By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — The Trump administration has revoked the visas or “removed” individuals who have green cards or some sort of resident status for protesting the war in Gaza. It also threatened television networks like CBS and MSNBC with cancelling their FCC licenses for airing interviews and news stories critical of the president’s policies.
Perhaps I am being paranoid, but I fear being targeted by ICE or the Department of Justice for attending a Hands-Off march, mocking Trump in my columns, and signing petitions critical of how Israel has conducted the Gaza War. Consequently, I have had nightmares of men in masks, not the kind that protected us from Covid, knock down my front door and spirit me off to El Salvador because they could not find my grandparents’ naturalization papers on Ancestry.com.
Fortunately, this hasn’t happened “yet” because my parents and I were born in the United States which constitutionally confers birthright citizenship on me, at least until Trump tries to nullify it. The Department of Justice found another way to harass me by dispatching a DOGE team to monitor the seder my wife and I held the first night of Pesach.
First, the DOGE agents scanned our Haggadah for concepts and words that promote DEI or undermine American foreign policy. All references to America’s ally Egypt and slavery were redacted. The passages about the midwives rescuing Moses and Miriam’s role in the exodus were expunged because they were militantly feminist. A footnote was added by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the recitation of the Ten Plagues indicating that if only Pharoah had fed his subjects unprocessed foods and prescribed Cod Liver Oil they wouldn’t have suffered from boils and their first-born sons would have survived. He also noted that had he lived in Biblical times, he would have suspended research on a cure for cattle disease. The DOGE agents chuckled about frogs, hail, lice, and locusts afflicting Pharoah’s subjects and wondered if he too had disbanded agencies that monitored climate change and its impact on fauna.
To save money, DOGE changed the menu for the seder. It considered the price of eggs too high and replaced them with cheap candy Easter eggs. Similarly, saltines were substituted for matzah. As one agent told me, “They’re both crackers!” We ate ramen instead of matzah ball soup because it’s the least expensive thing in the soup section of grocery stores. To simulate the bitterness of horseradish, we watched a video of Stephen Miller reading the Passover story to emphasize that ICE roundups wouldn’t be necessary if illegal aliens self-deported like the ancient Israelites. As the DOGE team left, an agent suggested we convert to Christianity to make American religious life more efficient.
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Laurie Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University.