Michigan’s Iraqi Christians Loved Trump. Then They Were Rounded Up.
It’s hard to not just spit in the faces of the dipshits and dimwits who bought into Trump’s epic con job, it really is.
It started, as so many of these stories do, with friends & relatives warning the Trump fan that he is NOT WHAT THEY THINK HE IS:
“My president is going to be good for the Christians and the economy,” Warda Slewo, an ardent Donald Trump fan, told his daughter, Ashourina Slewo, in her small kitchen in the northeastern suburbs of Detroit on Jan. 20, 2017.
“Your president is a racist,” Ashourina shot back. “I can’t look at your face when you’re saying that his plan for the economy outweighs the horrible things he’s saying about humans.”
The argument got so heated that Ashourina’s big sister Ashley physically inserted herself between the two, telling her father to leave the house while everyone cooled down.
(snip)
Warda Slewo shocked his Bernie Sanders-supporting daughter when he began singing Trump’s praises a few months before the election, after previously seeming not to care about the presidential race at all.
“Suddenly one day my dad is telling me, ‘He promises to protect the Christians and he’s a businessman, he can help the economy,’ ” Ashourina recalled. “I was dumbfounded.”
And then it progresses to the stage where the Trump fans find out that, yeah, he actually is following through on the crazy, angry, racist policies that he announced (and they somehow overlooked):
But just a few months later, Ashourina’s worst fears about what Trump’s election would mean for their Iraqi Christian family came true. On a hot Sunday in June, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fanned out in the Detroit suburbs, picking up more than 100 Iraqi immigrants as they made their way home from churches or family lunches. One of them was Ashourina’s father.
When Warda Slewo reached a detention center in Ohio early the next morning, ICE allowed him a one-minute phone call. “Write this down,” he told his daughter. “They’re holding me in Youngstown. Don’t leave me.”
“Hey Dad,” Ashourina said, unable to help herself. “Do you still support Trump?”
She heard the sound of her dad cursing in Aramaic before the line went dead.
Turns out that her dad committed a minor crime decades ago.
Now he’s facing deportation to a country where he will be tortured and killed.
Ironically, it was Trump’s idea for a Muslim ban, a notion some Iraqi Christians quietly supported, that ultimately led to that wave of deportations that swept away many in the community.
“Those that were expressing these ideas [in support of the Muslim ban] were literally digging graves for the Muslim community and we fell into it,” Ashourina said.
(snip)
“I saw all of these videos with people screaming and crying downtown at the federal building,” she recalled. “Crying after their loved ones.” Another video showed a line of Chaldeans waiting to get on a bus to be taken away to an ICE detention center, including a man with an IV still in his arm.
“I stared at all these videos in disbelief like, ‘Oh my God, it hit us,’ ” she said. “Everybody thought we were safe and we weren’t.”
They voted for Trump out of hatred of Muslims, freakish concentration on abortion, and a strain of defiant idiocy unique to fundamental Christians.
Now?
“I think they felt like we’re going to be protected and Trump cares about us,” she said of the Chaldean community. “But I think in the end they got played, basically.”
She added: “I’m definitely not voting for Trump.”
Do we mock them for their stupidity?
Or do we welcome them into the fold, win the next election, and then set about hammering home how they should not trust the charlatans on Fox News who wrap themselves in the flag and brandish the Bible to divide the U.S. into warring “Us vs. Them” camps?
This is going to be the question of 2021.