THE MONSTER OF THE WHITE HOUSE - II

The xenophobic and racist combat of Donald Trump and his staff happens for the simple reason that they are nevertheless: xenophobic and racist. Do not forget your connections to the Ku Klux Klan. Trump and his closest followers perfectly embody what is popularly said throughout the country: "Monsters have occupied the White House."

In this huge wave of racism and xenophobia, the Trump clan forget the success stories of those who imigrated to the United States. And there are quite a few. Donald Trump is the example that had in the family the success story of his imigrant ancestors in the USA, including his mother. Americans of origin, pure Indians only exist, the rest of the citizens have their roots far from the territory that is the US, they have in the DNA the complement of the immigration. Statute now the president wants to deny the next.

Follow then a simple but successful story from The New York Times, which we dedicated to Donald Trump and other monsters of his staff.

Mark Lane, in Washington DC for TA

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A Washington Correspondent’s Own Refugee Experience

By HELENE COOPER – THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — When I was 13 years old, my family fled our home for the United States.

We were refugees, even though we came here on visitor visas that we simply outstayed. The country of my birth, Liberia, had just seen a military coup, where enlisted soldiers took over the government, disemboweled the president and launched an orgy of retribution against the old guard. My father was shot. My cousin was executed on the beach by firing squad. My mom was gang-raped by soldiers in the basement of our house after she volunteered to submit to them on the condition that they leave my sisters and me, ages 8 to 16, alone.

In the hours after it happened, my sisters and I huddled on the floor in my mom’s bedroom while she sat, silently, on the love seat, like a sentry keeping watch over us. In her lap she held a pistol. Twice that night, the soldiers came back, but each time they left again without entering the house.

In the ensuing weeks, my mom worked steadily to get us out of Liberia. First, she went to the American Embassy, to begin the painstaking process of trying to get us a visa to the United States. She knew refugee status or an immigrant visa would take months or years, so she went straight for the easiest one, the tourist visa, thinking that was the quickest way out of the country for us. It still took almost a month to get.

After the rape, my mom had moved us to our cousins’ house, where she thought we would be safer than in our isolated home way out in the bush. My dad was still in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds, but at my cousins’ house there seemed to be safety in numbers. Still, every night, my mom would come into the bedroom where we were all sleeping to check on us — three, four, sometimes five times a night.

Finally, we got the visas. But we still had to get exit permits from the new Liberian military government allowing us to leave the country. My mom drained her bank account and bribed everyone she could find. She had a singular mission, it seemed: She was going to get her daughters to safety any way she could. (My father would join us once he was released from the hospital.)

It was around midnight on May 16, 1980, when we boarded Pan Am Flight 100 at Robertsfield Airport outside Monrovia. The destination was New York. The plane was a DC-10. The cabin engulfed us in its foreignness; it was like we were already in America, with carpets and air-conditioning and air fresheners.

I remember being terrified. I sat across the aisle from my mom, who sat next to my sister. We all kept looking at the open door of the plane, for someone to come and pull us off.

Over 30 years later, on Friday, I was at the Pentagon, which I cover for The New York Times, when President Trump came to sign his executive order closing the door on refugees coming into this country. I was on deadline and hurriedly typed out my “feed” for the story, which I was working on with my colleague, The Times’s White House correspondent Michael Shear.

I am no longer a refugee, so theoretically I am not affected by the ban. After eight years of living illegally in the United States, I received a green card as part of Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program. Ten years after that, I became an American citizen.

This country took me and my family in when we were at one of the lowest points of our lives and returned to me a feeling I had lost: that of being safe. I was so proud when I eventually took the oath of citizenship and posed for photos, waving an American flag, in front of the courthouse where I was sworn in.

Liberia, which went through a 15-year civil war after we left, has been slowly picking itself up. It elected a female president — the first African country to do so. The absence of war in the past 14 years has allowed businesses to reopen, roads to be fixed and children to go to school. The country is about to hold another election — a hoped-for peaceful transfer of power. These days, when I go to Liberia, I’m not afraid anymore.

On Saturday, when I read reports of the refugees and Muslims from seven countries who were being denied entry into the United States, one passage in particular jumped out at me, in our lead story about the executive order: “In Istanbul, during a stopover on Saturday, passengers reported that security officers had entered a plane after everyone had boarded and ordered a young Iranian woman and her family to leave the aircraft.”

That single sentence took me back — to another plane on another tarmac, and another family, more than 37 years ago. To my mom and my sister and myself, as we sat fearfully looking at the door of the plane, praying that no one would come on and take us off.

I hadn’t seen my mom cry in the whole month after the coup. Not even the night she was raped. But when the plane’s engines revved and it accelerated down the runway the night we left for the United States, her chest heaved with big racking sobs.

Helene Cooper is The Times’s Pentagon correspondent. Her new book, “Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,” will be published by Simon and Schuster on March 7.

Photo 1 - The writer, Helene Cooper, left, with her mother and her sister in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1972.
Photo 2 - Ms. Cooper, right, with her sister and her mother in Washington, D.C., in 2009.