John Buttrick writes from his Vermont Folk Rocker in his Concord home, Minds Crossing. He can be reached at johndbuttrick@gmail.com.

Around 5:15 p.m. on a Tuesday, a man in a black hoodie stopped a student on a city street. She tried to walk away, but he grabbed her. She screamed.

Others appeared to come and help her, but it turned out they came to help her assailant. They removed her backpack and seized her cell phone. The hooded man put her in handcuffs. They put her in a car and took her away. This did not happen in Haiti or in Afghanistan, in Iran or in Russia.

It happened in the United States of America to a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts! She was taken by unidentified U.S. officials, allegedly because she had spoken in support of Palestinians. I would never have expected this to happen in our country professing freedom and justice for all. Nor would I have believed that the U.S. would render hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison camp, as well as detain and abuse lawful migrants at the border — an extraordinary misuse of federal power.

I cannot get out of my head the photos of overcrowded children and adults behind metal cages, with accompanying reports of filthy living conditions, illness, untimely deaths, and reports of children separated from their families. Or perhaps you have seen the videos on BBC and PBS TV news showing portions of more than 200 captured Venezuelan men wearing only underwear, being forced to walk bent over with their heads at the level of their knees, to be incarcerated without transparent charges or access to a lawyer or to a fair trial.

Enough is enough! Where is the outrage? Where is the anger? There is no excuse for such inhumane treatment, even against those people who may have committed crimes. And it’s even more ludicrous that many of these people are being treated this way because of their country of origin or because of something they have said or something they believe.

Yes, in the past our country has established internment camps, encouraged forced marches, sent freed people of color back to their slave owners and restricted immigrants from some countries, particularly non-European countries.

But these were not our proudest times or examples of our country’s aspirations for greatness. In fact, some “Make America Great Again” advocates seek to leave these embarrassments out of the telling of our history while justifying the administration’s current inhumane activity.

However, there are people with a more diversified ideology and concepts of equity and inclusion. They seek to know the truth about the administration’s abhorrent conduct, to learn from it and to advocate justice.

Even now there are more groups being threatened. Many have heard about these groups but don’t consider themselves a part of these groups and conclude that they are therefore safe from discrimination. The terrorized groups include people of color, people in the LGBT+ community, government workers who are perceived as not totally in agreement with the current administration and people from 43 countries facing restrictions on entering the United States.

This list should be enough to suggest that safety from abuse may not be guaranteed for the rest of us.

This is not to say people should be motivated by fear. But they should be motivated by the reality that expanding exclusivity is a continuing administration policy impacting more and more people. It’s almost a cliché, but relevant, to repeat the quotation spoken by Reverend Martin Niemoller at the end of WW II:

“When the Nazis came for the communists,I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist. When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;I wasn’t a trade unionist. When they locked up theSocial Democrats, I kept quiet;I wasn’t a social democrat. When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.”

The abuse by our government is obvious. The enemy is silence. I cannot keep quiet anymore! Can you?