In future years, American schoolchildren will open their history books and read about a shameful period in U.S. history when entire classes of people were rounded up because of their country of origin and put into pens like animals to satisfy an irrational desire to cleanse the blood of the country.

They will read how this period in the 2020s, like the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII and the mass repatriation of Mexicans during the Depression, was driven by master manipulators who cleverly played on people’s fears and prejudices to whip them up into a mob-like frenzy.

They will read how hard-working migrant families were mischaracterized as subhuman, unworthy of human dignity and due process, no better as chunks of meat to be fed to the alligators.

They will see images of masked men in uniforms taking people out of their homes and places of work in handcuffs; of families being torn apart; of smiling, laughing politicians standing in front of shiny steel cages lined with the faces of the people/animals they had captured.

The schoolchildren will understand that this was one of the periods in American history when the country fell away from the core principles on which it was founded, when the American city on a hill stopped shining and became, for a time, a fever swamp of ugliness and intolerance.

The children will read about this and ask their teachers the big question, the only question that matters—

How?

How could this have happened?

And there will be no good answer to give them, except to remind them of the dangers of despots, and the even greater dangers of the people who enable those despots through their complicity and unwillingness to listen to the voices of their own conscience.