The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate Is Love
Super Bowl Sunday brought two showdowns – one between rival football teams and the other between competing visions for America. The trivial one has a clear result. The outcome of the consequential one continues to unfold.
The Super Bowl halftime show (video here) featured superstar Bad Bunny (Benito Martínez Ocasio). Through choreographed vignettes performed across a series of simple stage sets and accompanied by dancers, other musicians, and extras, Bad Bunny offered a taste of Puerto Rican culture. Most importantly, he communicated a point that he made precisely one week before at the Grammy Awards, where he won in three categories, including album of the year. In one of his acceptance speeches, he said (video here):
ICE out. We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans. I want to say to the people, I know it’s tough not to hate in these days. I was thinking sometime we get ... contaminados? I don’t know how to say that in English. The hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love, so please, we need to be different. We fight, we have to do it with love. We don’t hate them. We love our people, we love our family, and that’s the way to do it, with love. Don’t forget that please.”
The bolded phrase, evocative of Dr. Martin Luther King, appeared on the Levi’s Stadium Jumbotron.
Bad Bunny declared in his Grammy speech, “We’re not savage. We’re not animals.” In doing so, he refuted not only dehumanizing rhetoric from the president and his allies but the brutal and inhumane treatment that migrants have suffered. Read some of the accounts of brutality in detention:
View videos of brutal apprehensions:
Consider in particular the case of Liam Conejo Ramos. The five-year-old boy and his parents arrived from Ecuador in 2024 seeking asylum. Their cases were active and pending resolution when on January 20 ICE agents apprehended him and his father upon Liam’s arrival home from his preschool in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights. ICE agents spirited the boy and his father away to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, pending deportation. U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery ordered their release in a January 31 order, an excerpt from which commands attention:
The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.
Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:
“He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People.”
“He has excited domestic Insurrection among us.”
“For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.”
“He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures.”
“We the people” are hearing echos of that history.
And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.
U.S. CONST. amend. IV.
Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.
Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.
Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.
Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.
Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: “Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?” “A republic, if you can keep it.”
With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,
It is so ORDERED.
Judge Biery attached to his decision the poignant image of Liam Conejo Ramos, in his bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, at the time of his apprehension.
In one of the vignettes in his Super Bowl halftime performance, Bad Bunny visits a family watching one of his Grammy Awards acceptance speeches on television and presents to the family’s little boy one of his awards. On top of the coincidence of the bunny hat Liam wore at the time of his arrest and the fact that part of his full name – Conejo – means rabbit in Spanish, this scene with this little boy, who is so similar in appearance, further connects Bad Bunny and his message to Liam Conejo Ramos.
Liam and his father have returned home, but many other children continue to endure torturous conditions at Dilley. Consider this account:
There was the 18-month-old baby, Amalia, who was suffering from respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital, where she spent much of the next ten days on oxygen. Upon release, federal officers took her right back into detention at Dilley, words that boggle the mind to write, and there she was denied daily medication prescribed after her hospital visit, according to a new lawsuit filed last week. Amalia and her family were finally released last Friday in response to an emergency habeas petition, but for many families in similar situations, there is no clarity about when they or their children might leave, or under what conditions.
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THEN THERE IS THE CASE of Mariela Sobrero Chillitupa, 31, who was in the hospital for a few days in December for tests to determine if she had breast cancer. The tests weren’t conclusive, so her doctors called for a biopsy in the new year to know for sure. Mariela wanted to delay biopsy until after a court date she had scheduled for January 14. She didn’t think it would be anything major. She spent the night in a hotel with her three children, aged 2, 8, and 11, and had breakfast with her sister-in-law the next day. They said their goodbyes and Mariela told her sister-in-law to wait nearby, it would likely only be two hours. Later, however, she received a call: “We’ve been detained, don’t wait for us.”
Her sister-in-law, Mari, who asked to be identified by only her first name, said that Mariela has complained to her about her deteriorating health and treatment inside Dilley.
“Mari, they don’t give me my medication, only when they want,” Mari says Mariela told her, adding that her breast “gets hard like a rock,” and she is only given her medication when the nurse arrives. If the nurse doesn’t come, she doesn’t get her medication. Ayala was also told by Mariela that her breast is turning beet red. She told Mari that a week ago she asked a guard to give her fussy 2-year-old to his father, who is also in detention, because her breast was causing her so much pain; she was told “No, you have to keep him, he can’t be with his father.”
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Sadly, these stories aren’t outliers—they are more common than we’d like to admit. ProPublica reported this week that 3,500 detainees have been at Dilley since it reopened, and more than half of them have been minors. And while a legal settlement in effect since 1997 holds that children can be held in immigration detention for a maximum of twenty days, ProPublica determined that more than 300 kids have been at Dilley for longer than a month.
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A FORMER DILLEY EMPLOYEE who served in the U.S. armed forces spoke to me—on condition of anonymity—about what they witnessed inside the facility. They said they took the job because it paid the most in the area, and they had been led to believe there were only women in the facility. They soon realized the unsettling truth: Not just women but entire families were detained inside, including children and even newborn babies.
[...]
They said when people go for medical attention—because they’re vomiting, for instance—more often than not they’re just given Tylenol or Advil.
“All the kids are sick. I’ve never gotten sick before, but when I worked there I was always sick,” they said.
It’s hard for the children to sleep because the lights are always on in the rooms.
“They’re treated like they’re criminals, but most of them have done it the right way—they were picked up at their court appointments,” the source added. “People complain that they’re doing it the ‘wrong way,’ but when they do it the right way, you detain and deport them, so it’s a lose-lose situation.”
And forget about the twenty-day detention limit for minors and little ones. The former employee said they know a mother who has been there 130 days. That woman’s 11-year-old daughter has been with her the whole time, and her depression has gotten bad enough that she won’t eat.
“They’re all sad,” the source said. “They’re locked in there sad and depressed.”
I asked the former employee to say a few words about how they’ve been doing since they left the job. They said seeing how things are on the inside has forever changed them.
“This isn’t what I fought for [while in the military]. . . . I have PTSD as it is. Now adding this, I can barely sleep, thinking about those families,” they said.
[...]
“Kids shouldn’t be going through this,” the former employee said. “If I knew this was happening, if I knew it was really like this, I wouldn’t have served.”
Responding to questions during his February 12 confirmation hearing for the position of Assistant Secretary of State for the United Nations and International Organizations, nominee Jeremy Carl neatly encapsulated the significant contest to which the opening paragraph of this essay referred. Among the exchanges upon which the Daily Montanan reported (one can view part of the exchange here) was one with Sen. Chris Murphy (emphasis added):
Two of the other prominent topics during Carl’s contentious hearing included theories that white people may be the most oppressed group in America, and a belief in a racially-based and unproven “great replacement theory” that holds that America is slowly and deliberately replacing white people of European descent with other ethnicities in America.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, used one of Carl’s quotes as the starting point for his questioning: “Anti-white discrimination is the most pervasive and political salient form of racism today.”
“Do you believe that anti-white discrimination is more salient than discrimination faced by Blacks, Latinos, Muslims or other American groups?” Murphy asked.
Carl responded that since Trump took office a year ago, that has been changing quickly.
[...]
Carl also has written about his concern that “white culture” is disappearing and being erased from America. Murphy asked for definitions of white culture as well as examples of the government erasing it.
“Anytime you have mass immigration, you’re going to have a change in cultures especially if they’re coming from culturally dissimilar backgrounds,” Carl said.
“What history is being erased?” Murphy asked.
“Things like going to a certain type of Christian church,” Carl said, giving examples of ethnic differences within Christianity, saying that white Christians worship differently than Chinese-American Christians or Black Christian churches.
As Murphy pressed Carl for more examples of white culture being erased, Carl suggested the recent “Super Bowl” halftime show, featuring American artist Bad Bunny performing in Spanish, was evidence.
This worldview is the beating ethnonationalist heart of the current administration. It is not whistled but shouted in the social media and recruitment efforts of the Department of Homeland Security. It is evident in the non-white erasure underway in official government websites and in the collections and signage at National Parks and Smithsonian Institution museums. It is viral broadly in official government social media posts (see also a discussion of this topic here).
At the conclusion of his exchange with Jeremy Carl, Sen. Murphy observed, “[U]nderlying your beliefs is a sentiment that white culture is simply better.” “Better,” of course, is a matter of personal taste and preference. No one is obligated to watch the Super Bowl halftime performance of one of the most successful and popular recording artists in the United States and the world. All were and are perfectly welcome to watch an alternative All-American Halftime Show avowedly “celebrating faith, family, and freedom.”
This we know, however: white nationalist movements in 20th century Europe and throughout American history have brought pain, death, and devastation to innocent people in the hundreds of millions. Pain, death, and devastation are rampant now at the hands of the government of the United States. People of decency, sense, and goodwill are confronting this challenge – this hate – with determination, resoluteness, and love. The outcome of this confrontation is very much in doubt.
Thank you for recounting reports of DHS' illegal and despicable detaining of children & sick people in America's concentration camps. And for retelling the confirmation hearing for Assistant Secretary of State for the United Nations and International Organizations, Jeremy Carl who was named for this position for his theory that white people are the most oppressed group in America, and his belief in the “great replacement theory.” These are important actions by the Trump administration that Americans need to be aware of,