Donald Trump and the maga Republicans must stop the unending indefensible cruelty against our nation's human dignity

The second Donald Trump administration has been unprecedented in myriad ways, perhaps above all in the way that he has managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent. Some civil servants and senior officials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. 

In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was promoted to the position of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. 

He decided to personally take on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly sent back to El Salvador, in violation of a 2019, court order. On April 5th, Reuveni told his supervisor he would not sign an appeal brief that said Abrego Garcia was a “terrorist.” According to a whistle-blower complaint that Reuveni later filed, he said, “I didn’t sign up to lie.” He was suspended and then fired.

Other career prosecutors have chosen to step down. In February, when Trump officials moved to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, it triggered resignations from Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim United States Attorney in Manhattan, and from Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, the two officials in charge of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. In September, Erik Siebert, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned, after his investigations into Letitia James and James Comey stalled and Trump demanded that he be fired.

There has been turnover in senior ranks of the military as well. In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, abruptly announced that he would retire at the end of the year. Tensions had reportedly been mounting between Holsey and the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, particularly over the admiral’s concerns about the legality of drone strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Now military experts have raised the possibility of war crimes, as lawmakers investigate a drone operation on September 2nd that destroyed a boat and killed everyone on board.

The excesses of this corrupt Donald Trump Administration are escalating. A ProPublica investigation, published in late October, found that ICE had arrested more than a hundred and seventy American citizens, nearly twenty of whom were children. In November, after the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national, Trump suspended the issuance of visas for people travelling on an Afghan passport, halted the processing of all asylum claims, and vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.”

Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly. 

Consider the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. On the morning of December 7, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people of Japanese ancestry lived in the continental United States, most of them on the West Coast. Nearly two-thirds were American citizens. Wild reports—later debunked—of lights signaling to Japanese vessels offshore proliferated. Public fears about a potential enemy attack from within began to spread, even as intelligence officials in Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration believed them to be baseless.

Lieutenant General John DeWitt was the head of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Driven by his own alarmism and his suspicions of members of the “Japanese race,” he began pushing for the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, a revered figure in Roosevelt’s Cabinet, initially had doubts about the legality of the plan, as did his deputy, John J. McCloy, though they ultimately supported it, as a matter of military necessity. But lawyers for the Justice Department, who bore responsibility for the handling of “alien enemies,” argued that a mass evacuation was unnecessary and likely unconstitutional.

The debate culminated in a tense meeting, on the evening of February 17, 1942, at the Georgetown home of the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, who had joined the Cabinet only a few months earlier. Edward J. Ennis, the head of the Justice Department’s “aliens” division, and James H. Rowe, the Assistant Attorney General, were forceful in their opposition to the plan. But Biddle, who had also been opposed, was noticeably reticent, Rowe later recalled. Then an Army official drew from his pocket a draft evacuation order, and Biddle revealed that he had dropped his objections to it. Ennis nearly wept.

Two days later, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which led to the U.S. government dispatching the entire Japanese American population of California, Oregon, and Washington to ten concentration camps, as Roosevelt initially termed them, in the interior of the country. (The final camp did not close until early 1946.) Justice Department lawyers went on to defend the policy in court and, most controversially, took steps to obscure from the Supreme Court reports that cast doubt on the military justification and showed that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States.

In the decades since, numerous historians, as well as members of a federal commission that, in 1981, held hearings across the country, have studied the path to the executive order. The circle of blame has included not just Army and War Department officials but Biddle, who chose to “surrender,” as the historian Peter Irons put it, in his book “Justice at War.” Biddle admitted in his memoirs that, being “new to the Cabinet,” he was reluctant to challenge Stimson, “whose wisdom and integrity I greatly respected.” Irons also scrutinized Ennis’s decision to sign on to a misleading brief to the Supreme Court, observing that “institutional loyalty had prevailed over personal conscience.”

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her. Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” 

Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 22, 2025, issue, with the headline “Conscientious Objectors.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans will be held accountable for horrible behavior because history will never forget!

History’s Judgment about those who go along, by Michael Luo published in The New Yorker: Some civil servants and senior officials in the Trump Administration are experiencing bouts of conscience. (Ya'think❓)


During the second Donald Trump maga cult administration, there has been unprecedented cruelty, in a myriad of ways.

Perhaps, above all, are the unexplainable ways that Trump managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent.

Some civil servants and senior officials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was promoted to the position of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. He decided to personally take on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly sent back to El Salvador, in violation of a 2019, court order. On April 5th, Reuveni told his supervisor he would not sign an appeal brief that said Abrego Garcia was a “terrorist.” According to a whistle-blower complaint that Reuveni later filed, he said, “I didn’t sign up to lie.” He was suspended and then fired.

Other career prosecutors have chosen to step down. In February, when Trump officials moved to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, it triggered resignations from Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim United States Attorney in Manhattan, and from Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, the two officials in charge of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. 

In September, Erik Siebert, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned, after his investigations into Letitia James and

James Comey stalled and Trump demanded that he be fired.

There has been turnover in senior ranks of the military as well.

In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, abruptly announced that he would retire at the end of the year. Tensions had reportedly been mounting between Holsey and the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, particularly over the admiral’s concerns about the legality of drone strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Now military experts have raised the possibility of war crimes, as lawmakers investigate a drone operation on September 2nd that destroyed a boat and killed everyone on board.

The excesses of the Trumpzi Administration seem only to be escalating. A ProPublica investigation, published in late October, found that ICE had arrested more than a hundred and seventy American citizens, nearly twenty of whom were children. In November, after the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national, Trump suspended the issuance of visas for people travelling on an Afghan passport, halted the processing of all asylum claims, and vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.”

Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly.

A graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II.  (I read this book with a library reading group and recommend it.  My first time to read a "graphic" book and I appreciated the experience.)

Consider the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. On the morning of December 7, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people of Japanese ancestry lived in the continental United States, most of them on the West Coast. Nearly two-thirds were American citizens. Wild reports—later debunked—of lights signalling to Japanese vessels offshore proliferated. Public fears about a potential enemy attack from within began to spread, even as intelligence officials in Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration believed them to be baseless.

Lieutenant General John DeWitt was the head of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Driven by his own alarmism and his suspicions of members of the “Japanese race,” he began pushing for the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, a revered figure in Roosevelt’s Cabinet, initially had doubts about the legality of the plan, as did his deputy, John J. McCloy, though they ultimately supported it, as a matter of military necessity. But lawyers for the Justice Department, who bore responsibility for the handling of “alien enemies,” argued that a mass evacuation was unnecessary and likely unconstitutional.

The debate culminated in a tense meeting, on the evening of February 17, 1942, at the Georgetown home of the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, who had joined the Cabinet only a few months earlier. Edward J. Ennis, the head of the Justice Department’s “aliens” division, and James H. Rowe, the Assistant Attorney General, were forceful in their opposition to the plan. But Biddle, who had also been opposed, was noticeably reticent, Rowe later recalled.

Then, an Army official drew from his pocket a draft evacuation order, and Biddle revealed that he had dropped his objections to it. Ennis nearly wept.

Two days later, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which led to the U.S. government dispatching the entire Japanese American population of California, Oregon, and Washington to ten concentration camps, as Roosevelt initially termed them, in the interior of the country. (The final camp did not close until early 1946.) Justice Department lawyers went on to defend the policy in court and, most controversially, took steps to obscure from the Supreme Court reports that cast doubt on the military justification and showed that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States.

In the decades since, numerous historians, as well as members of a federal commission that, in 1981, held hearings across the country, have studied the path to the executive order. The circle of blame has included not just Army and War Department officials but Biddle, who chose to “surrender,” as the historian Peter Irons put it, in his book “Justice at War.” Biddle admitted in his memoirs that, being “new to the Cabinet,” he was reluctant to challenge Stimson, “whose wisdom and integrity I greatly respected.” Irons also scrutinized Ennis’s decision to sign on to a misleading brief to the Supreme Court, observing that “institutional loyalty had prevailed over personal conscience.”

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her.💢❗

Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” 

Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 22, 2025, issue, with the headline “Conscientious Objectors.”

Anti-immigration extremism never ends with deportations. Eventually history catches up with the evil perpetrators

History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism

Echo essay published in The New Yorker by Michael Luo.

(Maine Writer - Several weeks ago, I also blogged about another time in North American history when mass exportation was used as a way to eliminate an entie population of French settlers in Acadia. Although the great upheaval occured in he middle 19th centure 1755-1777, the consquences of he British cruelty is still experienced among the tens of thousands of descendents today.) Check out this blog at this site here.

The New Yorker:  Even Donald Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.

Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up through Mexico and other places,” even the elimination of birthright citizenship. (The fate of high-skill immigration is one area of uncertainty; a dispute over H-1B visas consumed maga world over the holidays.) The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States.

In April, 1876, a California state senate committee held a series of hearings in Sacramento and San Francisco on the “social, moral, and political effect” of Chinese immigration. By some estimates, well over a hundred thousand Chinese were living in the state. Government officials, police officers, and civic leaders testified that they represented the dregs of their native land and were rife with a “criminal element”; they lived in crowded, filthy conditions (as one witness put it, “more like hogs than human beings”); they were vectors of disease and licentiousness. Perhaps most important, as a years-long economic depression settled over the country and San Francisco seethed with thousands of unemployed white men, the witnesses argued that Chinese workers drove down wages and took jobs away from Americans. A California pastor proclaimed that white laborers must either “starve to death, or they must fall to the level with the Chinese, or else they must themselves leave the country.”

More than ten thousand people in California and Nevada joined local “camps” of the Order of Caucasians, an organization that aimed to “protect the white man and white civilization.” In July, 1877, a rally in San Francisco erupted into days of rioting as mobs rampaged through the Chinese quarter and vandalized Chinese-owned businesses, mostly laundries, across the city. Several weeks later, the state senators sent an urgent message to Congress, warning that white residents up and down the West Coast were beginning to feel a “profound sense of dissatisfaction with the situation” and there would come a day “when patience may cease.”

A treaty between the U.S. and China guaranteed the free flow of people between the two countries, making politicians in Washington reluctant to impose restrictions. But, then as now, the nation was evenly divided politically, and the Western states were a strategic prize for both Republicans and Democrats. Winning them, it seemed clear, rested on resolving the Chinese question. As a result, in 1882, the U.S.—for the first time in its history—closed its gates to a people because of their race, when Congress passed a bill barring Chinese laborers from entering the country. (The legislation later became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.) Immigrants still found ways in, though, so Congress passed progressively more onerous laws. Restive residents of dozens of communities across the West also banded together to drive out their Chinese neighbors.

Yet the Chinese were not passive victims: in 1892, after a new law required them to obtain a certificate of residence that established their right to be in the country, leaders of the community organized a campaign of resistance. Anti-Chinese leaders, in turn, vowed mass deportations, only for the effort to founder when it became clear that the measure would be exorbitantly expensive. The Chinese community managed to persist, but it existed in a kind of permanent stress position until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law an overhaul of the immigration system.

Today, economic anxieties are again fuelling overtly racist, populist appeals from politicians. A nimbus of outrage among working-class voters has propelled the MAGA movement, much like the rage that drove the anti-Chinese movement. Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship—scholars dispute whether this would be lawful––has a historical link to the Chinese American experience. In 1898, thirty years after the Fourteenth Amendment established the principle as a way of safeguarding the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans, the Supreme Court upheld it in a landmark case brought by a native-born Chinese American, Wong Kim Ark.

One of the tragedies of Chinese exclusion is that the anger toward the immigrants was likely misplaced. Chinese workers were not usually in direct competition with white workers. In an economic study published in 1963, the historian Ping Chiu found that in California the two groups were mostly stratified into different labor pools, with the Chinese concentrated in lower-wage jobs in agriculture and industries such as textile and cigar manufacturing. It was competition from more technologically advanced and efficient factories in the East, along with the broader shift to mass production, that were the biggest factors in the economic travails buffeting white workers in California.

Other scholarship has similarly suggested that excluding Chinese labor failed to lift the fortunes of white workers. This past fall, a group of economists released a working paper on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Western states. They found that it took a significant toll on the economies of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—the states with the largest Chinese populations––until at least 1940. The economists also found “no evidence that the average white worker benefitted from the departure of the Chinese” and concluded that the positive effects of Chinese immigrants in the workforce, including the economies of scale achieved by their presence, outweighed any employment opportunities that emerged from their absence. The findings are hardly surprising. A recent study from the Brookings Institution asserts that a surge in immigration helps to explain the strength of the U.S. economy since 2022, benefitting employers who need workers and contributing to consumer spending.

In the nineteenth century, the Chinese had few public defenders. John C. Weatherred, a bank executive in Tacoma, Washington, wrote in his diary on October 1, 1885, a month before the Chinese were driven out of his town, that there were a “great many fools on the anti-Chinese subject” and that he felt like “taking up for the underdog in the fight.” He praised “the Chinaman” for his “industry, economy & sobriety.” But Weatherred and other sympathizers mostly kept their feelings to themselves. As an emboldened Trump Administration prepares for a new crackdown on immigrants, history offers lessons on the cost of silence. ♦












Published in the print edition of the January 13, 2025, issue, with the headline “Excluded.”