The Saga Continues — Will You Be the Next To Disappear?
A report from Syracuse, New York demonstrates the kind of country we are becoming right in front of our eyes
Today, the hammers and saws and nail guns are silent in my neighborhood for a third week. The workers who normally spend their hours in the Georgia heat to maintain the aesthetics of my upper-income-adjacent neighborhood are gone.
The roofers? Gone. No men in MAGA hats have replaced them. Construction sites? Abandoned. Occasionally, a grumpy general contractor pulls into the driveway next door, pulls out a few pieces of lumber, and works for a few hours before calling it a day.
If you think you were paying high rent before the November presidential election, y’ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The numbers aren’t in yet, but not even my admittedly damaged eyes can deceive. Simple upgrades are not a thing right now, much less new construction. The construction crews are being harassed out of the country.
I can’t add my usual footnote to provide empirical evidence. Not yet. Besides, will the current regime even release the precipitous drop in new home construction when the numbers start rolling in? Will the MuskBrats alter the numbers? It’s a legit question.
Where are the people who work on the homes? Who is slinging roof shingles? Hell, even most of the leaf blowers have bailed.
Some brave souls are sticking it out. But, at least around here, most others seem to be in hiding or have already left the country. They’re being arrested for having darker skin than my Pantone® 11-0105 TCX Antique White neighbors. Or, as some of the harassed migrants say, for having “a ladder on their truck,” according to a devastating news report out of Syracuse, New York.
How many of them are heading to the newly repurposed El Salvadoran concentration camp that the Trump regime is using my tax dollars to pay the Salvadoran president to run?
You might expect a state like Georgia, where I live, to be catnip for fat-faced white ICE boys in ski masks. And, of course, it is. But the report out of Syracuse that I’m going to quote from indicates that there is no refuge from the emerging American Gestapo. Syracuse isn’t the safe haven you might think it is:
In January, Delmy Rendón smashed her car into a deer on a rural highway in Upstate New York, near the Canadian border.
She did what any Spanish-speaking immigrant would do.
Instead of calling 911, she knocked on the door of the nearest house for help. The residents were not kind, her mother said.
That moment set off a sequence of events that landed Rendón in a Louisiana detention center.
Rendón was on a path to U.S. legal residency in a new, safer and more prosperous country. Instead, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement put her on a route back to Guatemala without her family.1
I’ll be clear on this: Most of these migrants are undocumented. They run away from civil strife, gang violence, and almost unimaginable levels of extreme poverty to make a new home in the United States. Americans who choose to believe the Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk propaganda about the evils of immigration are falling right into their pasty white hands (I have pasty white hands, so I’m not perfect, either).
If immigration is such a threat, why are Christo-Nationalists hollering at women to have more kids?2
The main reason they want you to have more children is demographics. Demographic trends strongly indicate that America is on the verge of a labor shortage. Instead of the obvious solution, making it easier for refugees to find a home, they’d prefer that nice, white, docile Christian married women produce a litter of Christo-Nationalists, none of whom will ever so much as lift a hammer or turn a screw.
But, as they say, I digress. Let’s talk more about Syracuse.
After Rendón’s arrest, border patrol agents tracked her husband down at work and arrested him, too. When he refused to go without his daughters, officers went to West Carthage Elementary School and detained them, too, their grandmother said.
The three spent the night in a house near Buffalo under ICE watch.
Skarleth and Lexi are 9 and 6 years old. Lexi was born in the U.S.3
This kind of harassment is now part of official U.S. policy.
Local sheriff’s offices, especially those mostly stationed by pasty white deputies, are eagerly buying in:
President Donald Trump’s administration is targeting, shackling and shipping out immigrants who have lived, worked and started families in the U.S. without permission — but also without getting into trouble.
Lawyers, advocates and people who have been pulled over say Oswego County sheriff’s deputies are cooperating with Border Patrol agents in a way that smacks of racial profiling. Videos and court records support that theory.
Deputies are stopping Hispanic drivers for minor, unprovable traffic violations like veering left of center, then handing them over to Border Patrol agents who are sometimes already at the scene, the Syracuse.com investigation shows.
In other cases, immigration agents act on anonymous tips and stake out homes. They follow migrant workers from work sites to restaurants.
Undercover officers in ski masks show up at dairy farms in unmarked cars.
They split up families. They take children from schools, even when they turn out to be U.S. citizens.
Before January, some Hispanic immigrants say, they were pulled over for traffic violations. But police issued a ticket and sent them along, like they did with anyone else.
But the days of that “catch and release” policy are over. Border Patrol told Syracuse.com it’s on a mission to prosecute and deport every person who crosses the border illegally, not just those who pose a threat.
An unknown number of other immigrants who are first-time violators have been arrested and sent into an immigration system so confusing and secretive that some advocates don’t even call it a court.
Across Upstate New York, these immigrants – born in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — are stopped on their way to their jobs in landscaping, construction, pizza shops and apple orchards.4
This story from Syracuse.com is one of the most important and revealing stories so far during this, the beginning of the end of civil rights in America. I urge you to read it and contact your local congress critter and demand an immediate end to this transition to autocracy.
One short list of immigrants who have changed America
This list from Hudson Community College5 lists just a few immigrants who have made a significant impact on American social, political, and cultural life. Rupert Murdoch, who is not on this list, has had a devastating impact on American life, and sadly, makes the case almost on his own for banning immigration. The same goes for Musk, who is on this list. But rather than banning all immigration, maybe we should ban white immigrants until further notice. They seem to have unpleasant agendas.
Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) writer
Madeleine Albright (Czech Republic) politician
Christiane Amanpour (Britain/Iran) TV news correspondent
Anousheh Ansari (Iran) astronaut
Desi Arnaz (Cuba) actor, producer
Isaac Asimov (Russia) writer
John James Audubon (Haiti) ornithologist
Antonio Banderas (Spain) actor
Mikhail Baryshnikov (Russia) dancer
Irving Berlin (Russia) composer
Victor Borge (Denmark) pianist, comedian
Fernando Botero (Colombia) painter, sculptor
Charles Boyer ( France) actor
Sergey Brin (Russia) business personality, computer scientist
Joseph Brodsky (Russia) poet
Yul Brynner (Russia) actor
Jose Canseco (Cuba) baseball player
Stokely Carmichael (Trinidad) activist
Andrew Carnegie (Scotland) industrialist, philanthropist
Jackie Chan (Hong Kong) actor, filmmaker
Steve Chen (Taiwan) You Tube founder
Liz Claiborne (Belgium) designer
Nadia Comaneci (Romania) gymnast
Celia Cruz (Cuba) singer
Willem de Kooning (Netherlands) artist
Oscar de La Renta (Dominican Republic) fashion designer
Kiran Desai (India) author
Theodosius Dobzhansky (Ukraine) geneticist
Eleuthere Irenee Du Pont (France) chemist, entrepreneur
Albert Einstein (Germany) physicist
Erik Erikson (Germany) psychoanalyst
Gloria Estefan (Cuba) singer
Enrico Fermi (Italy) physicist
Eva Gabor and Zsa-Zsa Gabor (Hungary) actor
Andy Garcia (Cuba) actor
Khalil Gibran (Lebanon) poet and novelist
Salma Hayek (Mexico) actress, producer
Audrey Hepburn (Belgium) actor
Vladimir Horowitz (Russia) pianist
Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan) physician, author
Arianna Huffington (Greece) author, media mogul
Iman (Somalia) model
Wyclef Jean (Haiti) musician, political figure
Jawed Kari (Germany) co-founder of You Tube
Elia Kazan (Turkey) director
Teresan Heinz Kerry (Mozambique) philanthropist, public figure
Henry Kissinger (Germany) U.S. Secretary of State
Jan Koum (Ukraine) WhatsApp creator
Anna Kournikova (Russia) tennis player
Mila Kunis (Ukraine) actor
Padma Lakshmi (India) chef
Ang Lee (Taiwan) director, producer
Wen Ho Lee (Taiwan) scientist
John Leguizamo (Colombia) actor, comedian
John Lennon (England) rock musician, songwriter
Yo-Yo Ma (France) musician
Louis Malle (France) director
Thomas Mann Germany) novelist, essayist
Bob Marley (Jamaica) singer, songwriter
Melquiades Martinez (Cuba) politician
Yao Ming (China) basketball player
Mario Molina (Mexico) chemist, Nobel laureate
Ricardo Montalban (Mexico) actor
Van Morrison (Ireland) singer, songwriter
Masaharu Morimoto (Japan) chef
John Muir ( England) writer, naturalist
Elon Musk (South Africa) inventor, entrepreuneur
Vladimir Nabokov (Russia) writer
Thomas Nast (Germany) illustrator, journalist
Martina Navratilova ( Czechoslovak) tennis player
John George Nicolay (Germany) writer, lawyer, government official
Maureen O'Hara (Ireland) actor
Ann-Margaret (Olsson) (Sweden) actor
Yoko Ono (Japan) artist
William Paterson (Ireland) lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, U.S. Governor, U.S. Senator
I. M. Pei (Hong Kong) architect
Sundar Pichai (India) Google executive
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (Russia) pianist, composer, conductor
Ayn Rand (Russia) writer, philosopher
Rihanna (Barbados) singer
Helena Rubinstein (Poland) business, beauty products
Carlos Santana (Mexico) musician
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Austria) U.S. Governor, actor, bodybuilder
Monica Seles (Serbia) tennis player
Sammy Sosa (Dominican Republic) baseball player
Isaac Stern (Ukraine) violinist
Lee Strasberg (Ukraine) theatrical teacher, director, actor
Levi Straus (Germany) creator of Levis pants
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Russia) composer, pianist
Nicola Tesla (Croatia) inventor
Charlize Theron (South Africa) actor
Melania Trump (Yugoslavia) First lady
Rudolph Valentino (Italy) actor
Sofia Vergara (Colombia) actress
Elie Weisel (Romania) writer
Dr. Ruth Westheimer (Germany) sex advisor, TV personality
Jason W (Taiwan) designer
Jerry Yang (Taiwan) Yahoo creator
Fareed Zakaria (India) journalist
That’s just a few. But those days, for now, are over. 78 million Americans said, “No, I want to end the American Experiment.”
To borrow loosely from the famous poem by Martin Niemöller:6
First they came for the Guatemalan man
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Guatemalan.
Then they came for the Chinese
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Chinese.
Then they came for Charles Bastille
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Charles Bastille.
Then they came for the journalists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a journalist.
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
Notes
I warned y’all about this before the election:
People still seem to be struggling with the reality of what is happening. Most Americans continue to be in full denial. Restacking this article and others like it might help with that. Just saying.
If you have fallen for the Republican propaganda that immigration is harmful to the U.S. and its economy, I urge you to read more about it. You don’t need to view Fox News stories to be impacted by their trickle-down effect. The mainstream media promotes many of the Republican talking points. It’s not your fault that you fall for this stuff, since it is everywhere: Immigration! Bad!
It is not bad. It is what has sustained this nation for 250 years.
Footnotes
Breidenbach, Michelle, and Kirk. 2025. “Inside Trump’s Upstate NY Migrant Hunt: Border Patrol’s Meaner Tactics Snare Workers and Families.” Syracuse. April 17, 2025. https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/04/inside-trumps-upstate-ny-migrant-hunt-border-patrols-meaner-tactics-snare-workers-and-families.html.
Sherman, Carter. 2025. “The Rise of Pronatalism: Why Musk, Vance and the Right Want Women to Have More Babies.” The Guardian. The Guardian. March 11, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/what-is-pronatalism-right-wing-republican.
Breidenbach, ibid
Breidenbach, ibid
“HCCC Libraries: ESL II ~ Famous U.S. Immigrants: Famous American Immigrants.” 2025. Hccc.edu. 2025. https://library.hccc.edu/c.php?g=366161.
“Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | First They Came – by Pastor Martin Niemöller.” 2020. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. April 30, 2020. https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/.
“The main reason they want you to have more children is demographics.”
Kinda makes me wonder whether anyone from the current regime supports abortion depending on color.