This was going to be a somber editorial expressing fury and exasperation that we have not taken to the streets to demand that our elected representatives and judiciary hold the Trump administration accountable for its deportation to Honduras of a two-year-old U.S. citizen.
Some quick background: In late April, the toddler, identified in court documents only as “V.M.L.,” accompanied her mother, an undocumented native of Honduras, to a scheduled meeting at the New Orleans office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What was meant to be a dutiful check-in—V.M.L.’s mother was a so-called non-detained alien, freed from ICE custody in 2021—turned into a de facto abduction.
According to a lawyer representing the family, VML, her mother, and her 11-year-old sister were seized by ICE, stashed in an undisclosed hotel, and cut off from family and counsel. They were then flown to Honduras. The government alleges that V.M.L.’s mother consented to her younger child’s unconstitutional deportation because she wanted to keep the family together. All of which came as news to the child’s father, who lives in the U.S.
To top it all off, on the same day that V.M.L. was sent “home” to a country she has never lived in, two more U.S.-born children of Honduran immigrants, siblings aged seven and four, were deported. The younger of the two reportedly has late-stage cancer.
None of this is trivial or funny. It’s yet another attempt by the Trump administration to ding societal guardrails, to see how far it can keep pushing in its pursuit of a white-nationalist dictatorship that pays no heed to due process. But the severity of the V.M.L. situation, and the depressingly minimal play her story is getting in the news—why isn’t this a screaming headline, every single day?—demands an attention-getting unserious response.
So here is mine: deport Lorne Michaels.
Michaels is the 80-year-old creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live. He was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 2004 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. He is also an immigrant. He was born and raised in Toronto. He first set foot in New York City in 1961 as a tourist and became a U.S. citizen in 1987.
Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, Saturday Night Live is as sturdy an American institution as there is. Young people cherish it as a rare appointment-TV ritual. Even the elder malcontents who say it hasn’t been funny since the departure of Belushi and Aykroyd (or Murphy, or Sandler, or Wiig, or McKinnon) hold it dear in memory.
What would raise awareness of just how reckless and dangerous the newly emboldened ICE’s actions have been? If its agents were to burst into Michaels’s office in 30 Rock on a Monday night and, in full view of S.N.L.’s writers, cast, and guest host, yank him from the show’s weekly pitch meeting and force him into a waiting unmarked S.U.V., leaving in their wake spilled popcorn and a quivering Please Don’t Destroy.
The sad reality is that, up to this point, the individuals disappeared by ICE have been sufficiently “other” to allow an “It can’t happen here” complacency among the U.S. populace. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University grad student and pro-Palestinian activist arrested without a warrant in March, was born in Syria. Rasha Alawieh, the distinguished nephrologist and Brown University professor denied re-entry into the U.S. after visiting family in her native Lebanon, is a Shia Muslim who wears a hijab.
Andry José Hernández Romero, the makeup artist and hairdresser bundled off to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison on the false presumption that he was a member of Tren de Aragua, is a queer Venezuelan man. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whisked away from Maryland to CECOT, is a native Salvadoran. As for V.M.L., we don’t even know her actual name. These people don’t look or sound like me. Nothing done to them affects me. I’ll just sit tight and be fine.
But were ICE to deport one of America’s most celebrated immigrants—and a white executive-class necktie-wearer to boot—that would be a wake-up call. They’ve even come for Lorne? Oh, my God!
The TV networks, which have so far capitulated to Trump’s bullying (see ABC’s $15 million “charitable contribution” to the Trump Presidential Library and CBS owner Paramount’s interference with 60 Minutes), would rise up to defend one of their own. The white-shoe law firms that have shamefully placed Trump placation ahead of the rule of law would learn that no one is immune and no moral compromise is worth it.
As for the American people? This would be their breaking point, their recognition that enough is enough—that when you come for the guy who’s given us everything from “Chee-burger, chee-burger, chee-burger” to “More cowbell,” you come for us all. There would finally exist the mass political will to force the courts and the G.O.P.-controlled Senate and House of Representatives to put an end to the extrajudicial horror show we’ve been living through.
For Michaels, it would be a small sacrifice: one undignified Monday night at 30 Rock followed by a summer spent drinking rosé in Ontario’s cottage country while this all gets sorted out. It would be worth it for the vindication and liberation of young V.M.L. and all the others cruelly victimized by this administration.
Up to this point, I have left unanswered one question: On what grounds could ICE even deport Lorne Michaels, especially given that he is a naturalized U.S. citizen? Well, I’ll start by noting that “legal grounds for deportation” is clearly not a concept to which the Trump administration gives much consideration anyway. We’re talking about a group of people who feel unbound by rules and are willing to try anything until they are prevented from doing so. Already, Trump has floated the idea of deporting to El Salvador homegrown U.S. citizens who have been found guilty of crimes.
But it’s also worth noting that for all the concessions S.N.L. has lately made to cultural pluralism—having Shane Gillis host twice in two years, pretending to be cool with Morgan Wallen—the program has historically skewed leftward, and, in its current incarnation, it routinely ridicules Trump while championing things antithetical to MAGA: urbanity, diversity, queerness, satire, Bowen Yang. All while being presided over by an immigrant.
And Trump is nothing if not oafishly suggestible. So I’ve included below a draft of a letter you can send to the president to implant in his brain the idea that action must be taken against the Canadian menace in our midst. Please feel free to adapt it to your voice and height.
Dear Mr. President:
Sir, I am so sick of watching the overrated, low-rated Saturday Night Live on the failing NBC network ridicule you week in and week out. It’s sick and un-American to the point that it makes me cry. Sir, I am a tough guy, tall, over six feet, but I literally have tears in my eyes thinking about this, sir.
Sir, did you know that S.N.L. is run by an immigrant? What if you used your presidential power and the word “hereby” to deport this nasty man back to our enemy Canada? Sir, sir, thank you, sir.
Yours,
An actual (American-born!) U.S. citizen
David Kamp is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of several books, including Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America