SATURDAY: Mayor Baraka of Newark in chains!

SATURDAY, MAY 10, 2025

Federal agents in masks: We don't know what Frost was talking about in a certain difficult poem.

That said, his poem may establish a useful template of language, one we might choose to be directed by in our current "fictitious times:"

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered...

According to this guide, a certain pretense had been given up in the neighborhood of the house that was no more a house.

Regarding the town that is no more a town, is it a bit like that with us? Is it possible that we could gain from this guide's poetical language? 

In the town we all inhabit today, there are deportations which aren't deportations, pursued on the basis of offenses which don't seem like offenses, on the basis of a logic which may really be a dodge.

What the Sugar Hill are we talking about? We start with Mayor Baraka, yesterday afternoon, led away in chains:

Newark’s Mayor Arrested at Protest Outside ICE Detention Center

Federal officials on Friday arrested Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of Newark, after a confrontation that also involved three members of Congress at a new immigration detention facility that is expected to play a central role in President Trump’s mass deportation effort.

Mr. Baraka, a Democrat who is running for governor of New Jersey, was taken to a separate federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark and charged with trespassing. He was released roughly five hours later and was greeted by a crowd that had grown throughout the afternoon to more than 200 supporters and included candidates for New York City mayor and prominent labor leaders.

Alina Habba, a lawyer for Mr. Trump who is now New Jersey’s interim U.S. attorney, said that Mr. Baraka had been arrested because he had “ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself,” and had chosen “to disregard the law.”

Habba is a U.S. attorney who is only an interim U.S. attorney. Were those multiple warnings actually made? We have no idea. 

For ourselves, we were struck anew by this account of the mayor's arrest, which took place on public property:

Mr. Baraka, 55, was taken into custody by a team of masked federal agents wearing military fatigues while outside the gates in a driveway swarming with protesters and reporters.

Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, called the episode a “bizarre political stunt” in a social media post. She said Ms. Watson Coleman and Mr. Menendez, along with “multiple protesters,” had “holed up in a guard shack.” 

Had the people in question really “holed up in a guard shack?” Or does this story somehow involve a "holing up" which wasn't quite that, in a guard shack which wasn't a shack? 

Only time will tell! And depending on where you get your "news," you may not hear about it.

At any rate, the mayor was arrested by "a team of masked federal agents wearing military fatigues." Are those people, in that raiment, best regarded as "federal agents," or are they tilting in the direction of being something else?

The description echoes language from a separate report in today's New York Times. That second report involves an arrest which wasn't exactly a normal arrest, conducted by a similar team of masked people, this time in unmarked cars:

Tufts Student Arrested by ICE Is Released From Detention

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student, was released from immigration detention on Friday after a federal judge said her continued detention could potentially chill “the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”

At a hearing at the Federal District Court in Vermont, the judge, William K. Sessions III, said Ms. Ozturk should be freed immediately: “Her continued detention cannot stand.”

Ms. Ozturk, a doctoral student from Turkey, had been held at the immigration detention center in Basile, La., for six weeks. Her lawyers said she was expected to return home to Massachusetts on Saturday.

[...]

On March 25, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and plainclothes surrounded her outside her home in Somerville, Mass., while she was on the phone with her mother. She was put on a plane to the detention center in Louisiana, and her friends, family and lawyers didn’t know where she was for 24 hours, they said.

Her arrest led to public outrage at her treatment and criticism that the government is abusing the immigration system to deport international students, in the guise of combating antisemitism. In seeking her release, her lawyers have accused the government of detaining her in retaliation for speech that is protected by the First Amendment. The main evidence against her appears to be an essay critical of Israel that she helped to write in a Tufts student newspaper last year.

She'd been arrested for an offense which wasn't an offense, or so a person who was still a person might possibly start to imagine:

The hearing was held in Vermont because Ms. Ozturk had spent the night there in the custody of federal agents on the way to Louisiana, on a circuitous route that her lawyers said had prevented them from finding her.

Government lawyers in the appeals court hearing declined to discuss questions about speech raised by another judge. But Judge Sessions did not mince words on Friday, suggesting the government was trying to deport Ms. Ozturk based on the slenderest of evidence that she had posed a threat to American foreign policy interests.

“There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed,” he said in granting her release.

There it sat—the offence which doesn't seem to be an offence. As described by Judge Sessions, the offence which wasn't an offence posed "a threat to American foreign policy interests" which didn't seem to be a threat.

Why had she been arrested, then taken to Louisiana? She had co-written an opinion column in a student newspaper! 

On that basis, she had been seized on the street by masked men in unmarked cars—masked men who are still being described as federal agents. This seizure was vouched for by Marco Rubio, who is being treated by major news orgs as a person who's still a person.

What actually happened in the run-up to yesterday's arrest of Mayor Baraka? Yesterday afternoon, and then this morning, you heard very different accounts of the facts, depending on which "cable news" channel you were watching. 

Someone may have been offering facts which weren't actual facts. Meanwhile, was Tricia McLaughlin, "the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security," employing a logic which isn't a logic?

Newark’s Mayor Arrested at Protest Outside ICE Detention Center

[...]

In an emailed statement, Ms. McLaughlin argued that the facility had proper permits and she provided a list of five immigrants she said were being detained at Delaney Hall and had been accused of serious crimes, including murder and drug trafficking.

So said the federal official. But if the facility contains people accused of murder, why are they in a detention facility, awaiting a deportation from which, as is endlessly noted in other contexts, deportees often quickly return? 

Why aren't they in a state or federal prison, awaiting trial (or following conviction) on a murder charge? Is it because the "deportation" awaiting them is actually a rendition—a removal to a life sentence in a foreign prison? Is it because McLaughlin has transitioned into being a spokesperson for imprisonment without conviction or trial?

Was McLaughlin employing a logic which is no more a logic? Only time will tell—and, if time provides that service, most people won't ever hear.

"We live in fictitious times," the prophetic gentleman said. He was receiving an Oscar for best documentary film. 

It was March 2003. On that narrow point we can all agree, until such time as the Gregorian calendar goes the way of a body of water—gets changed by a royal decree.

Regarding the pursuit of this latest episode's significant facts, we leave you with this observation:

Yesterday morning, a type of fact-check finally appeared in print editions of the New York Times. In Thursday morning's report, we had already mentioned its online publication:

Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia’s Tattoos. Here’s a Closer Look.
Gang experts say the tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckles are unlikely to signify gang membership. The president says otherwise.

That was the dual headline on the report. On April 18, a president who may be drifting toward potentate had posed with a photograph which wasn't a photograph of a hand which wasn't an actual person's hand. 

Three weeks later, to the day, the New York Times finally addressed what the president said. So it goes, in the modern context, with respect to the famous statement Mark Twain never made:

A [misstatement] can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

That's what Twain never said. 

Long ago, did the poet Frost see our own era coming? Probably not, but he seemed to think he possessed some sort of antidote for whatever he did claim to see. 

Concerning the house which was no longer a house, his poem ended like this:

And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home.  The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring and yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Weep for the house that's no more a house! So the Yankee poet said, urging us to make our way past a disabling confusion.

We need to learn how to use our words. Some entities, in this dangerous time, may no longer be what they were, may not quite be what they seem.

"That was a house in earnest," he said. What house are we living in now?