Caffeinated Politics

There are, simply put, increasingly sad and cruel stories happening in our nation. Like you, I read and hear about them occurring in a far too regular fashion. Without doubt, Donald Trump is largely responsible for the most repulsive of these stories, as in the case of a man born in a German refugee camp and after living for seven decades in the United States, was recently taken into custody by ICE. Given other stories about this group of thugs, I should not be surprised by anything. Right?

Well, let me say that even in light of all that we have learned about ICE over the past months, there are moments when the cruelty of this deportation policy is so stark and so absurd, it makes you stop and ask out loud, “What in the hell is going on?”

That is what happened to me today upon reading that immigration agents detained a man who had lived in the United States for seventy years—born in a German refugee camp, raised here, woven into the fabric of our civic life—but now treated as disposable like a wrapper from a burger consumed by Trump.

Paul John Bojerski was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp a year after World War II ended. His family legally emigrated to the United States in 1952 when he was five.

He was born Zbigniew Janusz Bojerski  – a name he swore he never used during his lifetime in the U.S. – in a displaced persons camp in Lubec, Germany in October 1946 to Polish nationals.  The family emigrated to New York in January 1952, and he was admitted as a  lawful permanent resident under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service records.

More than seven decades later, the 79-year-old Sanford grandfather – still a man without a country – found himself in legal limbo in the Alligator Alcatraz detention camp in the Everglades, picked up on a decades-old deportation order authorities had previously chosen not to enforce.

Bojerski’s case is complex and unusual – the most bizarre one his immigration attorney says he has handled in 30 years – but also part of the Trump administration’s widespread effort to deport millions of immigrants who it claims lack legal standing to be in the U.S, even those who lived here for decades with full knowledge of immigration officials.

Bojerski and Gayle married in 1988 and went to Niagara Falls in Canada on their honeymoon. Because he crossed the border then and again during a trip to Mexico, without questions from immigration officials, he and Stoller have argued that he had fulfilled the obligations of the old deportation order.

He made that case when he applied for permanent residency but immigration officials did not buy it. His request was denied, and in 2010 the government issued a new supervision order.

He has been following that order ever since, without issue, until July when the ICE told him he was to be kicked out of the country where he’s lived for over seven decades.

The retired optician, taken into custody late last month, was recently moved to the Krome Detention Center in Miami and has a bond hearing this month. His family worries his health is failing while he’s in custody and fears for his future.

This type of outlandishness is not an isolated story. It is emblematic of a broader pattern under the Trump administration, where immigration enforcement became less about justice or security and far more about spectacle and fear. Do not forget that autocrats thrive on using fear as a controlling tactic for the people they wish to subjugate. The absurdity here lies in the mismatch between the whims of a wildly out-of-control Trump and a man now dragged into detention. We must ask what is to be gained by tearing this family apart?

Like I have written many times, and needing to use too many horrid examples from this White House, what is happening is that cruelty is the point. Policies that should be tempered by compassion and common sense have instead been wielded as blunt instruments, designed to send a message that belonging in America is conditional, fragile, and revocable. This message runs counter to the ideals that I also press again and again about freedom, dignity, and the promise that hard work and loyalty to community earn one a place in our ever-growing national story. If I sound at times like a civics book from your youth, that is because I actually believed my lessons from those same books.

Once again, I need to point out the glaring truth that our nation has never known a president so willing to discard moral guardrails in pursuit of political spectacle. Past leaders, even when flawed, understood that the presidency carried a responsibility to uphold the spirit of American ideals. Under Trump, that responsibility was absolutely abandoned. The result is a federal government that treats human beings as mere props in a mean and sinister desired concoction of ever-heightened cruelty.

This story of the man born in a refugee camp, only to be detained after seven decades in America, should haunt us. It is a reminder that the erosion of moral guardrails does not happen in abstractions. It happens in the lives of neighbors, coworkers, and elders. It is a reminder that absurdity, when paired with power, becomes dangerous. And it is a call to each and every one of us to work at reclaiming the empathy and decency that once defined our civic life.

America cannot afford to normalize such cruelty. To do so would be to betray not only those who suffer under these policies but the very ideals that make this nation worth defending.