Category: Columnists

I don’t believe the Trump administration removed the slavery memorial at the President’s House at Sixth and Market Streets to protect the reputations of the dead. I believe they did it to crush the spirits of the living.

Perhaps, for those too demoralized by Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, the instinct to resist has faded. But Trump doesn’t know Philadelphians. We are a stubborn sort, reared in well-worn streets that are older than America itself. You cannot take crowbars to our history and pry it from the walls. Nor can you silence us when we rise up to tell the story of what you’ve done.

That’s why Friday’s arrest of Don Lemon, a journalist who toiled in Philadelphia before moving to the national stage, will only sharpen the focus on the Trump administration’s push to deport Black and brown immigrants. It’s why the arrest of Georgia Fort, a vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists, which has its roots in Philadelphia, will only shed light on this administration’s troubling strain of anti-Blackness.

Pretending that Lemon and Fort committed a crime by covering a protest in a mostly white Minnesota church is ludicrous. Yet, that’s what the Trump administration would have us believe. They want us to think that reporting on protesters who were seeking to confront a pastor said to have ties to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a criminal act. That interviewing people is enough to be charged with conspiracy against the rights of religious freedom and an attempt to injure while exercising religious freedom.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Civil Rights Division of Trump’s Justice Department, claimed the protesters were “desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshipers.” Yet, the Trump administration, just days ago, declared that it would send federal agents into churches and schools to arrest undocumented immigrants. Does that also desecrate a house of worship? Or is it only sacrilege when others do the same thing?

Don’t bother to try to make sense of it. You can’t, because the Trump administration is not seeking fairness. Nor is it seeking truth. Instead, it is attempting to reshape reality in the image of Donald Trump.

I doubt that it’ll succeed, because there’s a strange thing about truth. No matter what you do to it, truth does not cease to exist. It simply waits to be uncovered.

Prying Black history from the walls at Sixth and Market Streets will never erase truth. Instead, the truth will be amplified. Not only by Michael Coard and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, the activists fighting to preserve our history. This truth will be told by all of us.

George Washington enslaved nine Africans in Philadelphia. He returned them to Virginia nearly every six months, thus avoiding the requirement to free them under Pennsylvania law. One of the enslaved, Oney Judge, managed to escape from Washington and his wife, and America’s first president spent years trying to return her to slavery.

That is the truth of what happened here in Philadelphia, and on Friday, when I went to the site of the exhibit and saw the rusted, glue-stained frames that once held depictions of that history, I was angry. But the tale of the President’s House is not the only truth the Trump administration is trying to obscure.

By sanctioning the presence of a masked gang of federal agents in cities run by Democrats and telling those agents they have absolute immunity, Trump’s administration has made us unsafe.

Shootings by federal immigration agents in Minnesota cost Renee Good and Alex Pretti their lives. We know their names and mourn their deaths, not just because they were American citizens, but also because they were white. However, they aren’t the only ones to fall victim to the violence linked to the president’s anti-immigrant push.

In total, at least four people have been killed and eight others wounded by gunfire during immigration enforcement operations since Trump returned to office a year ago. Most of the other victims appear to be people of color. But when state-sanctioned violence hides behind the darkness of masks, the only thing that can expose it is light.

Journalism is that light, and quite often, when journalists begin to look for one truth, another is exposed. That’s what happened when Don Lemon and Georgia Fort walked into that mostly white church to report on a protest in St. Paul, Minn.

Lemon and Fort discovered that in America, where history is pried from walls and Black journalists are arrested, truth does not play out in color. Too often, it’s in Black and White.

The headline was catnip to a Washington press corps that has spent much of the last decade desperately trying to normalize the mad, mad, mad, mad world of Donald Trump. With his poll numbers reeling after two Minneapolis killings by federal agents, the 47th president was “toning down” his mass deportation drive — perhaps pulling back.

There were symbolic gestures, for sure. The Nazi-style trench-coated unmasked face of Trump’s secret police force in Minnesota, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, was dismissed and slinked home to California in a convoy of shame. His replacement, the alleged Cava bagman Tom Homan, talked of a drawdown of federal forces in the Gopher State, even as no one except Bovino and his inner circle of goons left town. There was an abrupt end to immigration raids in Maine, where the White House finally realized the wildly unpopular arrests might be dooming the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins.

But you see, there’s just one thing. Just as Ike and Tina Turner used to say that they never, ever did nothing nice and easy, the Trump regime never, ever does nothing nice and “toned down.” What America saw last week was what Richard Nixon’s Watergate coconspirators called a “modified limited hangout” — minor concessions to reality aimed at keeping the larger, diabolical enterprise afloat.

Toned down? Tell that to a few thousand marchers in a union-led “ICE Out” demonstration on Saturday in Portland, Ore. They were merely exercising their First Amendment protest rights — chanting “ICE out!” as they calmly marched past the federal building — when agents abruptly fired volleys of tear gas, pepper balls, and flashbang grenades into the crowd, which included young children brought by their parents to what had been a peaceful rally.

“Just experienced the most intense tear gassing of my life …,” journalist Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle posted. “There was no fast exit as they indiscriminately threw loads of gas and flash bangs. Children were in the crowd screaming.”

It sure didn’t look like any kind of “toning down” on a snow-draped road outside rural St. Peter, Minn., where a woman who was legally filming federal agents was blocked off by a car as three masked men brandishing high-powered firearms emerged, screaming, “Get out of the car!” before violently removing her, slamming her to the icy ground, and arresting her.

That the police chief of St. Peter — a friend of the woman’s husband, it turned out — made a phone call to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that got her promptly returned to town and released was the essence of last week’s modified limited hangout. The main message to would-be citizen ICE observers was unmistakable: There is no major pullback in Minnesota.

War, children. It’s just a shot away.

The idea that the irrepressible forward momentum of a historically inhumane mass deportation campaign — powered by more than $170 billion allocated last year to hire more masked goons and convert abandoned warehouses into modern concentration camps — could be so easily reversed was laughable. Even the alleged toner-down-in-chief, Trump, told reporters when he was asked about a Minnesota pullback: “No, no, not at all.”

This week, things could get much, much worse.

On Tuesday, some 350,000 Haitian refugees are slated — under a Trump regime order — to lose the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that was granted to them by the Biden administration and has allowed them to stay legally in the United States after fleeing an epidemic of gang violence and murder in their Caribbean homeland.

Advocates for the large Haitian diaspora are fighting Trump’s revocation in court, so there is a chance the move can be forestalled. However, top officials, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, have said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has plans in place to immediately swarm the industrial epicenter of Haitian migration — Springfield, Ohio — with a massive force of federal agents to begin deportation raids.

You probably remember Springfield from its prominence in the 2024 presidential campaign. Over the last decade, a surge of Haitian migrants into a once nearly comatose factory town — some 12,000 to 15,000 people, or now a quarter of the small city’s population — revitalized Springfield, yet triggered a moral panic among some white neighbors who shared utterly unfounded rumors of animal abuse.

In that fall’s nationally televised debate, opponent Kamala Harris and some in the Philadelphia audience giggled when Trump blurted out, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs.” This week, the president and his totally not toned-down minions, like top aide Stephen Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, want to have the last laugh.

“The fear has been there” ever since Trump’s debate lies about Springfield, Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of Springfield’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, told a local TV station. Now, with TPS likely to expire, he predicts the local community “not being able to leave their house, not being able to go to work.” Many are terrified they won’t survive gang violence if deported back to Haiti.

The giant question hanging over the looming Springfield raids — and, yes, it is largely a rhetorical one at this point — is simply: Why? In every city that’s been flooded with masked secret police, from Los Angeles to Minnesota, over-the-top DHS rhetoric about removing “the worst of the worst” murderers and rapists from America has been undercut by arrests of law-abiding day laborers or restaurant workers. That’s not to mention all of the detainments and the killing of two people.

In Springfield, Haitian refugees responded to a 2014 plea from business leaders to save a shrinking Rust Belt city, and the majority came here legally during the Joe Biden years — doing everything the right way, and getting a fleeting vision of the American dream. If anything, the crime rate in this hardworking and often deeply religious community is lower than in other areas that are predominantly made up of native-born Americans.

It’s hard to imagine any reason — economic, legal, or moral — for the mass removal of Haitians to their unsafe and unstable native country other than the color of their skin. And it’s hard to call this proposed operation anything else besides an ethnic cleansing on U.S. soil.

This is no surprise. It’s been the distinguishing feature of Trump’s mass deportation scheme since the early months of the regime, nowhere more so than most recently in Minnesota.

The DHS “Operation Metro Surge” has heavily targeted two ethnic groups. Are Somali Americans — refugees from a war-ravaged nation that, in a much different time, was the subject of what was supposed to be a humanitarian U.S. intervention in the 1990s — the focus of the raids because of a fraud scheme local authorities seemed to have a handle on? Or is it because Trump called the Somali people “garbage”?

And even if you buy the seemingly ridiculous argument that the immigration raids are connected to a mid-level fraud scam, what is the explanation for Bovino’s goon squads cruising the Asian American neighborhoods of Minneapolis asking, “Where the Hmong at?” The Hmong people of Laos aided the misguided U.S. war in Southeast Asia and fled communist reprisals to come to America with encouragement from both the federal government and faith leaders. Why target them now, decades later, after Hmong Americans have planted deep roots here?

For that matter, what on earth is the logic behind zeroing in on so many Venezuelans, who came to America to escape the rule of a man the Trump regime has now arrested as a criminal dictator of a nation the U.S. Department of State has deemed violent and unsafe? Why deport the thousands of Latinos who worked tirelessly to rebuild New Orleans after it was decimated by Hurricane Katrina?

Not only is Trump’s mass deportation not nabbing many violent criminals, but his unholy war is undoing the very foundation of the story America tells itself to live: that our willingness to accept the huddled masses fleeing political violence or persecution made us an exceptional nation. It was always an uneven narrative, but the regime’s masked men are now erasing it in service of unapologetic white supremacy.

In Florida, which has also been a migration magnet for Haitians, Jewish residents of the Sinai Residences senior complex in Boca Raton — including many who survived the Nazi Holocaust — are so alarmed that some have volunteered to hide Haitian staff members in their units. The center’s CEO said the crisis “reminds me of Anne Frank.”

This does not have to happen. Springfield isn’t nearly the size of Minneapolis, and all of us — not just Ohioans — need to begin thinking about what we can do to help avert a humanitarian disaster in the U.S. heartland. More importantly, Congress — which has slowly shown signs of life in response to the January killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good — needs to fight by any means necessary to make sure ethnic cleansing is prevented in Springfield, and ended everywhere else.

Then they came for the Haitians. What happens next is up to us.

Regardless of how you feel about immigration, President Donald Trump has made a mess of his promise to deport the estimated 13 million people who are in the U.S. illegally. A vow that more than half the country supported last year, and which undoubtedly (along with the high cost of eggs) helped him take back the White House.

Today, not only has a majority of the electorate soured on the idea — including some Trump voters — but almost half are also ready to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the administration’s heavy-handed tactics have cost two U.S. citizens their lives in Minneapolis.

But let’s step back for a moment and imagine a world where Trump’s agenda was not being implemented by a white supremacist like homeland security adviser Stephen Miller or run by incompetents like Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem.

In that world, members of the administration would still have their work cut out for them, and protests would surely erupt. But ICE methodically engaging in workplace raids, for example, would prove a much more palatable (and effective) strategy than having masked federal agents arrest people using weapons and tactics that scream invasion, not law enforcement.

Still, at the end of a year or two of those more restrained efforts, we would likely be where we are now — with most Americans realizing mass deportations and limiting legal immigration don’t make much sense.

It wouldn’t even be about the human cost of blanket immigration enforcement; it would be about the expense.

No, not just the $170 billion devoted to detention and deportation in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act. Under the president’s immigration policies, American families will end up paying an additional $2,150 a year for goods and services by 2028.

That’s a 14.5% increase on food, 6.1% on housing, and almost 4% on leisure and hospitality services, according to a study by FWD.us discussed at a panel Tuesday, hosted by the nonpartisan policy group and the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia.

Researchers say that one of the most striking long-term impacts will be the tens of thousands of first-generation American children who are forced to become breadwinners as foreign-born members of their families are deported. There’s also the matter of billions of dollars in lifelong earning contributions to the U.S. economy lost, as well as the unquantifiable innovation and economic growth that will go missing as immigrants take their entrepreneurial spirit elsewhere. Remember that nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded or cofounded by immigrants or their children.

Like the United States as a whole, the Keystone State and the Philadelphia area reap the benefits of immigration.

More than a million immigrants live in Pennsylvania — about 80% of them in the Philadelphia area. They possess almost $40 billion in annual spending power and pay about $13 billion in taxes. In Greater Philadelphia, immigrants make up an estimated 21% of the construction industry, 48% of agricultural work, 18% of manufacturing, 16% of business services, and 15% of leisure and hospitality.

About 367,000 immigrants in Philadelphia are U.S. citizens, 202,000 are legal permanent residents, and 64,000 are foreign nationals here on a work visa or as international students. Immigrants protected from deportation through policies implemented by past administrations that are now in jeopardy — including Temporary Protected Status, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and those waiting on asylum decisions — number about 84,000.

If you think it’s unfair to include legal immigrants in a discussion about the president’s immigration crackdown, then you haven’t been paying attention to the Trump administration’s broader plans.

Immigration visa processing has been indefinitely shut down for 75 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Thailand. The administration has frozen refugee resettlement, placed exorbitant fees on new H-1B visas for skilled workers, made international students feel unwelcome, and instituted new restrictions on family-based immigration.

A recent study by the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy found that Trump’s proposals will reduce legal immigration by as much as 50% through 2028. New numbers released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday already show a sharp slowdown in the U.S. population, as immigration of all kinds is curtailed.

As the nation’s birthrate continues to decline, reducing immigration will stunt economic growth and further endanger Social Security as fewer young workers contribute to that crucial program, which helps keep many older Americans from slipping into poverty.

I’ll refrain from using whataboutism regarding an administration that has shown open contempt for the rule of law and say that the appeal of Trump’s promise to deport those who entered the country illegally is understandable. In black-and-white terms, these people broke the law, and they should be held accountable.

But reality is somewhere in the middle. The truth is that we depend on and greatly benefit from immigration — of all kinds — and we should work to make legally coming to the U.S. easier, not harder.

As Trump’s reaction to the backlash prompted by the ICE killings in Minneapolis shows, the president responds to political pressure and can change tack. He should realize that much like immigration and the high cost of groceries helped him win the 2024 election, it may be the same issues that cost his party the 2026 midterms and beyond.

This week’s Shackamaxon covers slow snow removal, political incentives, and whether politicians should be able to hedge their electoral bets.

Snow-go zones

When the news came through that Philadelphia schools would finally be open on Thursday, the Pearson household cheered. Between some brutal stomach bugs, the Christmas holiday break, in-service days, and the snow, it had felt like my older two children had barely spent any time in class since Thanksgiving. While I’m a strong advocate for snow days, I’m less enthusiastic about snow weeks. For many, the failure to open schools for three days crystallized their frustrations with the way the city handled the weekend onslaught of snow, sleet, and ice.

TV news and social media are filled with angry residents. Many small streets remain wholly unplowed. Getting on the bus often requires climbing over ice piles. Many feel Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and her team did not adequately prepare for a weather event that everyone knew was coming. One reader even asked me if Carlton Williams, the city’s director of Clean and Green Initiatives and the point person for plowing, was Parker’s version of overmatched Eagles offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo.

According to contemporary Inquirer reporting, more than 90% of city streets were plowed and passable after a large ice storm in 2016. It is hard to make a direct comparison, but I would be surprised if we were anywhere close. I asked Joe Grace, the mayor’s head of communications, if the city had anyone available to explain any unique challenges this year, but he did not respond.

Of course, Philadelphia is hardly the only city to struggle with this storm. Washington residents are furious with their city’s snow response, schools across the state of Maryland are still closed, and cities in New Jersey are also struggling to remove the snow and ice. The freezing cold temperatures mean the snow piles are sticking around, rather than melting, and the accumulation is both heavy and frozen solid, making shoveling a difficult process.

A matter of incentives

The snowfall, and the attendant consternation, is a good way to explain one of my key beliefs about city government: When the mayor disagrees with City Council, the mayor is often right. This isn’t a statement about any particular mayor or councilmember, but rather the different incentives for each office.

When things go bad in a way that affects everyone, it’s the mayor who gets the blame. While many residents may vent to their district councilmember about the cleanup effort, most understand legislators aren’t in charge of plowing. In the private sector, employers will often talk about “key performance indicators.” For cities, that means things like crime reduction, trash collection, snow removal, and effective schools — which are all under mayoral control.

With a two-term limit and competitive elections for each vacancy, mayors also have more direct accountability. People know who the mayor is, even if they don’t typically vote in local elections. If you are reading this column, you probably know who your district councilmember is, but around half of your neighbors likely don’t.

Meanwhile, the things Council gets blamed for, and thus focuses on, tend to be more picayune. Sometimes, the body makes sweeping policy changes based on the testimony of just a few outspoken residents, who themselves often represent a hard-line and unrepresentative “not in my backyard” attitude. This approach leads to a concentration of benefits and the diffusion of costs.

One former staffer told me councilmembers tend to see themselves as their constituents’ lawyer, rather than agents of systemic change. With challenges rare and vacancies even rarer, members have little incentive to take on new perspectives or alter their approach. Instead, they tend to dance with the ones who brung ‘em. This is particularly acute for members who represent districts, who are a majority of Council.

The one move that tends to refocus a councilmember’s attention is becoming mayor.

Parker herself is a great example of this phenomenon. As a district councilmember, she was tough on new development. As mayor, Parker has become a cheerleader for it. That’s because while individual projects may lead to a surge in complaints, they also help the city pay its bills, employ skilled workers, and house residents. The city’s chief executive, no matter who they are, is always likely to side with policy choices that have widespread public benefit because it is in their interest.

Resign to run reforms

Perhaps lost in the ice removal and “Remove ICE” controversies is an effort from At-Large City Councilmember Isaiah Thomas to reform Philadelphia’s “resign to run” provision. This rule prevents city employees from running for political office without first quitting their day job, including elected officials. Thomas told me he’d like to see the proposed charter change put to the voters this year, perhaps as early as the May primary.

In the past, efforts to change or eliminate the provision have failed, in part because of an understandable resentment of politicians getting to run for higher office on the public dime. Still, just like debates between mayors and councilmembers, it is worth looking at what kind of behavior this rule incentivizes.

While the current crop of councilmembers is quite new, that hasn’t always been the case. Growing up, the joke was that people only left Council for three reasons: they retired, they went to jail, or they ran for mayor. The last member of Council to earn a political promotion outside of City Hall was Lucien Blackwell, who won a special election to replace Bill Gray in Congress all the way back in 1991.

Both of Philadelphia’s current U.S. representatives benefited from holding elected office in Harrisburg, where this provision doesn’t exist. Could Brendan Boyle, famously the son of a janitor, have run for Congress if he had to resign his seat in the state House to run? Probably not.