Alan Dershowitz Knows What It Feels Like To Be Deported

A story about family separation at Martha's Vineyard, by Alan Dershowitz (OK NOT REALLY)

I keep hearing about these migrant parents whose children have been taken from them at the border, and, as one of America's premier civil rights attorneys, I, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan M. Dershowitz, must say I am appalled. I'm sure I will have some very strong opinions on this gross injustice, just as soon as I return from my next interview on Fox News about the cruel things my liberal neighbors have said about me on the Martha's Vineyard social scene.

Were one inclined to get a sense of how these parents and their children have been treated by the government, one might peruse these excerpts of testimony by migrants and those who work with them. They're taken from a lawsuit against the Trump family separation policy filed by Democratic attorneys general from 17 states and DC against the federal government, and they are truly heart-rending. Here's just one example:

“When I took off his clothes he was full of dirt and lice. It seemed like they had not bathed him the 85 days he wa… https: //t.co/SuBr4oo6pu

— Adam Klasfeld (@Adam Klasfeld) 1530646622.0 

Horrifying, isn't it? Painful though that is to read, it is as nothing compared to the horrors I have had to face simply because I have defended the basic freedoms that all people should enjoy under the Constitution -- yes, even in the case of Donald Trump. I regaled Fox's Tucker Carlson Thursday with an anecdote of the intolerance I have had to face -- or at least hear about, since obviously this is a second-hand account:

Can you believe it? I am a much better defender of freedom than these tribalistic liberals who see everything in terms of whether it's good or bad for Trump, and I have had terrible things said about me:

At a party this week on Martha's Vineyard a woman said, "if Dershowitz were here tonight, I'd stab him through the heart. " This is a Martha's Vineyard woman saying she would stab me through the heart.

I thought for a moment that my words had simply stunned Mr. Carlson, but then realized that this is his resting astonished face:

Now, compared to that woman's actual death threat -- although if she were my client I would of course defend her free speech rights, since it's clearly metaphorical -- the treatment of this migrant mother who hasn't seen her 7-year-old daughter since May is practically nothing. In fact, after guards had told her she would never see her daughter again, a Customs and Border Protection officer tried to lighten the mood with a little joke, which was nice of him:

[One] of the officers asked me, "In Guatemala do they celebrate Mother's Day?" When I answered yes he said, "then Happy Mother's Day" because the next Sunday was Mother's Day. I lowered my head so that my daughter would not see the tears forming in my eyes. That particular act of cruelty astonished me then as it does now. I could not understand why they hated me so much, or wanted to hurt me so much.

A bit unpleasant, but you must surely agree that it hardly compares to the efforts of MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte, who has little respect for free speech, and who has tried to incite my neighbors to cut me out of polite society. As I told Tucker:

He's leading the campaign to try to get other people to shun me in every way, and not to engage with me," Dershowitz said. "Now they're losing because the vast majority of people even in Martha's Vineyard…can't stand people who try to stop speech and try to stop debate, so it's backfiring.

If people really think about it, the attempts at ostracizing me are surely going to drive more people to vote Republican, because Americans really hate unfairness and bullying. Surely I have experience the harshest bullying imaginable, something that is easily on a par with that faced by this asylum-seeking mother:  

She was treated as if her daughter were not her daughter, and I am being treated as if I am not a fully valid member of the Martha's Vineyard summer community. Truly, I feel her pain. Or I suppose I might, if I cared about a little thing like social status, which I do not. As I said early on to Tucker, "I don't care about parties. I'm invited to too many." Honestly, I'd happily send one of these migrant moms instead if ICE would let her out with an ankle monitor.

Look for me, Alan Dershowitz, on Fox again soon. I'n not simply America's greatest defender of Civil Rights -- I'm also this great nation's greatest defender of civility.

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[ Mediaite / PBS NewsHour / Adam Klasfeld on Twitter]