In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who’ve been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, rest in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17. (Photo by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector/via AP)

originally published on Crosscut.com on June 21, 2018

Angelina Godoy, who runs the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, had hit her nerve-jangled limit. Godoy had pestered lawmakers about the forced separation of asylum-seeking families. She had shared her own Central American research on the ripple effect of seizing children from their parents. But the needle seemed stuck.

So Godoy fashioned a cardboard sign that read, “ICE agents: Stop following orders,” and quietly stood vigil outside of the Seattle office tower where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel file in to work.

She announced her intentions on Facebook, spurring a handful of supporters. Since then, a swath of moms, religious activists, retirees, and neophyte sign-wavers (including me) has gathered each weekday morning, greeting employees and passersby.

The messages are tailored to agents on their home turf. ICE: Stop locking up children.

It’s a visceral appeal to the women and men who are part of an agency required to enforce the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy of separating children from their parents — something that may be close to ending under an executive order from the president but, even so, can’t be remedied immediately with more than 2,000 children being held without family around them. The Orwellian, gothic vocabulary — young children torn from their mothers and “caged” in “tender age” facilities — is chilling because it’s not a dystopian novel.

But the vigil’s subtext is radical, that ICE agents should stand down and engage in Thoreau-style civil disobedience. Easy for Thoreau, mind you, but less easy when your livelihood is at stake.

Appealing to front-line enforcers generally isn’t part of the political-change playbook. A republic has mechanisms to promulgate laws and influence policy. And, especially in times of crisis, ICE agents, like police and firefighters, are fundamental to public safety.

Godoy’s strategy freights ICE — federal workers who love their families and chafe at their household bills — with the moral burden. In the United States, the onus should be on the political class, specifically the president and members of Congress. So what to do when the president is a govern-by-Twitter authoritarian and Congress is paralyzed? Frustration propels activists to parrot the 18th century’s Edmund Burke, that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Fortunately, ICE employees swear allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. In philosophy parlance, they have moral agency. They can and should exercise judgment consistent with their own values and sense of the greater good. But that takes a special kind of courage. And nerve.

First, agents may object and refuse to participate, arguing that Trump’s policy of rounding up those seeking asylum violates the Fourteenth Amendment. No person, that includes non-citizens, may be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law.

ICE agents also can exercise their own First Amendment right to free expression. During off hours, ICE officers can join in protests without violating the Hatch Act, the 1939 law curtailing political activities of federal employees. And, of course, ICE agents may resign.

There are antecedents to each of these scenarios. There were the CIA field officers who pushed back on the agency’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program. There were the mass resignations at the U.S. State Department under Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, a pattern that has continued. And there was the moral credibility of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which hastened the end of American involvement in Southeast Asia.

On Monday, I jumped the writer-advocate barrier, and joined Godoy and other friends. My sign, “consider your legacy,” was a wee milquetoast and didn’t tug like the others. But there was something invigorating about encountering those in the thicket, those agents with either averted or slow-burn eyes, dedicated to doing the right thing.

The jarring part is that it has come to this. Civil society breaks down when political norms and institutions begin to erode. The injustice and cruelty of Trump’s policy is a crucible for public servants, for all of us.

Disclosure: The writer serves on the advisory board for the UW Center for Human Rights.

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 15, 2014

Spokane, the lilac city, gave us Bing Crosby and poet Carolyn Kizer.

It also gave us John Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the alleged merchants of torture, “learned helplessness,” and practices that cannot be un-thought (read: forced rectal feeding.)

As the Spokesman Review reported, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a company hatched by the two Washington psychologists, raked in $81 million from the CIA to impart wisdom on Marquis de Sade-style interrogation.

Anal-hydration consulting is nice work if you can get it.

It’s a sad juxtaposition: The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee‘s torture report, tortured by CIA doublespeak, was released on the eve of last Wednesday’s Human Rights Day.

Add to it Eric Garner, extinguished by a chokehold, and the Ferguson non-indictment. 

So much for Human Rights Day’s sepia-toned pics of Eleanor Roosevelt and streams of social media quoting the sacralized language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“The use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies,” Sen. John McCain said the afternoon of the report’s release. “Our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights.”

Most Americans apparently don’t share McCain’s notion. A 2011 Pew survey found 53 percent of respondents favor G-men torturing alleged terrorists who may possess critical info. Will the Senate report, which makes plain torture’s savagery and ineffectiveness, move the needle?

On Wednesday, the Seattle Human Rights Commission hosted its annual human rights celebration at Town Hall. There was mention of the report, but the moment of silence was reserved for Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.   

In its report takeaway, the Washington State Religious Campaign Against Torture reduced the question of torture to its moral core. “We reject that ‘effectiveness’ should be the ultimate value by ?which we judge the use of torture. We hold that each human being is sacred. All human beings have the right not to be tortured. Global society calls that right a human right. If torture is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

The group’s ecumenical message centers on truth, reconciliation and accountability. The challenge is identifying a vehicle to ferret out the truth — such as a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission — and also ensure accountability. That seems like a non-starter: The U.S. Justice Department quickly announced it won’t pursue prosecutions of torturers or torture’s desk-jockey architects. 

“Our country is at a crossroad,” said the Religious Campaign’s president, Rob Crawford.

The multiplier effect of the Senate report, Ferguson, and Garner throws that idea of “our country at a crossroad” into bold relief.

The United States could seize the moment. Modernize and put teeth into a human rights agenda; transcend soft clichés and concentrate on outcomes.

Lawmakers could demonstrate moral imagination, at home and abroad, by hitching human rights to the “radical center.”

Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron. (Know any steely-eyed moderates navigating Congress’ ideological halls?) In fact, radical centrism involves re-evaluating systems and radically transforming institutions. It’s also married to a pragmatic politics that shuns utopian naïvete as much as amorality in the pursuit of geopolitical power. The approach was encapsulated by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (purportedly President Obama’s favorite philosopher) to embrace idealism without illusions.

The key elements of any radical reforms from the center would be: What works, what’s consistent with American values and universal human rights, and where is the dinero going? Ideally, the money is not going into the pockets of Spokane interrogation consultants.

Encouragingly, human rights are an increasingly popular area of study at Northwest colleges. It’s an almost inverse relationship: The diffusion of human rights scholarship — and a swelling of what constitutes a human right — and the reality of a violent, rights-stomping world. 

New human rights scholarship includes a chorus of naysayers, with arguments from the University of Chicago’s Eric Posner, Harvard’s Samuel Moyn and the University of London’s Stephen Hopgood over the toothlessness of many human rights institutions.  

But there are also institutions that illustrate promise, such as the European Court of Human Rights. Emulate it, and avoid the cynical Kissinger-ian road that drop-kicks the principle of universal rights. 

In a 1975 memo to Kissinger to encourage a General Assembly speech on human rights, then-UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, “Ours is a culture based on the primacy of the individual — the rights of the individual, the welfare of the individual, the claims of the individual against those of the state.”

Moynihan continued. “We will insist on broadening the definition of welfare to include not only the economic conditions of the individual, but his political condition as well.”

Lawmakers can seize the Moynihan vision and update it for a new century. Remake Congressional oversight of the intelligence community so it aligns with the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Be bold and join the International Criminal Court. Hold rights-abusing nations such as Syria accountable by establishing no-fly zones.    

Coherence and accountability demand other actions too: Abolish solitary confinement at home, breathe life into restorative justice, de-militarize domestic policing. Think big. Humans are sacred; institutions are not.   

“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.” Wallace Stegner wrote in “All the Little Live Things.” The post-9/11 torture narrative is knit together by a Northwest thread. We’re all responsible.