Immigration Assault Is Cog in Trump’s Fascism
Every Action Against Immigrants and International Students and Workers Normalizes Bolder Attacks
It’s not so much fear as it is confusion. The not knowing, the lack of real information. The atmosphere carries more than a whiff of threat, but what makes the threat worse is the lack of clarity.
The questions dominate the discourse, are the same for those here on visa or who lack official authority to be in the country. They are the same for international students and faculty and for immigrant workers and families.
The broad questions first: Who are the targets and why? What are we supposed to do? Am I next?
Then the more granular ones: Should I stay at home? Should I stay quiet? Where are the safe spaces? How do I prepare my kids? How do I prepare?
“There is fear in the workplace,” an immigrant activist told my class recently. “It is in all industries. And a lot of workers are being let go because they lack documentation.
“It is causing chaos,” she added. “They are afraid to go to work, but they also are afraid of being fired.”
“The Trump narrative,” another activist said, “that ‘we’re going after the animals’ is a complete lie. Being undocumented in itself is considered a criminal offense.”
We are 12 weeks into Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, and it is clear he plans to keep his promises on immigration. He is wielding executive orders as a scythe, slashing his way through the rules-based order and upending precedent at will and expanding his own power and the power of his office in dangerous ways. The Republican Party has been complicit, both by direct endorsement of some actions but also by its silence on others. And the Democrats are proving a feckless opposition, continuing to operate as though we are living in normal times.
Nothing is normal, especially when it comes to immigration. There has been an almost daily barrage of indignities: immigration sweeps that now include formerly off-limit sites like churches and schools, deportation flights to El Salvador, attacks on federal courts and the overt disobeyance of judicial orders, revocation of visas (and in at least one instance the revocation of permanent legal status), registration requirements for the undocumented, and stripping legal immigrants of Social Security and undocumented immigrants of their tax ID numbers.
These moves are part of a circular attack. The administration moves directly against all classes of immigrants, literally deporting them, and then uses the orders and deportations as part of its public narrative, its rhetoric of power — one that is racialized and part of a White supremacist agenda, that fetishizes and sexualizes this power (see Jeff Sharlet.)
What we are witnessing is not just an attack on immigrants, but on the frail remains of our democratic system, one we have allowed to atrophy and grow rickety but that has remained in place. We can call what he is doing fascism, authoritarianism, autocracy, or despotism (all fit in various ways), but we cannot ignore it.
Right now, another activist told us, Trump is “targeting brown and black immigrants, people who look a certain way,” whether they are here legally or not, whether they have valid visas and attend schools like Rutgers or Columbia or work in warehouses or as domestics.
The low-hanging fruit. The easy ones.
“If they are coming for undocumented folks,” another activist told us, “they will come for everybody.”
Immigration is the tip of the spear. Trump knows that most Americans support some form of deportation effort. Pew Research found that “Americans largely agree that at least some immigrants living in the United States illegally should be deported,” though who and how remain contested space.
Some will see the ambivalence in these numbers as proof of some kind of rebuke. It isn’t. This board “middle” does not represent resistance. It is part of Trump’s target audience, an easily moveable collection of Americans who are being inundated with narratives of crime, decay, and blame. We saw this shift at different times (the social safety net, integration and civil rights, workers rights and unions), one in which this supposedly moderate and thoughtful middle was swayed not by logic so much as by the repeated and aggressive attacks by the right.
Trump’s repeated attacks on immigrants, his use of language like “infection” and “invasion,” is not just evidence of his racism but also tactical, designed to move the boundaries of acceptable discourse farther and farther right to the point where policies once thought beyond the pale are suddenly mainstreamed.
We started talking about “criminal aliens,” but have watched as his dragnet has expanded to include all undocumented immigrants. It has spread from international students here legally but who are critical of Israel to all international students. There is good reason to think he will go farther — he has talked of deporting citizens.
This is straight out of the fascism playbook: keep moving the goal posts and changing the rules until the rules no longer apply. We are not talking enough about this aspect of Trump’s second term. The barrage of news continues to be treated as a set of independent and individual stories, when they are part of a larger structure of indignities. None of this is normal and we need to stop acting as though it is only about “the other.”