In the years since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a pattern of cruelties directed at immigrants has reshaped daily life across the United States.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have killed U.S. citizens, while children live in fear that their parents will not return home from school.
Many immigrants who followed legal procedures are being deported not to their home countries, but to nations including South Sudan, Eswatini, and Rwanda.
Earlier this year, Renée Good and Alex Pretti became household names after they were publicly executed on the streets of Minneapolis.
In Biddeford, Maine, food delivery worker Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed by an ICE officer in front of his wife and three-year-old daughter.
In Houston, Texas, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was gunned down by ICE agents while on his way to work at a construction site.
Cardinal McElroy drew on the parable of the Good Samaritan to ask a pointed question about who Americans have become in the face of these events.
The Cardinal’s framing is difficult to shake: when farm raids take place, when mothers and children are detained, many Americans have assumed the role of the priest and the Levite, passing by without intervening.
When the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, an organization credited with saving millions of lives overseas, many citizens felt powerless to respond.
Trump has described himself as “the greatest president ever,” but scholars have sharply challenged that self-assessment in both public writing and academic work.
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, has argued that during Trump’s second term the United States has “slid into some form of authoritarianism.”
Public opinion data reinforces that academic critique, with an Economist/YouGov poll finding large majorities of Americans describing Trump as “arrogant,” “opportunistic,” “reckless,” “dishonest,” “corrupt,” “hypocritical,” and “divisive.”
The word Trumpism has come to encompass not just the political movement, but the broader culture of cruelty that critics say has come to define this period in American history.
What history will ultimately record, however, is not only what Trump did, but what ordinary Americans chose to do, or not do, in response to it.
