Every Fourth of July, Erwin Knoll, the late editor of The Progressive magazine, would host a party. He’d grill burgers and brats and tack copies of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights to trees in his backyard in Madison, Wis.
The U.S. government has never had a fiercer critic than Knoll. And yet, having come to New York City as a child after fleeing Nazis in his native Austria in 1939, he cherished these foundational documents of American democracy, even though his adopted nation has always fallen short of its lofty ideals.
I think about Knoll’s July Fourth celebrations, some of which I had the good fortune to attend, as I contemplate what it means to celebrate the nation’s 249th birthday during a period that will deservedly be remembered as one of the most shameful in U.S. history.
Hard-working immigrants arrested by ICE agents in workplaces, courthouses, churches and schools. Farm workers chased in the fields. Foreign students scooped off the street and thrown into detention facilities for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.
President Donald Trump said he would be going after murderers, rapists and other violent criminals. But immigrants are in fact far less likely to fall into this category than those born in the U.S., and so the dragnet has been drawn around everyone who lacks legal status (and even some U.S. citizens ). Of the more than 200,000 people booked into ICE detention facilities between last Oct. 1 and mid-June, 93% were never convicted of a violent crime, and 65% had no criminal history whatsoever.