Above photo: On the Big Island, ICE has targeted undocumented children and their families. Screenshot/Hawaii News Now/2025.
Who are the real terrorists? That is one of the important questions we all need to be asking ourselves. It is a big challenge to write about this because every day there is a new deportation-related atrocity. Now the deportation problem is active even in peaceful Hawai`i, where I live, and the picture is hideous and cruel. The vicious effects of alarming, illegal, and lethal behavior by government agencies and departments, from the local to the federal level, are plain to see in this state, just as they are plain to see in almost every state. It is an ugly picture that we, the people, cannot allow. It is a reign of terror.
On May 6, federal agents bullied their way into a house on Maui occupied by about a dozen teachers, firearms at the ready, claiming to have a warrant that they never showed the occupants—overwhelmingly consisting of teachers from the Philippines, legally in the US as part of a teacher exchange—but it was only after traumatizing the teachers and their children that they showed the warrant. All the Filipino teachers were here legally, with documentation to prove it, but the officers refused their requests to show their documents, and they would not allow a US citizen teacher to show her passport. They would not even listen. Saying they were looking for a convicted felon, they instead forced everyone out of the house in the chilly morning, half of them not fully dressed, including young children, shaking with fear, and held them there at gunpoint for almost an hour. It was classic intimidation, frightening everyone there. The officers would not show any documentation to identify themselves. They only showed the warrant after they realized that the man they were looking for was not in the house, and they left without even a word of apology for terrorizing all these innocent people. Despicable.
More recently, militarized thugs raided an ordinary family in Honolulu to seize a harmless mother of four who had been living a life of kindness here for almost thirty years. She was immediately sent to a detention center and deported without a hearing. She has no criminal record. This is just one of more than one hundred such incidents in Hawai’i (about which the government is afraid to release details). In California, government helicopters heinously even went so far as to invade an elementary school graduation, trying to flush out immigration victims. It is all truly abominable.
As government sins that have afflicted the continent have now been visited upon us here in Hawai`i, like a deadly biblical plague, we are getting to see up close what happens when a sinister government operates unchecked. The checks should be coming from our own voices and the application of our Constitution, laws, and government branches. We should all be outraged. As Senator Mazie Hirono said of the Maui incident, “That is called terrorizing people, plain and simple.” She is absolutely right. Those were terrorists bullying innocent people who had no power. This type of thing has now, under the current criminal regime that controls the federal government, become all too common. It is illegal, alarming, and potentially lethal behavior, and it must stop. Those committing these crimes are criminals. They are terrorists.
With virtually no evidence, ordinary people around the country are being attacked, detained, and disappeared via imprisonment and then deportation, all without due process. Due process is the bedrock of rights in our country, and anyone in our legal system or government who denies it is committing a crime.
The current federal regime claims to be rooting out “terrorists” and “enemies.” However, their crazed zeal has them gobbling up as many people as possible, sometimes completely benign moms, dads, and children, even legal ones, ignoring due process. A big part of the problem is the new quota requiring these militarized agents to disappear 3,000 people daily. In the entire country, there is nowhere near that number of violators. A federal judge in Washington even ruled recently that the government acted illegally when the immigrants it deported to El Salvador were denied due process. This doesn’t put the judge “on the side of terrorists,” it puts him on the side of the law. If deportations are done, they must be done legally.
Certainly, there are some people in the US violating immigration laws, but they should be dealt with according to the law. The government prefers to go after people indiscriminately, scooping them up en masse, intentionally striking fear into everyone, legal citizens included. Yes, address the illegals, with evidence, but they still must be given their legal rights and treated with humanity.
Where is the humanity in applying today’s vindictive policy? These acts are unconstitutional and illegal. As I said above, these are crimes, and those government agencies committing them should be prosecuted as criminals, politicians included. They are the US’s real terrorists. It is a Nazi-like campaign. This deportation madness has the psychopath Stephen Miller’s fingerprints all over it, as he does the bidding of the Psychopath in Chief. (Or is it the other way around?) The two of them have increased ICE’s budget to $170 million. ICE is operating as a secret police, often not identifying itself, in the tradition of the Gestapo or the Stasi or the KGB in its heyday in the USSR. (Miller is not nicknamed “Baby Goebbels” by accident.) One could argue that this depraved deportation campaign is really just a distraction from the massive thievery the current administration is involved in as they loot the US treasury, and from all the other policies of this government that are deeply unpopular with the majority of the US population, people of all stripes and political persuasions. Bullying poor people of color is a shiny object that capitalizes on the nastiest sides of the American population, and they passionately want everyone to look at the object so that they don’t see all the destruction their government is doing to the lives of everyone but the 1%.
The perpetrators of these sadistic raids also seem to derive tremendous glee from carrying them out; it’s sickening. But if the government is looking for “terrorists” or “enemies,” it’s absurd to think wholesome mothers, fathers, and children who are just minding their own business fit those categories. Meanwhile, criminally convicted violent criminals from January 6 have been pardoned!
Nothing in reality justifies 3,000 deportations a day. But never let the facts or compassion get in the way of your chance to punch down on vulnerable people who don’t look like you (do we ever hear of White immigrants being deported?) and can’t defend themselves. Now, Marines have been illegally sent to Los Angeles, an extremely fascist step, where California state Sen. Scott Wiener said using the military to suppress protests proves this mass deportation campaign “has nothing to do with deporting criminals and everything to do with creating a militarized terror police state.”
These acts by the federal government, now with complicity from many levels of militarized local and state law enforcement, are illegal, and they are acts of terrorism. These groups claim to be rooting out terrorists, but they are just vacuuming up vulnerable groups and individuals, often those with no criminal record, under the weakest pretexts, mostly in ways that are motivated by racism. Says attorney Jameel Jaffer, “I really don’t think any foreign enemy could do as much damage to the United States as the administration is doing to it right now.”
To find the real terrorists, the hunters need to look in the Congress, the White House, and the corporate boardrooms. These three parts of the American system collaborate on striking fear into every vulnerable American. “Terrorism” means strongly frightening a community of people in order to oppress and control them. Besides the obvious methods of sending armed, unidentifiable thugs to scare people to death and jail or deport them without a trial or any chance to defend themselves, these three entities work together to pass bills that deeply frighten huge sections of the population because the bills, such as the incredibly corrupt and cruel “Big Beautiful Bill” budget—more like a Big Brutal Bill–take away their ability to afford basics like food or medical care. Congress, the White House, and boardrooms want to take away every means of financial support for millions of the elderly and the vulnerable and pocket the money for themselves. Everything that makes it possible for anyone who isn’t rich to be healthy, educated, fed, safe, and housed is being destroyed, mostly for the sadistic pleasure for the powerful and the enlargements of their bank accounts. For instance, 74 million people depend on Social Security to survive, which this depraved regime is trying to take away. Are 74 million people a big enough “community” for you? The federal government offers only the flimsiest evidence for their actions, sometimes even making it up or just plain lying. They are ignorant terrorists and liars. This regime has terrorized a million times more honest, law-abiding citizens than any immigrants have. In fact, multiple studies have shown that, contrary to the regime’s claims, immigrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens. But never let the facts get in the way of an opportunity to punch down on powerless people.
We all need to speak out and band together to protect each other and stop the madness. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said 58 years ago, in his famous speech “A Time to Break Silence”: “For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent . . . We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls ‘enemy,’ for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” Any one of us could be next, and we need to take action. We need to stand up.
So if this regime and the aggressive, heavily armed and armored bully agents they are sending out all over the country are serious about finding and deporting terrorists, they should not be looking at groups of innocent teachers, or kind, hardworking mothers and fathers of children who are in the middle of an elementary school graduation. If they are serious about finding terrorists, the search is easy: all they have to do is look in the mirror.
Peter Greenhill is a philosopher and social justice/human rights activist as well as the retired longtime director of the Iolani Peace Institute at Iolani School, Honolulu, Hawai’i.
