Night and Fog in America
Deportation, Disappearance, and the Eminent Death of a Nation.
by Paul Alexander Wolf

Dedicated to “the special” who walks into the fire – with eyes wide open, with an open heart and hands unarmed.

⸻

Teaser Line:
When justice disappears behind the veil of policy, we must choose: silence or conscience. This is not a warning from history.

This is now.

⸻

Introducing Note
This article is perhaps hard to read – because the truth is hard.
It speaks of a slow erosion of justice, of growing cruelty masked as policy, and of how democracies can slide into inhumanity while people look away.
I write this not as a theorist, but as the son of a Dutch resistance fighter who lived through what happens when silence takes hold. And I see it happening!
Please read this not as a warning from history –
but as a description of the present. If you know history,
perhaps you hear the echo of
history.

⸻

The United States Is Disappearing People
This is not a metaphor.
This is not hysteria.
This is real.
And it is happening now.
It’s true.

⸻

Deportation Without Justice
Under the Trump administration, U.S. immigration enforcement crossed a dangerous line.
People – mostly Black, brown, poor, or stateless – are being detained and deported without proper legal process.
• Lawyers are blocked.
• Families are not informed.
• Individuals are moved secretly across state lines.
• Some are flown at night to countries they do not know – without notice, hearings, or a chance to plead their case.

This is not border control.
This is not national security.
This is state-sponsored disappearance.

Human rights organizations have documented repeated violations: people forcibly removed to countries where they face torture, rape, and death – often with no due process or proper asylum review.
This violates both U.S. and international law.
But it continues.
And this is the US, once revered
as a beacon of hope.

⸻

The Courts May No Longer Protect
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that detained noncitizens have no constitutional right to a bond hearing.
That decision narrowed judicial oversight of immigration detention.

Now, in 2025, newer rulings threaten to go further – limiting or removing the power of lower courts to halt deportations, even when unlawful or life-threatening.

If this becomes the norm, the final check on executive cruelty will be gone. In other words it happens unchecked.
Judicial silence is not just failure;
it is permission.

⸻

Echoes of Germany – 1933…
I was raised in the Netherlands, taught the meaning of “Never Again.”

But what is happening in the U.S. looks disturbingly like Germany in 1933 – not the death camps, but what came before them:
• People taken without trial
• Disappearances without explanation
• Fear used to silence communities
• Courts stripped of power
• Compassion treated as a crime

In Nazi Germany, they called it Schutzhaft – “protective custody.”
In today’s U.S., it is called “expedited removal.”

The uniforms are different.
The logic is the same.

What was possible in Germany then cannot be ruled out in America now.
The difference is the context, not conscience.
And the machinery remains familiar.
The victims are different.
That’s all, if this isn’t enough already, isn’t?

⸻

Guantanamo, Libya, and the Far Edge
This isn’t limited to the southern border.

Some migrants have been detained at Guantanamo Bay without charges.
Others have been deported to conflict zones – Libya, El Salvador, South Sudan – where they face violence, rape, and execution. We may recognize those names – but not the horrors hidden behind them.

Many had no connection to those countries.
They were labeled “inadmissible” and sent away – without fair screening or notice.

This is not immigration control.
This is exile by spreadsheet.
And it is being done in the name of the American people.

⸻

Americans Are Looking Away
Why is there no mass outrage?
Like during the Vietnam war and other events.

Because most of the disappeared are not white.
Because they are not seen as “real Americans.”
Because cruelty has been normalized.
Because it is easier to look away than face the truth.

The same silence that surrounds Gaza echoes here.
If a country stops caring about human rights abroad, it soon stops caring at home.

When compassion becomes conditional,
justice dies in plain sight.

⸻

Cruelty as Policy
In 2025, cruelty is not an accident – it is budgeted.
• Tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy
• Slashed aid to Gaza, East Africa, South Sudan
• Collapsed food security and famine relief programs
• Neglected public healthcare systems
• Almost no funding for humanitarian assistance abroad

People will starve because of these choices – by design, not by mistake.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” did more than shift money.
It redefined what lives were worth saving.
It was not economic policy.
It was an architecture of neglect.

⸻

The Morality of Resistance: The Bonhoeffer Threshold
The system will not stop itself.
It must be interrupted – by people of conscience.

In the 1930s, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisted the Nazi regime, refused to remain silent, and paid with his life.
His legacy speaks now – reminding us that moral courage requires risk and resistance.

Today, many churches are silent.
Many professionals stay safe.
But silence is not neutrality.
It is complicity.

⸻

Gospel Without Courage Is Not the Gospel
If “white churches” preach only “salvation” and ignore cruelty, they betray Christ.

Jesus did not bless empire.
He stood with the displaced and condemned.
He overturned tables of injustice.
He broke silence – and paid with his life.

Preaching a safe Gospel while ignoring state brutality is not reverence.
It is abdication.

Final Words?

Yes, Final Words, important words:

This is not a political argument.
It is a moral emergency.

The deportation machinery in the United States is not a glitch.
It is a feature.

And history will not ask whether it was legal.
It will ask:
Who knew? And who spoke?

I write this as an Australian citizen –
and as the son of a Dutch resistance leader.

In June 2025, the Dutch House of Representatives passed legislation that may send people to prison for offering food or medical care to undocumented persons.
The bill now awaits approval in the Senate.
Its very existence is a sign of cultural collapse.

My father led a Dutch resistance group during World War II.
They hid Jews.
They tried to stop the trains.
When that failed, they targeted Gestapo officers.
They were betrayed.
Most were tortured.
Most were killed.

What they tried to stop – I see the echoes again:
Different uniforms, different victims, different words –
yet the same logic.

And so I ask:
What kind of future will we choose?

The true measure of a nation is not in slogans or budgets.
It is in its courage – especially when that courage costs something.

The question is not what is legal.
The question is: what is right?

If we choose to see, to speak, and to act –
then we will reclaim not only our moral soul,
but something deeper still:
A future in which countless voices rise – not in rage,
but in resolve –
until the walls of injustice fall like those at Jericho.

Because the moral character of a nation is shaped by what it chooses not to ignore –
and by the courage it summons
when history knocks.

We cannot remain blind to the disappearance of the nameless,
their torture, starvation, and death.
Not in the United States. Not anywhere.

⸻

Reckoning with the Arc

Irreversible damage has already occurred –
families torn apart, asylum seekers disappeared,
international law flouted, moral infrastructure gutted.
These scars are real. And lasting.

But if the current Administration –
and the culture of cruelty, impunity, and fear it has normalised-
were decisively removed or overthrown
by legal, democratic, or collective moral means,
then the descent could halt.

The arc could bend back.
Not easily. Not fully.
But meaningfully.

In other words:
The death of a nation is not final – until it is.

Every year, every policy, every silence brings it closer.
But just as Germany faced its post-war reckoning,
just as South Africa chose truth and reconciliation over vengeance,
America, too, could step back from the edge.

Not by words alone –
but by action, courage, and collective moral will.

⸻

Resistance Is the Imperative

If a government ceases to be of, by, and for the people,
it violates its foundational purpose and forfeits its legitimacy.

Democratic government derives its authority from the citizenry –
not from elites, not from authoritarian power,
not from cruelty disguised as law.

Its purpose is to serve and protect the wellbeing and rights of all –
not just the privileged few.

When that covenant is broken,
resistance is not only legitimate –
it becomes essential.

It becomes a sacred democratic duty
to preserve the soul of the nation
rather than allow it to rot from within.

Has that time come now?
Yes.

This regime has failed.
And what it represents must be named –
clearly, truthfully, urgently –
before what remains of democracy disappears
behind the curtain of normalized brutality.

⸻

Night and Fog in America
by Paul Alexander Wolf – July 2025

This article is shared under open access for wide readership and moral reflection.
You may cite, excerpt, or republish with attribution and without alteration.

✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️🙏🙏🙏✍️

Postscript: Cries We Do Not Hear

This article, as fierce and lucid as it may be, is only the visible edge – just the clear flame above the deeper furnace.
Beneath the words: the unseen screams, the torn bodies, the terrified eyes of children clinging to disappearing parents, the invisible bruises left by sanctioned cruelty.
It’s the sound we don’t hear -the ones smothered by oceans, locked rooms, or the walls of public apathy – that threatens to break the soul.

We don’t smell the burning shoes.
We don’t hear the man begging in Dari, or Spanish, or Dinka, as he’s dragged onto a plane to a country he’s never known.
We don’t see the mother biting her tongue so her daughter doesn’t watch her cry.
We don’t see the pastor’s prayer as the ICE van closes.
We don’t feel the violence behind closed immigration cells.

But someone does.
God does.
And the earth does.

And one day – whether through history’s reckoning or heaven’s – we all will.

So let us not be among the number who looked away.
Let us be among those who wept, who saw, who spoke,
and who refused to let silence become the final witness.