Letter to the editor: America's Anne Frank

First published in the Brunswick Beacon, 11.27.25

When I read that masked ICE troopers rappelled from helicopters onto a Chicago apartment house at 1 a.m., I couldn’t believe it was happening in America. A resident said he hid a mother and her 7-year-old daughter after seeing armed troopers zip-tie nearly naked kids and separate them from their parents. “I didn’t want them to take her,” he said.

Anne Frank was a 13-year-old German-born Jew. She was hidden from the Nazis by a compassionate Dutch family in 1942 until an informant turned her in. She was arrested and executed in 1944. In her diary, Anne wrote: “Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes ... Families are torn apart: men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.”

Jolie Feld teaches immigrant children in California. Her column, “Anne Frank’s ironic place in the classroom during ICE raids,” quotes a student who said Anne’s story “reminds me of right now. Some of my cousins got sent to a detention center and got separated from their kids. Now we don’t know where they are or if they’re gonna be OK.” She said, “‘Alligator Alcatraz’” looked like a concentration camp and described how “her 13-year-old brother was forced to get groceries alone at night because their parents were afraid to go out.”

Years ago, I read the Diary of Anne Frank with sadness and horror, but also with pride that America defeated fascism and liberated the concentration camps. Such atrocities couldn’t happen here I thought — Americans are too compassionate. I never imagined I’d see the cruelty and barbarity of secret police in the America I love.

Today, as Trump encourages Americans to betray their neighbors and armed, masked troopers rip frightened children from their beds, I feel the same sadness and horror. Please, tell Congress to stop this. Make America proud again.

Linda McConnell Baker

Leland

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