Editorial: What the record will show

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” So said Abraham Lincoln, and the sad truth is that we often forget it until forced to confront it.

History, as manifested by this era of police-state tactics inherent in the Trump administration’s immigration policies, came to our area within the past two weeks. As we have reported, federal police officers from several agencies were on the streets of Greenport Village. They stopped people and went into a laundromat on a Sunday morning, questioning people at random and detaining two individuals.

A man on a bike ride with his children was stopped. He is, according to sources, an immigrant from El Salvador who has legal status and is employed. They gave no no warrant or identification; he was just stopped and questioned by armed men, with his terrified children crying. Asked for a name and badge number by a Times Review freelancer at the scene, one officer said, “I’m not telling you that.”

A man said men knocked on his door looking for another resident, and refused to identify themselves. In another incident that morning, our freelancer was driving through Greenport when he noticed a black, unmarked car following him. When he pulled over, so did the following vehicle, remaining behind for several minutes.

We have all read reports and seen videos of people being taken into custody, sometimes seriously roughed up by agents, many of them masked, with no arrest warrants, no reading of rights and no due process — an entitlement everyone on American soil has, no matter their legal status. It’s happening here, on the East End.

According to multiple sources, nearly 70% of ICE arrests involve immigrants with no criminal history. The police-state policy is driven by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who was quoted as saying to ICE officials, in demanding 3,000 arrests a day: “What do you mean you’re going after criminals? Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”

No one can argue against arresting violent criminals and bringing them to justice. But men lining up for day-labor work in parking lots? Landscapers at their jobs, people working in farm fields? A brownskinned fellow on his bike with his kids on a Sunday morning?

The deportation of immigrants rounded up with no charges leveled at them is a disgrace for a country that believes in equal justice under the law. President Trump even hosted El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele — who has referred to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” — in the Oval Office, where the two leaders preened and joked about incarcerating American residents in what has been described as “a gulag.”

Seemingly every day, we learn of those with protected immigrant status being imprisoned here or abroad.

The president launched his first run for office using fear and anger as the twin poles of his campaign tent. Remember? “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And in a nationally televised presidential debate in 2024, he made absurd, racist statements about Haitian immigrants in Ohio: “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating — they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Later, confronted with the ludicrous claim, vice presidential candidate JD Vance admitted what the Machiavellian strategy was all about: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention … then that’s what I’m going to do.” But he didn’t add, slander people in the process with lies.

Lincoln spoke the truth. And the era we are now living through will include in the record those who have acquiesced to the elimination of guaranteed rights under our legal system, and those who have stood firmly on the right side of history.