I’m getting into the habit of saying this essay is a follow-up to my last essay. In my last article, I wrote about Roberto Clemente and Steve Jobs and what motivated them to be mentors. Pain forced their hands. Success is rarely something given to you.

Listen to David Frost’s video of Clemente. Pain made the Great One get involved.

This is a short section of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford. Jobs is discussing his dance with death. I’ve done the dance twice and got the message. Death is the best invention of our lives.

As the old adage goes: no pain, no gain. It sounds like an oxymoron. Pain is the opposite of gain. Nevertheless, it is the motivator for nearly all important actions.

This is the backstory. I was in my car several weeks ago and was listening to Chicago’s NPR radio station WBEZ. The program was about ICE and Merrillville, IN. It rattled me. I was in the middle of Merrillville shopping at the time. I live in Winfield, which is a small town of 7,000 residents. It takes me 15 minutes to drive from my home to Merrillville if I hit all of the half-dozen lights between the two towns.

I couldn’t believe ICE wanted to buy or rent an industrial warehouse space to use as a detention center. ICE wanted to have a jail for Hispanics before returning them to their countries of origin. The following day, a friend of mine was visiting who happened to be Hispanic. I mentioned ICE’s plans to address unwanted Hispanics.

My friend and I talked about the protests in the middle of the winter in Minneapolis. Scenes like this raced through our minds.

As an aside, I told my friend that my web administrator is also Hispanic. However, she is safe for a while, since she lives in the Philippines.

The Merrillville Town Council passed a resolution that they did not want to have an ICE prison in the town. They sent it to Indiana’s Attorney General, Todd Rokita. If you go to Indiana Attorney General Rokita’s website, look under Latest News. He is active in his desire to get much stronger federal laws regarding illegal robocalls.

Rokita told the Merrillville Town Council that they were interfering with state laws dealing with “potential federal real estate transactions.” Merrillville’s Town Council refused to rescind their opposition. It may be a moot situation since the warehouse that ICE was considering has already been rented to another company.

At one level, it appears that Merrillville doesn’t have any rentable space for ICE. Nonetheless, it is a great teaching moment for the town council and for the rest of America.

Enter George Santayana. He was a great philosopher of the early 20^th century. Additionally, he was also famous for one-liners. In 1905, he wrote this one-liner in The Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Let’s be honest; ICE didn’t come up with a new concept in Minneapolis. America has had similar mindsets in the past. I was born in 1943. By that time, our federal government had detained 127,000 Japanese-American citizens due to the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in western states. There were 80,000 Japanese Americans who were second- or third-generation American citizens.

Interestingly, there weren’t any War Relocation camps for Germans or Italians. I wonder why?

Native Americans faced the worst type of racism with the arrival of white Europeans. From 1492 to 1776, a huge percentage of Native Americans died due to a lack of immunity to epidemics like influenza, measles, and smallpox. Scholars estimate that the Native American population decreased from 8 million to 4 million in that time span.

In the following century, the American Indian Wars and the belief in Manifest Destiny added to the tribal death tolls. To add to the Native American death toll, Native Americans were forced onto reservations, almost always many hundreds of miles from their ancestral homes. This was an American apartheid nearly a century before South African apartheid.

As Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s not just Minneapolis and Merrillville. The following is from Chicago’s PBS website.

Where most ICE detainees were held in 2025

Between Jan. 20 and mid-October 2025, the last period for which data is available from the Deportation Data Project, there were more than 40,000 book-ins at the Alexandria Staging Facility in Alexandria, La.

Source: Government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by NPR

Additionally, look at this interactive map of ICE’s expanding footprint.

Source: Government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by NPR

America is emulating Nazi Germany with our version of concentration camps, or the Soviets and their gulags.

This is a link to Indiana Public Radio, which dealt with ICE coming to Merrillville, Indiana.