April 13, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

When we kids played hide and seek back in our innocence – at least those who were free of circumstance to do so – we saw surprise in each other’s faces as we caught or were caught. Surprise, not fear. The other day I saw fear, caught in a moment of uncertainty. I could almost hear her heartbeat.

Perhaps my first Irish ancestor, arriving around 1850 in gang-ridden Five Points, Old New York, came upon such fear. He survived, both the Irish Famine and then a difficult climb out of a tough neighborhood, eventually becoming first chief of department, newly formed FDNY, later commissioner. An immigrant.

Perhaps my first Prussian/German ancestor saw fear – he had to – when he joined the Union Army in the Civil War, fought in key battles and became a citizen a few years later. He saw fear again among former German countrymen also living in Brooklyn in the American anger of the First World War. An immigrant.

Perhaps my English grandfather, who never bothered to get papers when he left his merchant ship to live in the Northeast, saw fear when he passed customs officials while working the Brooklyn docks off Vinegar Hill. An immigrant.

Fear is never unknown to immigrants, whether they enter properly or if they come illegally, often to protect their sons and daughters from gangs in dictatorship countries that, ironically our America has too often supported for our political and economic interests.

Certainly there was no “perhaps” in the fear I saw the other day on a Hispanic cleaning woman’s face. She was alone in a long hallway in a relatively expensive rental apartment building, and I was coming out of an elevator, rushing as is my way, this time to pick up a donation for a local arts center. I asked her where Apt. M was, and as she pointed, I caught her face in a glimpse that can keep me up at night. Maybe it was my haste, bursting from the elevator; maybe it was my question – “Where is Apt. M?” – that perhaps had her wondering whether I was with Homeland Security, an advance person on a deportation run.

“Would I be next?” read the fear on her face as she paused from cleaning the floor. “Now, or tomorrow, or … ?”

I quickly went to the apartment, retrieved the donation and then, as I passed the lady, I said “Have a good day” in some attempt to calm the situation. I wonder now how many good days she has now, whether she is legal or not. Constant fear, it would seem. An immigrant.

Now maybe I am misreading the situation in that apartment building. But even so, it surely is happening all the time elsewhere in this nation built by immigrants.

There has to be a better way to handle the decades-avoided-by-both-parties immigrant mess, to give both people and this nation opportunities to further the American Experiment. With proper controls, yes, but also with common sense, decency, humanity, understanding and respect. Not with the protocol of masked, armed agents who descend and surround, who do not fully identify themselves (as required in many states but also for necessary transparency and accountability in a lawful society) and who enable a seemingly rogue government to throw due process, constitutionally mandated, into the gutter. Sounds like a 1942 film in which the Schutzstaffel (SS) do their round-up. New three-letter acronym on the uniform today, with an added one implied on bullet-resistance vests: FEAR.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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