Time for the right to step up and own Trump’s ethnic cleansing immigration policies | Opinion
Recent interactions with people on the right wing of our political spectrum have me wondering: Why can’t Trumpers just own the fact that what they’re supporting is the ethnic cleansing of America?
It’s time to stop justifying Donald Trump’s immigration policy by trying to hide behind the tattered fig leaf that this is somehow about legal versus illegal immigration.
For me, this arose recently in a discussion over a news story on the PBS Kansas issues program “Kansas Week.” The story at hand is that the Trump administration is holding back educational funding for children of immigrants who are learning the English language — roughly $1.3 million in Wichita USD 259.
I pointed out on the show that our mayor, Chinese-descended and Guatemalan-born Lily Wu, learned to read, write and speak English from those kinds of programs in USD 259. It led to her successful career as a local TV broadcaster and her election to the highest office Wichita has to offer.
Just an aside (because regular readers know that I’m a big fan of irony), four days later, Wu had to call in to a City Council meeting from an all-expense-paid trip to Harvard. She needed to cast the tiebreaking vote to shut down the city’s Advisory Council on Diversity, Inclusion and Civil Rights — or risk the Trump administration yanking $100 million in federal funds.
But back to the TV program: Enter John Whitmer, former Kansas legislator, current Sedgwick County Republican Party chairman and talk show host on right-wing radio station KNSS.
“Why do you have to assume that this (USD 259 cut) is race-based as opposed to someone who just doesn’t want to see taxpayer dollars going to fund anything for illegals?” he asked. “We don’t know if this is targeting legal or illegal residents” (we do, and actually it’s both) “but if it is illegals, I really don’t have an issue with them saying you gotta be here legally to qualify for benefits.”
I could give you hundreds of other examples like that, but what would be the point? You’ve all seen or heard it for yourself.
The inescapable conclusion is that “legal versus illegal” is nothing more than a worn-out talking point to mask a program that, in actuality, aims to purge the country of dark-skinned folks who talk funny — as many as possible, under any pretext available.
Ask yourself this: If the purpose is just to deport “illegals,” why would you go out of your way to create more of them?
Masked agents wrongfully detain citizens
The fact is that Trump removed legal status from at least half a million immigrants by executive order — not because of anything they had done, but because of where they came from: Latin America and Caribbean countries.
Not a day goes by anymore without news reports of U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent being wrongly detained in immigration sweeps, and immigrants who are here legally being whisked away when they show up to meetings at courthouses and federal offices, which they’re required to attend to maintain their legal status.
Immigration opponents are fond of asking, “What part of ‘illegal’ do you not understand?”
The corollary is, what part of legal does the current regime not understand?
On the campaign trail and into the early days of Trump 2.0, we were promised that the crackdown on immigration was to target “the worst of the worst” — immigrant criminals coming here to do us harm.
But mission creep quickly set in, as it tends to do when creeps run the mission.
Government officials don’t come any creepier than Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and top adviser on immigration policy.
Here’s what he had to say about Haitians last week, on why they’re one of the groups being collectively targeted for mass expulsion:
“Who lives in your country tells you what your country is. Haiti doesn’t work as a country,” he told Fox News (who else?). “If you take Haiti, and you move it to America, it’s not going to work here. … It’s not how you feel about an individual immigrant. It’s about the policy at a systemic scale. If you move the Third World to the First World, eventually we become the Third World.”
As you’re reading this, Los Angeles is under military occupation, to facilitate unidentified masked government functionaries, heavily armed and armored, grabbing people out of parking lots, farm fields, schools and churches, and hustling them into unmarked vans — to be shuffled from prison to prison to keep them out of communication with their loved ones or lawyers.
The lucky ones might wind up in what people without conscience or common humanity have laughingly named “Alligator Alcatraz,” a hastily built prison tent camp in the middle of a fetid swamp, plagued by disease-carrying mosquitoes, unsanitary conditions and inadequate nutrition.
The unlucky ones — guilty or innocent — get disappeared into El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison — America’s outsourced Auschwitz.
Memo to Stephen Miller: It doesn’t get any more “Third World” than this.
What’s happening now is the latest version of the white nationalist, nativist, racist impulses that powered the most shameful chapters of American history, from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to “No Irish/Italians/Catholics need apply,” to putting Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, to Jim Crow laws that kept the boot of white Southerners on the throat of African Americans, even into my own lifetime.
In each and every one of those cases, Americans who objected were accused of coddling lawbreakers. So go ahead and accuse those of us who oppose Trump’s war on our own country of being soft on the “illegals.”
We’re in good company.
