Revving Up Deportation, and Undermining Liberty

Trump's Justifications are Racist. We Need a Class-Based Analysis to Fight Back.

One woman tells the story of sexual abuse at work, of an employer taking advantage of one of her co-workers, She couldn’t do anything about it, the woman says. They would call immigration.

Another describes the fear that grips many of her friends as they prepare to leave for their jobs in the morning (or evening), a fear triggered by simply not knowing if they will make it home, if federal authorities might show up and detain her and her coworkers.

What would I do with my children? she says.

Another worries about her husband — she is native born, but married to an undocumented immigrant. He could be picked up and detained and I would not know about it.

This is what they put up with to stay in the United States, and yet it is often better than the conditions the fled, which include sexual assault, gangs, and war, political repression, economic and environmental collapse. Many cross multiple borders fleeing violence — fleeing conditions often created by American interference and the rapaciousness of corporate capitalism.

Every unauthorized immigrant in the United States has a story about how and why they came here, about what they have been willing to do to stay, to survive. The above stories are composites based on dozens of people I’ve met and interviewed in recent years, including since Donald Trump was elected in November and returned to the presidency on Jan. 20. These are the men and women on the front lines, the ones the Trump administration attempts to paint as dangers to Americans, and could find themselves targeted for detention and deportation.

Since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump has signed a slew of executive orders meant to rev up his deportation machine, including declaring a “national border emergency” and authorizing Guantanamo Bay as a detention facility, while undermining the asylum process and bypassing due process for many migrants.

Trump’s actions are more aggressive and hostile, and more openly racist than previous immigration crackdowns. But make no mistake, he is building on the work of his predecessors in both parties. The restrictionist agenda has long been ascendant: Bill Clinton signed legislation — often called the harshest immigration law since the early 1900s — expanding who could be deported and made “deportation … a constant and plausible threat to millions of immigrants.” Modest reforms advocated by George W. Bush, which would have offered legal status to millions while further ramping up enforcement, were defeated in Congress, but they centered and ultimately reinforced the rhetoric of immigrant criminality. Record numbers ultimately were deported under both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who made enforcement their main priority even as they nodded toward reforming the larger system.

Immigrants and groups supporting immigrants know this history, understand that their status carries a level of uncertainty others do not face. Still, what Trump is doing is on another level —because it undermines the notion of fairness under the law.

“Immigration, by its nature, has always been a risky proposition,” attorney Eric Mark told my journalism class recently. “If you are here without any lawful status, you've always been in danger. You've always been at risk of being deported.” What’s different, he said, “is that the rule of law and our general concern for humanity seem to be cast aside in favor of just deporting anyone we can deport and even those who we probably shouldn't be deporting.”

Diego Bartesaghi, communications director for Make the Road NJ, an advocacy group, said this attack on immigrants and the rule of law is likely to spread beyond the immigrant community.

“What we see right now is that they're really touching the constitutional rights that we have, regardless of your immigration status, and and this is kind of like the the alarm that we were trying to say right in the beginning,” he told my class. “We were seen as the child who cried wolf in the beginning.”

Trump argues that they are focusing on what they call “criminal aliens,” but that clearly is a lie, he says. “They're saying they're coming for criminals only, but in reality, they're not. They're coming for everybody.”

The echoes of Martin Niemoller’s poem, “First They Came,” should not be dismissed. The poem has become a cliche, trotted out repeatedly over the years as a response to even the smallest constitutional violations. But cliches become cliches because they carry truth in them.

In this case, as Barseghi says, we are sliding into a “fascist dictatorship that, little by little, is trying to take our rights away.”

Running in parallel to Trump’s attacks on individual constitutional rights, is his rhetorical assault on migrants, which are coarsening the language, the public rhetoric. He continues shamelessly to invoke race and religion to justify his mass-deportation regime. This has been the most consistent through-line of Trump’s political career, going back to the infamous escalator ride in Trump Tower in 2015 when he declared his candidacy, and called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. He has described immigration from the south as an invasion, compared migrants from South and Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean to infectious diseases and infestations of vermin, has accused them of poisoning the blood of the nation. This is more than just word choice for political effect. It is part of his appeal and part of the appeal of all rightwing autocrats, who use the language of economic populism to obscure just how much American workers have in common with migrants and to maintain elite control.

People do not flee their homes and engage in often perilous treks just for work. They don’t it because it has become too dangerous to remain, because the breakdowns — whether economic, political, social, or environmental — make flight their best option.

Immigration needs to be viewed through a class-based lens. The narrative that immigrants are stealing our jobs or threatening our communities, that they are what is wrong with our economy, let’s the people who actually have the money and run the corporations off the hook.

Groups like Wind of the Spirit, New Labor, and Resistencia en Accion NJ and others offer this class-based analysis, but that — by necessity — ultimately takes a backseat to immediate needs, to rent and transportation, food, medicine, and child care. These are the costs that determine survival even as undocumented workers too often get paid less than minimum wage and face threats at work.

“All these issues are there together, and it is very difficult to analyze them when you you are working in a situation of scarcity,” Stuart Sydenstricker, a volunteer with the Morris County-based Wind of the Spirit told me.

Immigration is a class issue, and we — those of us in the media and with power to recalibrate the debate — need to keep making this case, because the people in Trump’s crosshairs cannot.