Trump’s escalating attacks on migrants: cruelty is the point
Every day, new horrors emerge from the deportation machine in the United States.
A man was ripped from his kids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while filling up his petrol tank in California. The children were left alone in his truck until a bystander moved it away from the pump and helped them call their older sister to pick them up.
In Massachusetts, a 12-year-old was abandoned on the street after his father was abducted in front of him. ICE agents then harassed and intimidated a neighbourhood volunteer who walked the boy home.
An Oklahoma family was marched out of their house into the pouring rain wearing only their underwear, while ICE agents ransacked their home, seizing their phones, laptops and cash savings as “evidence”.
Even a four-year-old cancer patient with US citizenship was deported to Honduras—without her medication. The child’s mother had been abducted during a routine immigration hearing and given the choice of abandoning her children or taking them with her.
Government agents have been so brazen as to arrest the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, for attempting to inspect an immigration facility in his city. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS, responsible for ICE and Customs and Border Protection) then threatened to arrest more elected officials. This came after the Trump administration’s so-called border tsar, Tom Homan, threatened to arrest the governor of Wisconsin for advising state employees to obtain legal counsel before collaborating with ICE.
After migrants are arrested, they are usually sent to squalid immigration prisons. These are filled beyond capacity, and at least nine people have already died in these for-profit hellholes since January.
The administration has been fighting to abolish habeas corpus, a person’s legal right to challenge their detention or incarceration. The White House’s justification is that undocumented immigration constitutes an invasion. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has gone further, turning an arrestee’s right into a presidential privilege. “Habeas corpus”, she said, “is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country”.
Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans lost their immigration status overnight, and hundreds have been sent to a supermax prison in El Salvador, even when many followed the law entering the US.
As with the rest of Trump’s political program, plenty of overt racism is used in this terror campaign. It ties in with his “war on woke”, which aims to wipe away the civil rights gains of the second half of the twentieth century. His administration has blocked virtually all pathways for asylum seekers, except for white South Africans from the landowning classes.
But the chaos stretches beyond Trump’s crude racism. For example, a Danish man has been imprisoned in an immigration jail for more than a month for alleged paperwork discrepancies. He was ambushed at a regular immigration meeting.
It is a shock and awe attack, aiming to instil fear in vulnerable communities and increase the scapegoating that has been central to Donald Trump’s political career. Brutality is the purpose, as this regime aims to build a meaner society and maintain legitimacy through relentless anti-migrant campaigns.
While the viciousness and shamelessness of the operations are significant, they have not yet translated into an increase in the total number of people being deported. The blitzkrieg thus far is about the atmospherics: the rate of deportations remains lower than during the administration of Democrat Joe Biden, and significantly lower than during Barack Obama’s first term, when that president earned the moniker “deporter in chief” from immigrant rights activists.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that things won’t get worse. In the horrific budget Trump is fighting to get through Congress, massive cuts to welfare are accompanied by a 65 percent increase in funding to Homeland Security. The administration has already sent thousands of troops to the border and more than quadrupled the number of agreements allowing local police to enforce immigration law.
Yet there have been glimmers of hope. On top of thousands protesting earlier in the year, local resistance has been bubbling up in the face of the anti-immigrant campaign. People have been protesting immigration hearings in Phoenix, Arizona. In Worcester, Massachusetts, locals tried to block the detention of an immigrant mother by crowding out agents, and the subsequent brutality and arrest have sparked further protests.
The administration’s shock and awe campaign has disoriented many. But there is a recent history of mass resistance to draw on. If the White House keeps pushing, more resistance will be provoked.
