ICE on the Seacoast

 The July 14, 2025 meeting of the Select Board was an exercise in the New Hampshire version of democracy in action. Which is to say members of the public were allowed to speak, to voice their opinions but this is not exactly a redress of grievances. The Board does not engage in "back and forth." Once elected, apparently you may, as with gods, pray to them but do not expect an answer. Live Free or Die.

Actual Patriot

Governor Ayotte had just signed a law requiring local town police departments to cooperate, aide and abet masked ICE agents as they abduct people from Hampton streets for the crime of not looking like they come from here.

We should all feel much safer for this cooperative police action, we were told by Representative to the State House Linda McGrath, who also let everyone in on a little secret apparently only she knows about: There are row houses just across the Piscataqua River in Maine, filled with Chinese Mafia, and they are just ever so eager to launch an attack on New Hampshire Seacoast towns. No cat or dog will be safe in Hampton, unless we allow our police to cooperate with ICE.

Regina Barnes excoriated those objecting to this melding of town police with ICE agents as people who are taking a simple matter of law enforcement and turning it into something it is not: POLITICS!

Imagine that! Making immigration political!

As if neither Ms. Barnes nor Ms. McGrath are not political down to their MAGA undergarments.

As if this whole law is not simply MAGA agency invading the statehouse and then washing downstream to drown the liberties of Hampton citizens.

As noted in previous posts, Chris Muns and others spoke at the meeting but one speaker particularly caught Mad Dog's attention for her power and brevity.

Brevity can sometimes be a power in itself. Before Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, the speaker who preceded him spoke for 2 hours. Lincoln spoke for less than 5 minutes and his predecessor told him afterwards: "I wish I had managed to say in 2 hours anything close to the importance of what you said in a few minutes."

Something of the sort obtains with the remarks of Cybele Grier:

"The ICE raids we see being carried out in American communities across this country are nothing short of state sponsored terror. ICE raids do not make neighborhoods or our communities safer. In fact, they make them more dangerous for all of us.

This is not who we are as Americans. I do not want us living in a police state like Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey. This is not who we are. These are not our values. It is un-American!

Select Board, I urge you, say No to our Police Chief signing any cooperative agreement with ICE. Our police officers should be focused on making our community safer. I want them to stay focused on Hamton's issues and not do the federal government's job with our tax paying dollars."

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Five cheers for Ms. Grier!

The fact is, we have seen things like this before in America. We corralled Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII while their sons died fighting for America in Italy. IWW "Wobblies" were rounded up in Western towns and deported out of state. Emma Goldman was deported for saying unkind things about Woodrow Wilson and J. Edgar Hoover. 

America has always been berserk. We have occasionally managed to do astonishing and unique things: We are the only country in the planet's history to fight a Civil War on behalf of an underclass, trying to liberate from above those who could not do it for themselves. We created Social Security and Medicare and we put up a statue in New York Harbor with a poem by Emma Lazurus which said, "Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." 

But we have also elected Donald Trump twice. And now he is here in Hampton. 

This is what Ms. Grier reminded us.