For about an hour Tuesday night, the Statue of Liberty went dark. With multiple women’s actions coming today, one immediate thought was that it could have been a purely coincidental yet powerful moment of solidarity with women. But a second—and less inspiring—thought was that it instead represented our moral failure to continue being a beacon of hope and refuge for the world’s persecuted.
How badly are we failing at our job to protect the most vulnerable in the world? Enough that refugees who wanted nothing more than to be in the U.S. are now fleeing our government-sanctioned cloud of nativism for the safety of Canada:
Chris Crowningshiele has been driving a cab, on and off, for 30 years in this rural corner of upstate New York known as the North Country. He lives south of here in Plattsburgh, and his fares usually come from ferrying students from a state university there or picking shoppers up at a Walmart in his gray minivan. But in recent weeks, riders have been asking him — two, three, sometimes as many as seven times a day — to bring them to the end of Roxham Road.
He is carrying them on the last leg of their journey out of the United States. Just on the other side of that sign is Canada. Border officials and aid workers there say there has been a surge in people illegally crossing from the United States in the months since President Trump was elected, many of them natives of Muslim countries making bids for asylum [...]
Mr. Crowningshiele picks up passengers in Plattsburgh, mostly at the airport or the bus station, and over the 25-mile drive north, they have told him that they had traveled from across the country. Some were migrants from Yemen and Turkey. They confided that they were fearful, of what was happening in the countries they wanted to leave behind — not just their homeland but now also the United States — and of what they faced once they stepped out of Mr. Crowningshiele’s cab.
“You wonder what’s going through their heads, you know?” he said. Many of his passengers have been families, with parents carrying young children and whatever possessions they could take with them.
“People just want to live their life,” Mr. Crowningshiele, 48, said, “and not be scared.”
Once at the border, men and women clutching children and braving the bitter cold turn themselves in to Canadian police to be arrested, the first process in order to make a refugee claim:
Just after a gentle rain let up on a recent afternoon, a blue Prius with a yellow taxi sign perched on its roof approached the border.
A husband and wife got out. He loaded on a backpack, a duffel bag and several shopping bags. She carried a young boy. The couple declined to speak with a reporter, though the man said they were Turkish. The family was the second spotted arriving that day on Roxham Road, with at least two other cabs coming later. By the count of the people living on the road, it was a slow day. Almost 20 people had come the day before.
As the family approached the border, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told them it was not legal for them to enter here. If they continued, he said, they would be arrested.
“I apologize about this,” the man replied, his voice unsure, “but I have to break your rules.”
He paused.
“I’m sorry.”
Look for these sort of tragic accounts to increase now that Donald Trump has released his Muslim ban 2.0, which does nothing to improve our national security and instead continues fomenting xenophobia here while staining our reputation abroad. We should be steadfast in our longstanding tradition of welcoming tired and huddled masses, but instead refugees are fleeing us for our neighbors to the north. All this because our nation is now being led by a former reality show host who wants nothing more than to Make America White Again.
No wonder Lady Liberty turned off her light last night.