US is no longer the same so no American holiday

Would you go to the US right now? I’ve been numerous times over the years and I’d planned to go again soon.

I’ve been hoping to take my mom and sister for a holiday since last year.

We have a house there – or rather Himself does because that’s where much of his work is done – and summer in coastal New England is heavenly: warm, sunny, sea breezes, lobster rolls, clapboard buildings, chipmunks, and lemonade.

And yet I’m not convinced. I’m not sold on going through border security.

I’m not sold on being there with a foreign accent.

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I’m not sold on supporting a country that is delighting in deporting people to random pay-to-jail destinations like El Salvador and South Sudan and, at best, a makeshift “Alligator Alcatraz” of tented cages in the steaming, mosquito-ridden Florida Everglades.

But why, asks Himself, would they be interested in you? Well, excuse me, but has he read this column ever?

The US immigration authorities are interested in all sorts of people, detaining Welsh tourists, French scientists, Canadian actresses, minors at a birthday party, a bride returning from her honeymoon, labourers in a field, restaurant dishwashers, green card holders, university students.

My friend lectures at a European college for American foreign exchange students.

The current intake are anxious about returning home, a student born in El Salvador, a trans girl, a Jamaican lad, all legally US citizens, all potentially suspect under the current dispensation.

Customs officials are randomly swooping on queues demanding to inspect people’s phones and they are legally entitled to do so, the First Amendment be damned.

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Well over half the people detained by immigration officials have no criminal record; of those who do, the majority are traffic and immigration violations.

But they’re locking up “felons and rapists, the worst of the worst”, crows soft-bellied strongman Donald Trump, unaware of the irony of being a convicted felon and sex pest himself, unconcerned that his ICE officials are swooping on such hard targets as gardening old ladies and gay makeup artists.

With zero process, suspects may be shackled, strip-searched, and deported, not to where they came from, but wherever will take them for a few dollars.

So, do I want a holiday in Germany in 1938? No. But, man, how I miss the America I once knew.