Dear Editor
When did sadism become a national joke? How did watching people being snatched off the street, shackled by masked men and thrown in the back of a truck to face a perilous future become something to cheer on?
How does cutting food and medical aid to impoverished and starving people become a fun way to spend a weekend?
Multibillionaire Elon Musk started his DOGE cost-cutting campaign by going on stage at a Republican Party event and waving around a power saw as if he were demolishing the USAID program while the audience cheered him on.
“I missed some good parties that weekend,” he said when he was finished.
When the infamous Alligator Alcatraz opened up in the python- and alligator-infested Florida Everglades, the Florida Republican Party actually fundraised off of it by selling T-shirts, caps, coffee mugs and such. Many of the items showed smiling alligators biting chunks off detainees.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem so relishes her job of overseeing the deportation effort that she prances around the country visiting various photo ops for fun. One shows her sitting on a horse wearing a cowboy hat and Western attire, overlooking detainees boarding a plane in Texas. Other times she’s shown up in ICE coats and military uniforms, sometimes toting a rifle.
Noem had a video made at a prison in Louisiana, posing with the prisoners while rock music by the Rolling Stones played in the background. Television’s “Dr. Phil” also made a video of ICE grabbing people off the streets, shackling them and throwing them into the back of Gestapo-style trucks.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, is an avid viewer of those programs. “I enjoy watching them more than anything else,” she says. It isn’t as if they were being sent back to their own countries. Some countries won’t take them back, so some detainees are sent to countries such as Libya, Sudan and Eritrea, where they can’t speak the language or have any family or personal ties.
Statistics show that more than 70 percent of the detainees have no criminal record. Being illegal is not a criminal offense. It’s a civil offense. Most of them held low-paying jobs, such as farming, laboring on construction sites, working in factories and working at car washes, among others. Still, Trump, Musk, Noem and others persist in calling them “the worst of the worst, vicious criminals and monsters.”
I think it’s quite clear who the real monsters are.
Marilyn Ooms, Perryville
