(RNS) — The first day of school often brings a mix of excitement and anxiety. Kids reconnect with friends and wonder what their classes will be like. Parents feel familiar pangs of pride and loss as they watch their children growing up. And teachers prepare to help new groups of students cooperate and learn together for another year. As the mom of two teenagers, now a freshman and a senior in high school, I’ve looked forward to the first day back to school every year with gratitude and joy.
But this year was tougher. This year, the first day of school in our home of Washington, D.C., included military troops in our streets and families so filled with fear they decided to keep their kids home. It included parent-led patrols on school routes and educator training on responding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. It included difficult conversations with children, trying to explain the unexplainable. A few days before school started, a family whose kids have attended school with my sons since kindergarten was torn apart when the father was surrounded by agents and detained on his way to work. “So, where is he?” my son asked. I have no idea.
On the first day of school, media reported that the National Guard troops occupying our community will now be carrying weapons. Tourists began spotting guns on the hips of fatigue-dressed soldiers outside of Metro stops the night before we sent our children off to school with their lunches packed and pencils sharpened, as if we could create some normalcy for them in what is anything but a normal situation.
As a Quaker, a pacifist and the mother of two Mexican American young men, I am horrified by the deployment of military troops to my city and our nation’s capital. Cloaked in the guise of public safety and a manufactured national emergency, the White House is using the military to enforce a racist, inhumane and authoritarian agenda. This brazen attack on D.C. autonomy and our country’s democracy is consistent with other ineffective and violent policy responses of this administration. This is but President Donald Trump’s latest move testing the limits of how much power he can acquire by force. What happens in D.C. will have repercussions for the whole country and what comes next.
I am also horrified for our military troops, who are being deployed to undertake what should only be civilian rule-of-law activities and for which they are not trained. They are being taken away from their families and homes unnecessarily and turned into forces to be used against fellow Americans. I imagine many of them may be wrestling with their own conscience through these deployments.
Two executive orders Trump signed in the first few days of his second term allowed him to take similarly dubious actions at and beyond our borders. Thanks to the one he signed on his first day in office, Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States, the flow of migrants at the border is now classified as a “national emergency,” and the Department of Defense is authorized to deploy troops to the border. A second order, Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States, assigned service members with the aim of “repelling the invasion and sealing the United States’ southern border from unlawful entry.”
There are now nearly 10,000 active-duty troops stationed along the southern border to support and execute detention, removal and enforcement operations. On Aug. 8, Trump was reported to have secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against Latin American drug cartels that his administration has classified as foreign terrorist organizations.
This move is the latest in the administration’s effort to reframe a public health issue as a national security emergency requiring a military response. Military strikes or raids in Latin America would put civilians at risk of violence, including the over 1 million Americans currently living and working in Mexico. It would destabilize U.S. relations with our southern neighbors while harming efforts to protect communities from drug trafficking and other crimes — and do nothing to help those suffering with drug addiction at home.
In March, in an unprecedented abuse of executive power, Trump unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act to exile approximately 250 Venezuelans to El Salvador without due process. The AEA is a wartime authority and has never previously been used outside of war. The last instance was during World War II, when the U.S. government justified the internment of Japanese, Italian and German nationals. Writing this sentence sends a chill down my spine.
Trump has also proposed detaining up to 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo Bay. Over 500 migrants have already been held at the site, costing taxpayers over $40 million, in addition to transportation costs of $21 million.
At home and abroad, this reliance on militarized rule looks more like an authoritarian police state and it is making our communities less safe. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have drastically cut funding for programs that actually do make our communities safer — food, health care, housing, community-based violence interruption and prevention programs — and poured billions into more militarized deployment and deportation campaigns instead.
I was proud that the organization I lead, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, joined a diverse coalition of 37 good-governance, veterans, immigration, human rights and faith-based organizations in sending a letter urging key congressional leaders to take action to bar the use of military force against these organizations. We’ve got more work to do, but there is hope.
Before the first day of school, I tuned into calls by local organizers sharing information for parents on how to resist the militarized takeover in D.C. and keep our kids and families safe. They included lessons and success stories from organizers in Los Angeles, communities that have been living with militarized takeover by the Trump administration for months now. D.C. will soon need to share these lessons with other cities, as Trump is gleefully declaring his next targets, and the Pentagon has drawn up plans for sending troops to other cities. Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland are all on notice, and the message is clear: The more you object, the faster troops will be deployed to your streets too.
Thankfully, many people are objecting, including some in Congress. While Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., has already introduced a resolution to extend the emergency order beyond the permitted 30-day period for the D.C. takeover, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., has partnered with Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate in the House, and others to restore D.C. control in forthcoming bicameral joint resolutions. More members of Congress should quickly throw their weight behind efforts to restore D.C. civilian control and actively oppose any extension to the president’s authority or timeline. Congress should also make a renewed push to advance H.R. 51, establishing D.C. statehood, and other important democratic reforms such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
My faith teaches me that war is not the answer, at home or abroad, and that peaceful communities are built through the advancement of justice and human dignity for all. My faith also teaches me to love my neighbors — no exceptions. No matter what Trump may declare, these are lessons I will continue teaching my children throughout this school year.
(Bridget Moix is the general secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation and leads two other Quaker organizations, Friends Place on Capitol Hill and the FCNL Education Fund. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
