Standing in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection line at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport (MSP) after my flight back from Paris, I couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump’s consistent message about mass deportation of immigrants if he is elected again.
Upon arrival, the passengers of all international flights were funneled into one big room where their passports (and visas?) were processed. But, it wasn’t one giant line for all as we were immediately separated by the type of passport we possessed. If you had a U.S. Passport, you queued up in one line, if you held a passport from another country, you queued up in a different line. It’s worth noting here that the U.S. Passport line had at least four agents processing passports while the “other passports” line had only one, which struck me as a bad look from a public relations standpoint.
At some point in the hour-plus wait to have my passport processed with all the other passengers, I found myself looking around the room (as anyone would do) and suddenly became aware of the similarities between the two separate lines. As anyone would expect, the “other passports” line had a great diversity of characters—people of color, different religions based on their clothing, and probably even a diversity when it comes to socio-economic status. But, here’s the thing… the line I was standing in was every bit as diverse—so much, you truly couldn’t tell the two apart.
I wanted to snap a photo of the room and send it to those like Donald Trump or his running mate, J.D. Vance, but didn’t want to give the security folk in such a no-nonsense area of the airport a reason to pull me aside as a suspicious person. With that photo, I would have simply included some wise-crack message like, “You’re too late, they’re already citizens.”
In short, our country has always been about being a great melting pot—that has always been one of its strengths. So, why in the hell are some of us cheering on Trump when he says he wants to implement the country’s largest deportation program this country has ever seen?
Looking around the room at the variety of people present—especially in the U.S. Passports line—I had an overwhelming sense of pride. Yet, if Trump or Vance had been standing next to me, they would have been disgusted. And, there are few things more un-American than that.