Sitting in my car loaded with ready-made meals, battery-powered lights and flasks for my father and aunt to weather Storm Éowyn, I was listening to the radio and the legendary Irish balladeer Paddy Reilly singing the Woody Guthrie song “Deportee”.
I had never really paid much attention to the lyrics, but only minutes before the news had reported that US law enforcement agents raided a factory, arresting those they believed to be illegal, and that 18,000 US soldiers were being sent to the Mexican border by executive order of President Trump.
‘Deportees’ started life as a protest poem written by Guthrie, who was outraged at the racism of mainstream American media towards the death of 28 Mexican migrant workers killed in a plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon.
After the tragedy, media only reported the names of the four crew who were Americans. Guthrie saw this for what it was and called it out.
These workers were dirt poor and drove across Mexico to harvest fruit and vegetables on American farms for meagre wages. They were then shipped back like cattle.
The fact that their names were not even listed in this air disaster seemed to Guthrie to reinforce the view that migrant workers were chattels and commodities. They were dehumanised. (Not too dissimilar to how Israelis treat many of the Palestinian workers they rely on).
Guthrie gives the victims names: “Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita / Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria / You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane / All they will call you will be ‘deportees’.”
Trump’s war on immigrants is as short-sighted as it is racially motivated. The fact that the US economy has been built on waves of migration is lost in the mist of right-wing rhetoric and xenophobia.
Already MAGA farmers want the president (they so enthusiastically championed) to spare the agri-food sector from mass deportations.
They believe, if he does not, the food supply chain could be upended because it depends on migrant workers. And they are right – half of the two million farm workers in the USA lack legal status.
Equally high are the number of migrants on which the dairy, poultry, food processing and meatpacking industries rely too.
If it sounds familiar, it should be – as this is exactly what Brexit-supporting British farmers and fishermen did: shot themselves in the foot.
Hardly a week after the Brexit deal, Tory free-marketeers were doing deals with New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil and Australia for cheap meat and poultry imports. Voting for self-harming policies seems to be a shared trait in right-wing politics.
Watching the inaugural prayer service for President Trump, I could have cheered when the quietly-spoken Episcopalian Bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, pleaded with the incoming administration for mercy in dealing with migrants and the vulnerable.
It is not often one witnesses truth being spoken onto power in such a direct, eloquent and meaningful way. It hit Trump and Vance like a sledgehammer.
Mean-spirited and vengeful Republicans have already asked for the bishop to be added to the list of deportees.
This is straight out of the Nazi handbook on quelling opposition voices like Bonhoeffer, Niemoller and Reinisch.
Playing the race card is now embedded in the UK with Reform. It’s coarse and jaundiced commentary is dressed up as common sense and free speech. It plays on imaginary fears.
But back to Guthrie. His lyrics give a voice to the migrants: “Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted / Our work contract’s out and we have to move on / Six hundred miles to that Mexican border / They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”
And if that sounds familiar it should, too, as Irish migrants in the USA and UK were similarly tainted and treated.
“El numbre que le a poner va se Deportee.” (All they will call you will be deportee.)