The impression is spot on
This story has been out for a few days, but more details emerged on Friday (The Guardian):
A 64-year-old Iranian woman, who has lived in the US for 47 years, was detained by immigration agents on Sunday morning while gardening outside her home in New Orleans.
According to a witness, plainclothes officers in unmarked vehicles handcuffed Madonna “Donna” Kashanian and transported her to a Mississippi jail before transferring her to the South Louisiana Ice processing center in Basile, reports Nola.
Kashanian arrived in the US in 1978 on a student visa and later applied for asylum, citing fears of persecution due to her father’s ties to the US-backed Shah of Iran. Her asylum request was ultimately denied, but she was granted a stay of removal on the condition she comply with immigration requirements, a condition her family says she always met.
She has no criminal record but remains in Ice custody.
The timing of Kashanian’s detention came just hours after US airstrikes in Iran. Federal officials did not comment on her specific case, though the DHS released a statement highlighting the arrests of 11 Iranians nationwide over the weekend, according to Nola.
Kashanian had moved to New Orleans as a teenager and built a life over four decades. She often shared Persian recipes on YouTube and was active in her daughter’s schools.
Nicole Wallace interviewed Kashanian’s husband, Russ Milne, and daughter, Kaitlynn Milne, on Friday.
Raw Story reports:
Kashanian’s husband, Russ Milne, told host Nicolle Wallace that she has fought through the system for citizenship for many decades. He said that she escaped a previous marriage “at a very young age.” It was finally deemed unlawful, and she was able to apply for asylum while attending university on a student visa.
Donna could never get the system to resolve her status despite her marriage to Russ Milne, her daughter said.
“She’s always caring. She’s our support system, so it’s obviously been really rough this week,” the daughter said with tears in her eyes. “She’s the person that was always at my school. Always taking care of things around my school. She was, you know, always a huge volunteer, always helping everybody around.”
Her voice cracked as she recalled, “Everybody knew Kaitlynn’s mom.”
Kashanian’s husband noted her volunteer work, particularly after Hurricane Katrina, when she helped build homes with Habitat for Humanity.
It was tough to watch. Despite the roadblocks to obtaining citizenship and asylum status, Donna had been allowed to build a life in the United States for nearly a half century. That is until her status was revoked without notice under the second Donald Trump administration.
The cruelty of Kashanian’s arrest and detention is pointless. Except the cruelty is the point, as Adam Serwer observed.
No statute of limitations
Punishment for civil infractions in this country falls under statutes of limitations typically measured in years, not decades. But not under the mass deportation policy driven by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Kashanian’s crime (“poisoning the blood of our country”) in the view of Trump, Miller, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan is as indefinitely unforgivable as murder. Their loathing for people viewed as inferior is beyond cruel. It is pathological.
Trump in his first term wanted to fortify his southern border wall, The New York Times reported, “with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators” to keep immigrants out. Already Florida is constructing a camp in the Everglades surrounded by snakes and alligators to keep them in. It will hold women like Donna Kashanian until the Trump administration can dump them like refuse in a third-world country. The actions of the U.S. government rhyme with the worst of history’s atrocities.
I first watched Judgment at Nuremberg as a teen. There is a bit of dialogue I long misremembered. When I finally watched the DVD, I found that I’d added my visceral reaction to the remembered dialogue. Marlene Dietrich is in a nightclub with Spencer Tracy, the chief judge:
Mrs. Bertholt: You see, I have a mission with the Americans, as Mr. Perkins can tell you.
Judge Dan Haywood: Oh, what is that?
Mrs. Bertholt: To convince you that we’re not all monsters.
Judge Dan Haywood: No, but some of you are.
That last line is not in the film. My memory added it to the exchange, and there it remained for decades. Present circumstances give me reason not to erase it.
Rod Serling’s classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” reminds us just how easily terror leads to horror, and how easy it is to surface the monsters within ordinary people.
Lauren O’Connor of the Writers Guild Foundation writes:
According to Devendra Varma, who was an expert in gothic literature, the difference between terror and horror is “the difference between awful apprehension and sickening revulsion.” This is to say that terror is the emotion we feel when we know something unimaginably awful is going to occur; horror is the emotion we feel when we sit in the realization that something unimaginably awful has just happened. The reason “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is an exemplary script lies in how Serling takes us from terror (anticipation) to horror (realization).
Since Trump’s pogrom against immigrants began, Donna and her family lived in terror. On Sunday their terror turned to horror.
Something unimaginably awful, monstrous, is happening right now, right here in the United States of America. Government-sponsored terrorists are committing daily horrors on our own streets. The monsters have arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue, and on Maple Streets across this once-decent country.
That is not to equate Trump & Co. with Nazis. But the impression is spot on.
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