Crackdown not limited to ‘worst of the worst’

I generally refused to watch anything on television that features Donald Trump or the MAGA movement. I just change the channel.

He was on 60 Minutes recently, and I did not watch it, but I did see a clip of it. He was asked about all the mass arrests, and he called these people that are being arrested and detained by ICE “the worst of the worst.”

Let’s be very clear. What he is doing is demonizing entire groups without any proof whatsoever. Well, many of them are illegal, but not immoral. They are far from the worst of the worst by any stretch of the imagination. Donald Trump says this because he wants you to think he’s doing a fantastic job of cleaning up this country.

Yet many of the people that he’s having arrested are middle class workers. They clean our houses, they work in the fast food industry, they are gardeners, they work in grocery stores and hardware stores, they are rideshare drivers, delivery workers for furniture companies and many other positions that require unskilled labor.

This is hardly the worst of the worst.

I will grant you that some of them are here illegally, who came to this country to provide a better living. In many cases, they left oppression and poverty in their own countries contrary to what Donald Trump would have you believe.

I really believe that if there’s one thing that we need to get back to in this country, it is a sense of decency. The current administration is taking us further away from that. This current administration wants you to believe in hatred and judgmentalism because that’s who they are.

This is not who we are supposed to be.

Lawrence Kopp

Schaumburg