With our trip to Maine cancelled because our host took ill, we needed to decide what to do. We didn’t want to drive all the way to Maine and have no place to stay and no friends to see, we didn’t want to just stay home when we had planned to be away, and we didn’t want to let our one night hotel reservation go to waste. So we are heading north, not quite knowing where we are going, or why. Our original plan was to get home next Sunday, and that would give us too much time to just wander, so we are now planning on a voyage into the unknown that will probably last four nights and five days. I have a few thoughts, but I am keeping them to myself. You (and we) will see.

That makes for a short post on today’s blog.

I will say this. I saw a segment on CNN last night showing ICE picking up a undocumented man as he took his 5 year old son to a soccer game, the man handcuffed and the son crying as he tried to hold the hands of his handcuffed father. They were apparently both whisked off to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. The boy’s mother (and man’s wife) remained at home, and CNN showed her speaking to her 5 year old son by phone, telling him not to worry, that things would all be okay.

I also saw yesterday the first plane of deported Haitians, all who were in the country legally with temporary protection status until very recently, landing not at Port-au-Prince (which was deemed too dangerous for our evacuation planes), but at Cap Haitien in the north of the country. By coincidence, on YouTube, while I was on the stationary bike yesterday, I watched a video made by a vlogger who had traveled to Haiti to really see what it was like, exploring Port-au-Prince with an armed guide, and speaking to a few residents. Clearly, this is not a place that anyone should now be sent. Period. Full Stop.

Digression. I remember our trip to Haiti in 1977, during the reign of Baby Doc Duvalier, where things were also far from good for residents of the country, but where terror of the government was so strong that we were told that you could leave your suitcase on a downtown sidewalk and it would be there untouched when you came to pick it up a week or two later. End of digression.

Back to ICE. I also saw interviews with some deportees (I don’t remember where they were from) who had been sent to a third party country, in their case, the Central African Republic, about which I know little, which is also apparently a place where no one should be sent. Looking on Google, where the question was asked: Can Americans travel to the Central African Republic? The answer given is: “Americans can technically travel to the Central African Republic, but the U.S. Department of State Travel Advisory is Level 4: Do not travel. High risks include violent crime, civil unrest, kidnapping, unexploded landmines, and very limited medical care.”

The men who were interviewed said that not only were they now in the Central African Republic, a country to which they had no connection, but they had no way to leave that country, as they had no passports or identifying papers. Perhaps this will be resolved. Perhaps not.

Let me be clear: the depravity and cruelty of the Trump administration knows no bounds. However low they go, they can and will go lower.

That’s it.

And we’re off.