Image by Ted Griswold, Los Angeles, 6/9/25.
Many of us residing in the U.S. of European descent are the children of immigrants. Some are more recent than others, but immigrants nonetheless.
My own grandfather arrived at Ellis Island just over a hundred years ago as a small child, having crossed the frigid Atlantic. As the story goes, he suffered the flu en route and barely survived. His parents were escaping a turbulent situation that had erupted in Odesa.
Slowly, my grandpa and his parents, after hopping trains and enduring bumpy wagon rides, made their way to the high plains of Montana, where they would find work as sharecroppers.
It was here, on the ancestral lands of the Salish, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Crow, that my father and his two brothers were born and raised.
They worked the farm for many decades but never owned it. They were poor, but they knew, especially as World War II broke out, that it was better than what they had left behind in Russia.
I think about them often, out there toiling in the fields as I look around my own community today, vibrant and full of hard-working immigrants, who made similar sacrifices to be here, to raise their families in peace. To return to the lands that were stolen from them in the first place by the violent purveyors of manifest destiny.
Now, in the name of white supremacy and male fragility, our immigrant population is being victimized; kidnapped by a fascistic government and its Gestapo thugs. Paid for by our tax dollars.
Our hearts should break, but not our will to resist this tyranny.
I have little doubt that my grandfather, with dirt under his nails, and a cigarette dangling from his sun-chapped lips, would be with us in the streets, fist raised, chanting, “Fuck ICE!”
