When this is over, U.S. rights abusers must be tried for crimes against humanity

In a just and decent America, the law enforcement career of Charles Cross Jr. would have ended more than a decade ago. A Milwaukee police sergeant, Cross was briefly fired from the force in 2007 after kicking down his girlfriend’s door and convicted of misdemeanor property damage, but top brass gave him a second chance after he underwent treatment for alcoholism and depression.

This did not go well. The lawman was also on a so-called Brady list of city police officers whom prosecutors found to have credibility issues. In 2012, Cross’ Milwaukee career ended after he plowed into a home with his car, intoxicated at double the legal limit, and he also came under investigation for phony overtime claims.

But America’s rapidly expanding archipelago of gulags for detained immigrants provided yet another chance for a disgraced ex-cop with a history of poor judgment and dishonesty. Now 62, Cross, according to a report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has found work in California with CoreCivic, a private contractor in the lucrative business of running detention centers for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

It turns out it was Cross, under the title “INVESTIGATOR,” who’d recently signed papers claiming a gay Venezuelan makeup artist named Andry José Hernandez Romero was likely a member of the gang Tren de Aragua, based upon his tattoos. It’s a claim lawyers and family members of the 31-year-old Hernandez Romero, who was seeking U.S. refuge from Venezuela’s repressive regime, have ridiculed — insisting the tattoo is three kings paying homage to Jesus. But that didn’t prevent ICE from shipping Hernandez Romero, without due process, to a notorious hellhole prison in El Salvador where it’s not clear if or how he can be released.

In one sense, the ongoing tragedy of Hernandez Romero’s deportation and imprisonment, when there is no evidence he has ever even committed a crime, is hardly unique. Not in a no-longer-recognizable America in which insane and infuriating stories about unlawful detention, a lack of due process for hundreds of migrants, and cruel mistreatment of international college students or innocent tourists are becoming as routine as last night’s baseball scores.

But one detail about the case is very different. This time, we know the name of one of the responsible parties for Hernandez Romero’s suffering, thanks to some diligent journalism. Too often, the federal agents, police, or contractors behind the growing inhumanity of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation regime can hide not only behind the anonymity of their jobs, but literal masks like those worn by the ICE officers who snatched Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk off a Massachusetts street.

I want to know who these people are because they are wantonly committing human rights violations in my name and yours. Because when all this nonsense is over — and I swear one day it will be, at the ballot box or in the streets or by any means necessary, even though I might not live to see it — I want more than just people feeling ashamed of their role in this spree of inhumanity.

I want justice.

Because something has gone deeply haywire in a nation that used to claim our cherished ideas around equal justice for all, free speech, and welcoming the world’s refugees made us an exceptional land. The reality, of course, is that for 249 years, our actual commitment to these values was wildly imperfect and uneven. But it also feels that Trump’s second coming unleashed new depths of ugliness we falsely believed could never happen here.

Consider a Guardian report this weekend about an Australian man with a U.S. work visa who had traveled without incident about 20 times between the East Coast — where he has a job, an apartment, and a girlfriend — and his native country. That streak ended last month after a brief overseas journey to spread his late sister’s ashes at a memorial when U.S. border agents pulled him aside at the Houston airport.

There, the man told the Guardian, he was thrown into a room with as many as 100 other travelers from all over the world and told to hand over his phone while facing ever wilder and untrue allegations from the federal agents. The Australian, who was eventually accused of having the wrong type of visa and deported, noticed that posters on the wall hailing diversity and inclusion had been defaced with black ink.

“Trump is back in town,” he claims a U.S. border agent told him. “We’re doing things the way we should have always been doing them.”

Actually, no. It’s true Trump’s deportation regime isn’t, so far, the type of mass mobilization, with called-up troops or extensive door-to-door sweeps, that some feared based on his 2024 campaign promises. That may yet be coming, based on a whopping $45 billion request for immigration detention facilities, and a report that the White House has an ambitious target of one million deportees in 2025.

But nearly three months in, there is — for now — instead the constant hum of daily incidents that have titillated Trump’s cruelty-is-the-point supporters by creating headlines that are keeping would-be tourists at home and causing students to self-deport.

» READ MORE: The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is something I never thought I’d see in America | Will Bunch

We have baskets of deplorable actions when it comes to migrants and foreigners and their shrinking freedoms here. There are the daily reports of Orwellian questioning, detainment, or deportation of travelers who once would have entered the U.S. without hassles. There are the arrests, imprisonment, or visa cancellations for scores of international students, often for merely exercising their free speech rights. And there are the shackled deportation flights to Gitmo or the abusive supermax prison in El Salvador, stripping men of their human rights for reasons as specious as their tattoos, or even in error.

This daily orgy of American cruelty is clearly immoral, but key parts of it are likely illegal, as well, and the rot extends to the highest levels of the Trump regime. When Homeland Security Secretary (and admitted dog murderer) Kristi Noem flew to the CECOT prison in El Salvador and filmed a propaganda video for Trump’s gulag regime in front of half-naked men in their overcrowded cage, she wasn’t just evoking shocking images from Nazi Germany. She was also arguably committing a type of war crime by violating the Geneva Conventions — invoking wartime law to justify the deportations there, and then publicly exploiting the prisoners.

One trait shared by most fascist regimes is that they ultimately implode, often with major collateral damage, but raising the question of consequences for those who perpetrated their crimes against humanity. The sword of justice should someday come for the likes of Noem or immigration czar Tom Homan, who sees no problem in sending an innocent man into a gulag, and who presides over the system that rounded up a mother and her three children in his hometown of Sackets Harbor, N.Y., before his neighbors united in protest.

But what about the everyday Americans who not only willingly take part in this evil banality, but who, in the case of many ICE or border agents, seem enthusiastic about the cruelty? Shouldn’t there also be consequences for those Houston agents who gleefully quote Trump and deface diversity posters while terrorizing travelers? What about the guards who mistreat these shackled human beings on their sweltering, brutal flights to India or Central America and an uncertain future?

After the revolution, or whatever it takes to wake up from America’s autocratic nightmare, will these cogs in a gulag machine fall back on the canard that they were “just following orders”? Or can a nation long drunk on the delusion of its own exceptionalism understand that all of us are making deeply moral life choices right now, to comply with inhumanity or to resist? Shouldn’t the key architects and willing participants pay a price for what they are doing?

Think about it. There’s a reason those ICE agents hastily pulled masks over their faces before they handcuffed a stunned and shrieking Ozturk and threw her into a van. They understand enough about the moral consequences surrounding their actions to know they don’t want decent citizens to know who they are.

I want to know who they are. And just like we once saw at Nuremberg and in courtrooms from Tel Aviv, Israel, to Cleveland, I want the worst offenders to face judgment for what they have done. Because right now, the American Experiment is going off the deep end, and it’s going to be a long swim back not only to save democracy but to reclaim our humanity.