ICE and Memories From Liberia

I must be back in Samuel Doe’s Liberia, 1985, right?

For six months in the spring and summer of 1985, I lived in Liberia, a West African nation about the size of the state of Tennessee, but inhabited by 16 native ethnic groups, with at least as many languages, all dominated by a powerful group of descendants of former US slaves (the “True Whig Party”). Their ancestors had been repatriated to Monrovia, Liberia, in the 1820s as part of the abolitionist movement. How all that came about is a topic for another essay, perhaps, but the dictatorship of Samuel Doe, who led a military coup against the True Whig government in 1980 is my present concern.

As I look back on it now, it is clear that the entire Liberian population then lived in fear of one another, everyone afraid of being spied on and arrested or even killed outright if a word was said against the Doe regime or in favor of any change. And it is doubtful that our group of five should have been there at all at the time.

I was the faculty coordinator for four college students (all young men, ages 19-21) from St. Olaf, Sewanee, Susquehanna, and Bucknell Colleges. We were sponsored by the Lutheran Church in America’s global ministry office, in New York City, and had been preceded by at least eight or ten previous groups who had studied abroad at Cuttington University, an Episcopalfounded college about 80 miles inland from Monrovia, the coastal city and capital of Liberia.

Those predecessor groups had a somewhat smoother time of it, under the True Whig government, and the program had been suspended for several years just prior to our going, due to the political instability under self-promoted (from Seargent) “General” Doe. Late in 1984, it was judged that the program could proceed again, and I was a last-minute faculty stand-in for a math professor from Susquehanna whose spouse had just been diagnosed with a serious medical condition that kept her from participating.

All of this has come back to me now because of all the media coverage of the ICE campaign against illegal immigrants in Minnesota. My experience in Liberia, thank goodness, is the only time I have come into direct contact with masked militarylooking men, carrying menacing AK-47s (as my students were clear in pointing out to me), and we met groups of them over and over again as we traveled throughout the country during our months there, visiting both Episcopal and Lutheran pastors and missions, hospitals and schools, two open-pit iron mines, rubber plantations, and trekking through the rainforest to visit waterfalls and see the wildlife.

I naively took that experience, of routinely seeing menacing military groups along the highways, stopping traffic, rousting everyone out of their vehicles, and then holding them up for ransom (the soldiers all claimed to have been unpaid for months and needed our money to support their families) to be something I would never see back home, but in fact, except for the ransom part, it’s exactly what I am seeing again and even worse, as ICE breaks car windows and hauls people out of their vehicles to meet their arrest and deportation quotas. At least while we were in-country, there were no reports of Liberians killed by these groups of military marauders.

I never imagined I would see my own government ordering a law enforcement agency to perform its work with such banana-republic, dictatorially thuggish practices: in balaclavas like a group of terrorists? Really? Breaking down doors and going into people’s homes with no judicial warrants? Really? Going to elementary schools to pursue arrests of parents picking up their children? Really? Killing an unarmed mother trying to turn her car around? Really? Killing an ICU nurse filming ICE operations in his hometown? Really?

Those of us who voted for President Trump, I hope, could surely not have voted for this. This is not the America I expected to live in. Canada, if only you had some warmer places to live, I think some of us would be ready to move tomorrow, rather than live in our warm-weather retreats of Texas or Florida. But ICE-free, Canada would still have lots of ice. Then again, so does Texas at times.