Hate is Never OK.
Protecting children from the Trump Administration's harsh immigration policies
I am in a women’s book group who have been meeting on Zoom since the COVID-19 shutdown in 2019. It is always a delightful and interesting Thursday morning, learning about issues from the latest information on AI to the lives of 19th century women intellectuals. Last month, our dear friend, who just turned ninety-seven by the way, had read Eddie Glaude’s recent book, America USA: How Race Shadows America’s Anniversaries. Glaude’s moving prose demonstrates the degree to which our belief in American equality is a half-truth and a half promise that is yet to be realized. That is a hard truth to swallow but swallow it we must.
The Obama presidency was the sign to many of us that Martin Luther King’s statement that the arc of history always bends toward justice was being realized. But we were naïve not to realize that the powerful and well-funded forces of darkness were working quietly behind the scenes to resist the freedom the Obama administration foretold.
Donald Trump was, from the beginning, part of that darkness. It was he who claimed that Barak Obama could not be a real American, even demanding Obama produce his birth certificate. There are those who claim that Trump’s presidency is a backlash to Obama’s presidency. But that explanation is much too simple for what really is happening. We are being told Trump is trying to repair a broken immigration system but given his behavior, this explanation is inadequate.
Donald Trump’s presidency has been a lesson that our liberties can quickly be compromised, not just for blacks, but for immigrants, women, and the poor. Donald Trump has been called a crook, a buffoon, a demented old fool but we need to add white supremacist to the list. His presidency is not just a fever dream of a white supremacist utopia that he alone has concocted, but the result of a well-funded movement that is designed to remake America to a white nation. Trump’s immigration policy is a stark example of this fever dream writ large.
The American people are having to endure intimidating, masked and armed patrols in our streets who have been responsible for the shooting deaths of two American citizens and the deaths of other unnamed immigrants, not only on the streets, but in cruel conditions in facilities that seem nothing less than concentration camps. Promising that his regime would deport only the “worse of the worse,” he lied to the American people. Instead, children, mothers, and anyone else who happened to be undocumented have been thrown into brutal detention facilities.
But like so much of the Trump administration, the cruelty is the point. Trump’s hope is that the crueler the policy, the fewer people from “undesirable countries” will want to come to the US and the ones who are here will voluntarily go home. Human rights, human dignity seem to be beside the point.
The cruelty is especially heartbreaking when it affects children. Children are being held in detention with their parents in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. In an account given by Joachin Castro on MS NOW, the Texas Congressman found when he inspected the Dilley facility that there are unsanitary conditions, inadequate food even for children and infants who are often kept in detention long past the legal time limit. In his visit the Congressman saw the trauma in the faces of these children who were either numb or begging for help.
It’s not just the children detained who are being traumatized, but also the children who are left behind with the sudden loss of the economic and emotional support of a parent who has been detained. Families who are no longer able to buy groceries, pay rent or buy diapers because the family’s breadwinner has been snatched off the streets. In some cases, young children are left alone after their parents simply disappear. The result for them may be foster care in the homes of strangers or care by an older sibling or relative. This kind of trauma will follow these children for the rest of their lives, and we Americans will have to come to terms with the consequences when these traumatized children become adults.
Most of the immigrants Trump have targeted have something in common. They are mostly people of dark skin, many from countries where English is not the first language. It is clear that Trump never intended to target only the worst of the worst or that only those who are here illegally. It is clear that he wants to stop immigration to the United States entirely or although only rarely admitted to, only allow immigrants who are white of European heritage.
Compare the policies of the Biden and the Trump administrations. The Biden administration’s quota was 125,000 refugees to be admitted the United States. They were mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean but also included refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, and Myanmar. (Global Refuge). In the first year of his second term in office, Trump set a quota of 7500 people for asylum and all of them who were admitted were white South Africans or Afrikaners, with the exception of three from Afghanistan (El Pais). This policy to admit Afrikaners was justified by a false claim that black South Africans were committing white genocide. The truth is that South Africa is a violent and dangerous country at this point in its history and blacks are subjected to rates of violence greater than whites. This is not what Trump tries to make it seem.
White nationalism explains the odd obsession with birthright citizenship. Why would he also be making efforts to end birthright citizenship, which by the way is guaranteed by the Constitution? Why else would he be making efforts to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens?
And Trump distracts us with noise. Donald Trump distracts us with racist fear mongering. Who fell for the “they are eating dogs; they are eating cats” lie? Who bothered to confirm the truth about the so-called immigrant caravan heading for the border, just conveniently before an election or the apartment building falsely claimed to have been taken over by MI5 a street gang in Central America, in Colorado? Or why the hostility to all immigrants, even those who are living legally and have even been naturalized? Hostility to immigrants who have lived peacefully in the U.S. for decades, raising families and paying taxes.
What is not spoken about enough is the racist ideology that guides Trump’s policies. We all remember the infamous escalator scene when he announced in his 2016 campaign that immigrants were rapists and murderers, but some are good people. We all know that his closest advisor, Stephen Miller, had a reputation for racist behavior even when he was in high school and that Miller is responsible for much of the brutal policies that come out of the Trump Administration. (See Jean Guerrero’s biography of Stephan Miller, Hate Monger).
But what is less visible is that Trump’s actions are part of a movement that advocates for racism as official US policy and we need to know more about this movement and why it is so dangerous. You may call them the alt right or the neoliberals or a meeting of the two as Slobodian does in his book Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.
The problem with these groups, the alt-right, and many neo-liberals, is that they are proudly racist. People like Charles Murray uses flawed science to promote an ideology that claims that whites have superior intelligence. They believe, as does Trump, that immigrants are inferior, less intelligent, and incapable of pulling their weight in our economy. When it is suggested that we need all types of people in our economy from the highest level to the least skilled, one advocate for an exclusively white country even argued that free trade will help to keep America racially pure by having many lower skilled jobs performed in other countries, and the products imported after they are made. That way our population won’t be “diluted” with people who are unable to keep up.
America is, or at least was before Trump, the strongest, richest country in the world. And we achieved that as a diverse, compassion country that was made stronger by welcoming immigrants from all over the globe to America. Many of our scientific breakthroughs have been achieved by immigrants; Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, and Carl Djerassi, just to name a few. Many of our great teachers and scholars are immigrants. Look online at the names of some of the best physicians in your communities. You can surmise by some of their names that many come from immigrant families. Donald Trump’s parents were immigrants.
Since our founding, the United States has always been in a battle between those who believe in the promise of justice, diversity and equality and those who do not. There is a reason the original framers of the Constitution only gave the vote to white men of property. Take a look at the 1920s when nativistic movements were resisting the inclusion of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, many of whom happened to be Jewish and Roman Catholic and were seen as a threat to the existing power structure of white Protestant elites.
We are still struggling for equality for people of color, many of whom are not immigrants, but whose ancestors were here from the beginning of our country. Crispus Atticus, the first American killed at the Boston Massacre, was a free man of black and native descent. Some of our best intellectuals are African American including WEB DuBois, Frederick Douglas, and Ida B. Wells. Many Hispanics in places like New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California are descendants for those who held land grants from the Spanish government and have been here before the Southwest was America. And the intellectual contributions of some of the early Hispanics are unknown to many Americans. Lorenzo de Zavala, Felix Varela, and Francesco P. Ramirez are just some of the early thinkers in American history.
Judging from Trump’s immigration policies, it is part of an insidious plot to “make America great again” which means for Trump, “Make America White Again.”
Dr. Glaude and my friend Sara are right. We are not living up to the dream of equality and fairness that every schoolchild promises when they say the Pledge of Allegiance the first thing each morning in their classrooms. Those who adhere to an ideology of white superiority that has been debunked by rigorous science and by the achievements of thousands of Americans, (immigrant, black, brown, female and otherwise) are trying to create an America that many abhor. Rather than celebrating the contributions of all Americans, Trumpism is sowing hate.
These are dangerous times because people who endorse hate have grown powerful, but the power of the people is always stronger.
If we chose to use it.