Garry Wills is the author of more than 50 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg.
My wife's mother, Lidia, was born on a farm on the Chiana River near Arezzo, Italy. She was brought to the United States at a young age and did not remember the place. However, the relatives who surrounded her in her Connecticut neighborhood shared with her memories and interactions with their families “there.” My wife grew up with the legends, as she spoke Italian before she spoke English. She wanted to return to her parents' hometown, and we traveled there every year.
We wanted to take Lidia's mother with us, too, but every year she gave different (and lame) excuses that she still didn't want to come with us. We didn't understand why she was hesitant to return to her relatives. Finally, Lidia's sister told us that she had discovered her secret. Lidia knew she had to apply for a passport from the State Department before leaving for Italy, and she had a deep-seated fear of federal agents, stemming from a time during World War II when the FBI came to her house and demanded to search it without a warrant.
Investigators were searching for possible spies for Benito Mussolini in the Italian-American neighborhood and were particularly interested in Lidia's radio. They examined it to see if it could receive or send shortwave messages overseas. Her experience of being treated as a foreigner by the government had haunted her, and she did not want to face such a situation again.
Lydia had never been “naturalized.” She had never even considered it, because she saw herself as anything but American. She ran an American business, a women's clothing store called Smart Shop, and she paid taxes. She had a Connecticut driver's license. What other documents did she need? My wife and I thought it was odd to think of her ultra-American mother as an “illegal alien.” We tried to convince her that she could get a passport if she explained her situation to the authorities. But she wanted nothing to do with them, a frightening thing she had been avoiding ever since the war.
If she were still alive and Donald Trump were elected president again, it would be no laughing matter. Trump has pledged to begin a historic mass deportation of millions of illegal aliens. While awaiting deportation, they could be held in detention centers built with military funds. Trump will again facilitate this, as he did under previous presidents, by using laws such as the Insurrection Act to separate children from their parents. Some, perhaps many, of the people caught up in this operation will be like my mother-in-law: brought here as children and becoming lifelong residents and taxpayers.
The inhumane roundups could also include what Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) calls “Dreamers,” people who were brought to the U.S. without a choice and for whom Durbin authored the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals bill. Trump would vastly expand the category and stack the odds against them. Lydia was a Dreamer before anyone dreamed of it, arriving as a child and never thinking she might not belong in America.
Trump's actions could spread fear and distrust of government among a large portion of the population, needlessly creating the kind of epidemic of doubt and fear that has plagued Lydia for most of her life, and that has affected Lydia's children, my wife, and even her siblings. It would split families, prevent communication with relatives, and sour relationships with an otherwise patriotic government, all because of an unfounded presumption that illegal aliens are malicious — the same presumption the FBI had when they checked Lydia's radio in her home. It would reinforce the suspicion that the federal government is hostile, which characterizes the authoritarianism of Trump's other proposals.
In this regard, a friend wrote to me and suggested an example of what we might lose: “I often think of Saul Bellow, whose father secretly crossed the border from Canada. Our unauthorized Nobel Prize winner?”
