The people whose lives Trump sees as dispensable

Sgt. Angel Rampersad lost her life in the Iran war. She was an immigrant and a queer woman, among the kind of people treated as second class citizens in America under this regime.

Sgt. Angel Rampersad was killed along with two other service members when an Iranian missile struck a U.S. base in Jordan. It was base far away that clearly wasn’t protected adequately, struck by a country with which the U.S. began a war, a country we’ve been told doesn’t have any military capability—among the lies Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have told—because we’ve supposedly destroyed all of it.

A 28-year-old from Queens, New York, Sgt. Rampersad, was an immigrant who came to the U.S. as a five-year-old child with her mother from Trinidad. She gave her life for this country—a country that is terrorizing immigrants every day. She was also married to as woman, a member of a minority group under siege in authoritarian America.

Sgt. Rampersad apparently had a love of the military from when she was very young, back when she was at Forest Hills High School and taught herself how to play the drums. She would have joined as soon as she was legally able.

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She enlisted when she was 21 rather than at 18, however, waiting a few years at her mother’s insistence until after she attended college at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. She then reenlisted last year and was serving at the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command in Ansbach, Germany, supporting overseas operations when Donald Trump began the reckless, unplanned war on Iran in February.

In the Army, Sgt. Rampersad “met the woman who would become her wife,” The New York Times reports. The couple adopted a black-and-white terrier named Rio, according to the Times, which quoted neighbors who were stunned by Rampersad’s death and were hanging flags and banners in her honor.

I was struck upon reading about Sgt. Rampersad. She was someone who was among those Trump and Pete Hegseth view as completely dispensable. Does any of us think they truly mourned her loss or had any guilt, let alone sorrow?

Not that Trump and Hegseth and all the rest in this wretched regime care all that much about the white straight male soldiers—they clearly have put all of their lives at risk with this senseless war. This regime is, however, rounding up immigrants on the streets of our cities—killing some and imprisoning others in concentration camps, people who’ve committed no crimes—and they are demonizing queer people, stripping our rights. When Trump and Hegseth look at immigrants, people of color, and queer people who were killed in the war, making the ultimate sacrifice, it’s hard to believer they think of them as deaths that actually count.

I guess I’m slightly comforted by the fact that Sgt. Rampersad’s wife was present along with her mother at the dignified transfer yesterday, even as Trump ludicrously claimed all the dead soldiers had wanted to make sure Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon, as if he’d spoken with them. The last thing Trump wanted to do yesterday was to have to honor the body of a woman of color who was an immigrant. And the last thing Hegseth wanted to do was honor a woman, period, let alone have to meet her queer wife and extend his empty condolences.