a church community, people could informally pool resources on a cash basis. No paper trail; no centralized records. Vulnerable immigrants might even be existing members of the church community. It’s easy to see how 10, or 20, or 50 people in a church could organize to provide the resources to protect some people.

They couldn’t protect everyone. And they couldn’t manage it indefinitely.

But if you squint, you can see the outline of a network taking shape. And it’s a kind of network that’s familiar in American history.

Bottom line. We have masked, unidentified agents of the state snatching people off of the streets. We have the government attempting to skirt due process. We have people being deprived of their property. We have an attempt to revoke birthright citizenship.

Maybe we’re not in Anne Frank territory. But also: Maybe the hour is later than we think.

Jonathan V. Last is the editor of The Bulwark and writes “The Triad” newsletter. Subscribe to The Bulwark here.

Photo illustration: Anne Frank (Indianapolis Children’s Museum) pictured to left of Deysi Vargas (CBS News), mother of a 4-year girl whose lifesaving treatments at an L.A. hospital were to be stopped when her family, in the U.S. legally, was about to be deported. After public outcry, their removal has been temporarily halted.