Trump Can’t Find His ‘Invading Gangs’
Now he has to scour the streets for immigrants he can pretend are criminal invaders
Over 20 million illegal aliens, Trump says. An invasion of gangsters from Venezuela: rapists, murderers everywhere causing panic and chaos, he calls it. But his army of Immigration and Border Patrol agents can’t find them. All they can find is mothers with American-born babies, fathers supporting their families, foreign students on valid study visas and tourists who’ve overstayed a visa by few daya.
Okay, so here’s where Trump’s immigration obsession really shows itself for the sham it is.
The president and his political advisor on immigration, the ghoulish-lookiing Stephen Miller, concerned that they aren’t coming up with nearly the number of deportations that they need to to reach the mass deportation level that Trump has promised his MAGA cult.
According to news accounts, ICE and Border Patrol personnel are being told now to simply pick up any suspected immigrant they run across in their daily travels, or in the vicinity of raids they might conduct. It does’t matter whether the people they grab are leading blameless lives, have valid visas or even Green Cards, Just haul them away 2111to boost the numbers the detainees, and push them through the process, if possible, to deportation.
The goal, according to Miller, who is White deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security advisor, is to hit a rate of 3000 detentions a day, up from the 1000 a day that they have been running at at best.
As we heard all through the campaign from Trump at his rallies, and still hear from him, the immigrant invasion of “millions” of. Illegal people is composed of “murderers, rapists, drug smugglers, human traffickers and other vicious criminals. But as it has turned out, a dragnet approach by ICE and the Border Patrol has not been finding such people, nor has there been a wave of such crimes. They just can’t seem to find, much less display any of these gangsters and “bad hombres.”
So now, the president and his consigliere Miller, are trying desperately to at least come up with large numbers of detainees and deported immigrants, whom they hope the public will believe are invaders.
Ironically, to do that they are dragooning other federal agencies involved in law enforcement like the Federal Protective Service, the FBI, Alcohol Tobacco, DEA and Firearms Bureau, and even the National Guard are being dispatched to grab any immigrants they find off the street, at immigration and regular federal court hearings on immigration cases or on cases involving immigrants, however insignificant the transgression.. There hooded and unidentified people and shuttled off to remote detention canters even if the case went in favor of the immigrant defendant!
It’s an unprecedented assault on mostly peaceful law-abiding people, many of whom are in the country legally, and others who came here and perhaps overstayed their visa because, since Trump’s first term, the Immigration Department and the immigration courts have been overwhelmed with people trying the legal way to get their status corrected with a renewed visa.
As Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy group explains in article in Al Jazeera, “The quotas that they are pushing for [are] creating this situation on the ground where ICE is literally just trying to go after anybody that they can catch.”
In fact, she reports, this means that the people they are most likely to be catching are the ones who are least likely to be “undesirable” or “dangerous” aliens, but rather the ones so anxious to become US citizens, like the so-called Dreamers — people brought into the US illegally as small children and then raised here — who are as American already as native-born citizens, or people who have lived in the US for years and married American citizens and raised US-born children and just want to legalize their status.
The only real invading gangsters are the ones showing up in communities around the country, most recently in Los Angeles, with assault rifles, flash-bang grenades, shotguns and handcuffs at demonstrations called to protest and try to stop or at least hinder brutal arrests, detentions and deportations of immigrants, many of whom are in this country legally or are desperately in need of asylum but cannot get their cases heard. The standoff in Los Angeles between these Homeland Security gangsters and other government thugs and the courageous defenders of the immigrant population that is now under attack is just the start.
What we are seeing happen is that, instead of pursuing and deporting the “worst of the worst” as Trump vowed to his MAGA supporters to do, since his thugs can’t find any “invading hordes of aliens,” is go after the best immigrants. In fact, various studies over the years have shown that immigrants in the US, legal or not, are much less likely than the general population of citizens to commit crimes or to seek public assistance. They work at jobs to support families either in the US, or back in their home countries.
Do immigrants “steal jobs” from citizens? Not so much. Studies show that most work in their own immigrant communities where few jobless white MAGA people are to be found, or they take difficult and low-paid jobs that US citizens don’t want — home care workers, hotel maids and custodians, roofers, fence installers, Uber and Lyft drivers, yard workers, and of course agricultural workers.
The entire Trump scam about immigration is a diversion from talking about what really needs to be done to help the lower and lower-middle class of mostly white workers who wear the MAGA hats and and cheer Trump’s rants about ending the “immigrant invasion” aND “protecting the blood“ of “real” [white0 Americans.
What those people need are are programs to make college and community college, as well as trade schools and regular colleges and universities more affordable, creating public works jobs in distressed areas that have suffered from decades of factory flight to foreign countries, making taxation fairer again, with the rich paying their fair share, a wealth tax on the rich, and ending America’s militarism and Empire, which sucks up over $1 trillion a year in wasteful spending on foreign wars and planning for war.
That, by the way, is what Democrats used to stand for back in the days before neoliberals like Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took over the party.
I’ve had occasion to talk to a number of Trump supporters. Surprisingly, one thing I hear often is that they think Trump “is an obnoxious, self-centered human being.”
As one guy, a self-employed carpenter and handyman told me, “I know Trump is a terrible person, but the Democrats haven’t done anything to help us. I’m voting for him because I think maybe he’ll shake things up.”
That’s true,” I replied, “but he’ll take away your Medicaid and Obamacare insurance premium subsidy, and he’ll give huge tax breaks to the rich and nothing to you.”
Back a month before before the November election and before I’d left for a year in the UK, when I said that or something similar to it Trump voters, they wouldn’t believe me. I’m looking forward to revisiting some of them now.
Some off these people were quick to say they were not racists or even anti-immigrant. They just didn’t want criminals and freeloaders. The problem is that they all were and still are getting their news from Fox TV, which plays non-stop in the bars and diners where they tend to hang out, and no doubt where they keep their TVs tuned to at home.
But reality is hitting hard in communities that are seeing immigrants that they know as neighbors or owners of small businesses they patronize getting hauled away. And as we’re learning, they don’t like what’s being done to those people.
As the horror stories of Gestapo-like raids on neighbors, co-workers, the parents of our friends’ kids, or maybe even a favorite teacher, the truth will out.
Many of the Trump voters are, I believe, decent people who are struggling and who have been sold a bill of goods that they didn’t want, and when on top of that they don’t get what they were promised—economic relief and an end to the grinding down of their daily lives— they will be ready to hear a more progressive agenda.
Will such an agenda be offered to them?