Podcast: Is Congress as dysfunctional as it seems?

In the mid-1930s in the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin's leadership, the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB) drove around Moscow and other cities in trucks with the word ХЛЕБ on the side. This translates into English as “Bread,” leaving the appearance that these were bakery trucks distributing fresh bread throughout the city. The stories are well told by some of the great dissident Soviet writers of the time, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, his wife Nadezhda, and several others. Osip Mandelstam was first arrested in part for his satirical poem about Joseph Stalin entitled The Stalin Epigram.

Recently, one is drawn to recognize the parallels between the NKVD bread trucks and black SUVs filled with ICE officers, who mask their faces and offer no identification as they snatch children and adults off the street because they have melanin in their skin or speak with an accent. Like the NKVD, ICE officers shoot people without substantive explanation, detain more than 66,000 people, many without criminal records, including occasional citizens, and ship them off to undisclosed detention centers. They have also deported hundreds of thousands of people, often without notice or due process.