Just caught up with the season 27 debut of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC this past Thursday evening. It was excellent in all kinds of ways, but none as ethically important and politically relevant as Olivia Benson standing up to the American Gestapo aka ICE as they do their utmost to impede Captain Benson and the NYPD from bringing a rapist to justice.
ICE is bent on taking Benson's witness into custody and having him deported to El Salvador or who knows where. Never mind that the witness is here legally. He looks like a foreigner and that's all Trump's racist goons need to haul him off. When Benson attempts to stop them, she's taken into custody.
Benson's arrest is actually the least of what these Federal criminals have been doing in real life to fair-minded, hardworking people in government who try to do their job and stand up to ICE when necessary, which is all too often. Alex Padilla, US Senator from California, was thrown to the ground, when he tried to ask Homeland Security Kristi Noem a question, by another branch of Trump's Storm Troopers a few months ago. But it was good and important to see a fictional character, wonderfully played by Mariska Hargitay all these years, do the right thing in New York. Hats off to NBC.
Would a real captain of the NYPD do what Benson did? I would certainly hope so, but I don't know that I would bet on it. I don't know that other networks and streaming services would have characters in their dramas do what Benson did, either. I'm a lifelong devoted Yankee fan, and it's always great seeing them play baseball on YES. But I was very disappointed to see ads for ICE more than once in between innings on YES in the past few months.
Baseball is about American as you can get. ICE is about as un-American. Good to see NBC and Olivia Benson on the right side of this battle for our democracy.
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