In the small town of Kennett, Missouri, a solidly Republican/MAGA stronghold, there is a raging storm brewing over immigration.
But not in the way you might think.
Last week, several news outlets, including The New York Times, published stories about the outrage among townspeople over the detaining and planned deportation of a town soccer mom. Carol Mayorga, who is originally from Hong Kong, was surprisingly detained by ICE, in their brown shirts, during a routine check-in where she hoped to renew her work authorization, which expires in January 2026.
She was subsequently shackled and handcuffed, stuffed in a van and then carted all over Missouri, bouncing from jail to jail and awaiting an apparent deportation to Hong Kong.
Mayorga’s three children – 14, 12 and 7 – were essentially abandoned without warning, and they mostly have no idea where she is and when she’ll be able to make a brief phone call to them. They have cried. They have begged. They have screamed. But mostly, they’ve been terrified by the upending of their very normal, very American lives.
The good people of Kennett, where Trump won an overwhelming majority of the vote last November, are outraged. They loved Mayorga, who worked at a local diner and was a fixture in the community. They can’t believe what’s happened. And they keep telling everyone that this “is not what we voted for.”
And that’s all touching and swell, except for one small thing.
This. Is. Exactly. What. You. Voted. For.
This callousness. This indifference. This cruelty. You voted for it. You voted for it to be inflicted upon millions of people all around this country. Good people. Decent people. Community-minded people. People who make this country great.
You didn’t give a damn that Trump and his 2025 version of Brown Shirts were going to terrorize those other immigrants. You know, those “bad ones.” The immigrants who didn’t live in your communities, who didn’t work alongside you, who didn’t coach your kids’ baseball and soccer teams, who didn’t own local businesses, who didn’t go to church with you, who didn’t help you at the PTA event last week, who didn’t live down the street.
You were OK with all those not-the-immigrants-we-know being spirited off to foreign prisons on trumped-up, BS charges, being denied due process and tricked into handcuffs. You called the folks like Carol, whose names you never bothered to learn, criminals because you have no understanding of the complicated immigration system of this country and you’re unaware that the overwhelming majority of immigrants are here legally and with the full knowledge of the federal government.
Didn’t matter at all to you, because you got riled up by a marketing machine that fooled you into thinking that your problems could be attributed to the immigrant working beside you and not the rich guys picking your pockets.
So, when a guy like Leonardo Garcia Venegas, an American citizen who was working in Foley, was wrestled to the ground and detained by ICE, you didn’t much care. You didn’t care that, according to a video and reporting by Telemundo, that Venegas presented to authorities a Real ID but it was dismissed as fake. Didn’t matter at all that hours later, when he was finally released, the Department of Homeland Security’s evolving story was that he had “interfered” with police activity.
None of it matters because so many Americans are frothing at the mouth over “the border,” a new code word used by white people that means Hispanics. Because what we’re actually dealing with here is nothing more than good ol’ racism — the really, really nasty kind that pushes folks to abandon principles and rights and laws and shout with glee as government agents mistreat and manhandle the unlucky humans who happen to be the target this time.
Now, here we are, trying to argue that the courts are wrong, the laws are wrong, the Constitution is wrong. And all that’s right is white people’s irrational fear of anyone different, not because those differences pose a threat, but because those differences have been exploited.
And what’s truly, truly astonishing about it all, as so many Americans turn a blind eye to the screaming cries of children being ripped away from handcuffed parents, is that those same people never seem to connect the true greatness of America to the very immigrants they’re scared of.
America has been and always will be a kennel of mutts. A land where anyone can thrive. Where Chinatown leads to Little Italy, that leads to Koreatown, that blends into Little Germany, and on and on and on. The contributions of immigrants are immeasurable. Hell, the immigrant story is the American story.
And, sadly, the only time a whole bunch of people seem to realize that is when the bad things are happening to the immigrants they know.
