The response to Operation Metro Surge showed there’s still a lot of decency in America

About a year ago I spent an afternoon in a small cemetery on a rural road in north central Wisconsin. I had the cemetery to myself for a few hours as I worked to clear away the out-of-control daylilies that had obscured my grandparents’ headstone. 

The Summit Township Cemetery is full of my mom’s family — the Simon clan that once dominated the farms in this rural stretch of northern Langlade County. 

My great-grandparents, Stefan and Margaret Simon, immigrated from Germany in 1884. They immediately went west, and after three years in Milwaukee, moved north and started farming the land that perhaps felt a bit more like their Bavarian home.

There’s nothing particularly unique about my family’s history; such stories are the story of our nation. 

It’s useful to reflect on these stories from another era as we process what’s happening with immigration policy — and to immigrants — in our current moment. 

Anti-immigration sentiment in America is not new. The anti-immigration laws that all but halted immigration for much of the early-20th century were a reaction to immigration from southern and eastern Europe. German immigrants were targeted during World War I,  and, of course, Japanese immigrants were incarcerated during WWII. 

It is also true that there have always been those who stood up for and supported immigrants. 

About a month before I was at the Summit Township Cemetery, I was in Chicago at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Hull House was part of the settlement house movement. Settlement houses were established — largely with money from wealthy philanthropists — to support the immigrant populations that had flowed into America’s large cities to work in the burgeoning factories. Hull House had been supporting and educating new Americans on the near west side of Chicago since 1889.

Our nation has long been of two minds on immigration.  

Maybe I’m wrong — I didn’t live through those earlier times — but it does feel like what we went through in Minnesota with Operation Metro Surge was different. Masked agents in unmarked cars roaming the streets, harassing and dragging people — immigrants, citizens, protesters, on-lookers, whoever — into custody. 

The impact on our immigrant neighbors is almost impossible to imagine. 

They were targeted — regardless of their immigration status — by a reign of terror, not able to leave their homes, yet unsafe in their homes. 

And, while Operation Metro Surge ended, the trauma has not. The Trump administration continues to do everything in its power to make it hard for immigrants in America to work, get benefits, get medical care and more.

I was thinking about their experience as I read a remarkable novel, “The Oppermanns,” by Lion Fueuchtwanger. 

It tells the story of a bourgeois German Jewish family in Berlin during 1932 and 1933. It is a harrowing tale of how German Jews dealt with the growing tide of antisemitism as the National Socialists — the Nazis — rose to power, and specifically how they weighed the decision whether to stay or to leave the country they called home. 

And now immigrants in our country weigh the same decision. 

Immigrants who built a life in this country, now find this country turning its back on them.  

Fiction has a way of illuminating the human impacts of historical events. What I drew from “The Oppermanns” was less about about government or fascism and more about the people. 

What matters is the impact on people, on those who are targeted — and on how the rest of us respond. 

It matters that our community stood up during Operation Metro surge and stopped the lawless actions of our federal government. It matters for the immigrants in our community, and it matters for our country. 

And I think it revealed something good about our country. 

The protagonist of “The Oppermanns,” Gustav Oppermann, pondered weighty questions about Germany’s loss of Enlightenment values. 

But he also lamented the loss of decency. He considered himself a decent person and could not fathom how his country had so thoroughly rejected this basic human value.

Decency. That’s exactly how I’d describe the actions of those who stood up for our immigrant neighbors. 

They warned their neighbors when agents were nearby. They sat in the parking lot of Whipple Federal Building on long winter nights, waiting to help the people released into the cold with no money or phone. They made sure kids got their schoolwork and families had the food they needed. 

I was volunteering at VEAP, a Bloomington food pantry, during the peak of Operation Metro Surge. We got a lot of donations during that time — people stopping with a few bags of groceries because they wanted to help their immigrant neighbors. 

But there was one donation that sticks in my mind. 

The size of the donation was extraordinary: two of those gigantic 4-door pick-up trucks with every nook and cranny jammed with bags and boxes. 

As we helped them unload, I noticed many of the bags bore the name of a Wisconsin grocery store chain and asked where they were from and how they had gathered all this food. 

The woman in charge said she owned a business in Eau Claire, and they were talking one day about what they could do. They decided to start a food drive, and food poured in from the community. They found VEAP on the internet and just drove there. 

The donation was over 3,000 pounds of food, household goods, diapers and more. 

They just wanted to help the people in Minneapolis. They didn’t know these people; they don’t even live here. 

Minnesota broke Operation Metro Surge because people — regular Americans across the country — saw it was wrong. 

It was not the way we should treat each other. It was, in Gustav Oppermann’s word, not decent. 

We’re fed so much garbage by our algorithms that we’ve come to believe there is nothing we agree on, nothing that can hold us together as a nation. 

But when ICE was forced to stand down in Minnesota, we learned that there are still a lot of decent people in this country.   

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence, maybe that’s a positive we can hold onto.