Noe Fermin Guerrero-Mendieta was arrested for being brown.
ICE storm troopers broke through his car window and arrested him for being a dangerous criminal. No, the Mexican national is here legally and was headed to his construction job.
That’s the color of justice in 2025.
Fortunately, good people in Waco, Texas, where he’s resided for 10 years, stood up for him: a pro bono attorney, his employer, and the McLennan County Democrats, who’ve staged multiple protests since his arrest.
Thirteen years after the Supreme Court tossed out most of Arizona’s Nazi-style “show me your papers” law, ICE flagrantly races to quota-fy our criminal president’s dreams of mass deportation.
Just as it scrambles to put enough heads on its wall to satisfy the emperor, ICE is in a bullrush to line up deportation flights to hostile lands while the Supreme Court considers the whole question of due process for the detainees.
Did you realize that more than 1,000 of those flights have taken place?
That’s right: 7,300 people spirited away to who-knows-where on military flights.
Who’s standing in the breach? Well, in our little dictator’s nine months in office, he has fired over 100 immigration judges.
Author and commentator Thom Hartmann acknowledges he had no idea about the scope of this until hearing on CNN the figure of 1,000-plus deportation flights, leading him to ask:
Are Americans being “conditioned to be ‘Good Germans’”?
Hartmann recounts — from a poignant conversation with an elderly German — how Hitler’s unchallenged propaganda convinced otherwise thoughtful people to accept what turned out to be unimaginable.
Those people believed camps like Dachau and Buchenwald were for the “worst of the worst” criminals and for “traitors” against the war effort.
Jews who disappeared were simply being resettled – “umseidlung” — a lie parroted by pliant media with Nazi-staged photo ops including a documentary film shown in theaters across Germany.
The good news here in 2025: True resistance is growing.
Michelle Goldberg reports in The New York Times how people in Los Angeles help neighbors avoid ICE’s clutches.
The strategy includes announcing the arrival of ICE with noisemakers and whistles.
Command posts are set up at Home Depots, chosen attack points for ICE to nab hard-working laborers.
Activists gather outside immigration courts, where agents have arrested people leaving asylum hearings, just as judges have told the applicants to return.
“If you want to protect democracy, you protect the most vulnerable,” said Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Labor Organizing Network, adding that to stop fascism, fight for “those at the end of the whip.”
“One million deported” is the goal of the administration – one million though vast numbers of those snatched off streets and job sites are the best possible neighbors and employees.
However, for the forces of good, the figure one million is serving as a resistance number as well.
The organizing group Indivisible has a campaign named “One Million Rising” focused on direct action – a “symphony of defiance” one official explained to Goldberg.
Indivisible was the key driver behind the stunningly successful June 14 “No Kings” protest – over 5 million people in 2,000-plus marches.
But the campaign is about more than symbolic statements. It’s about pressuring lawmakers, registering voters and finding fresh faces to run for office.
Back in Texas, Guerrero-Mendieta, a father of three with his sights set on citizenship, who has never missed an immigration appointment, is in a detention facility, even though the charges behind his arrest – not having his alien registration papers — were dismissed.
Contrast him with the man who’s our president by having limbo-ed his way under criminal law’s long arm.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
