What Is It, Exactly, That Being an American Means to You?

Is it a flag on your porch? A sense of pride during the national anthem? A particular vision of freedom or prosperity? Perhaps it's a story you tell yourself about who we are and what we stand for.

Whatever it means to you, I want you to hold that meaning close as you read what follows.

On March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador. They carried 261 men deported from the United States. Most were Venezuelans—people who fled one nightmare only to be thrust into another. They were designated as “gang members” by the current administration and deported with little or no due process. No trials. No evidence presented. Just labeled, processed, and removed.

What happened next should shatter any comfortable notions of what American values mean in practice.

These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, “I'm not a gang member. I'm gay. I'm a barber.” This man was slapped for his tears, beaten for his vulnerability.

No phone calls. No visitors. No books. No talking. Just exile to a place “so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten.”

And all of this—every slap, every sob, every stolen dignity—stamped with American approval. Coordinated with American officials. Executed with American efficiency.

We have turned away from Lincoln's better angels. We have abandoned the moral arc that has, despite our many failures, generally bent toward justice. The world is afraid of us now—not with the complicated respect of a moral superpower, but with the simple fear reserved for bullies and tyrants.

Some of my conservative friends say that's good. Good that people are afraid. That fear makes them feel strong.

I just don't know what kind of morals people have, that they seek to be feared. That's not manly. That's not something to be proud of. It's crude. It's barbarism.

Being feared isn't strength. True strength lies in being just when it would be easier to be cruel. In maintaining our principles when they're inconvenient. In seeing the humanity in others even when it would be politically expedient to deny it.

What kind of nation have we become that we measure our greatness not by who we protect but by who we can brutalize? Not by what we build but by what we destroy?

The man who cried for his mother as his hair fell to the floor—he is not an abstraction. The barber who begged to be recognized as human—he is not a statistic. They are people. And what we allow to happen to them defines us more surely than any pledge or anthem or flag ever could.

This is the true test of what being an American means: not what we proclaim when standing tall at a ballgame or wrapping ourselves in patriotic symbols, but what we permit to be done to the vulnerable when we think no one is watching.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And we have really failed ourselves here. Failed to hold the tension between security and humanity. Failed to push back the flood of cruelty that always threatens to overwhelm civilization. Failed to walk the wire between legitimate concerns about immigration and our fundamental obligations to human dignity.

America, look at what is being done in your name. Look, and tell me if this is truly what you meant when you spoke of your pride in being American.

Because a nation that can do this—that can coordinate the ritualized dehumanization of people without trial, without evidence, without the most basic protections of due process—is not the America I was taught to believe in. It's not the America worthy of your pride or my loyalty.

It's an America that has forgotten itself.