Trump starts with 100-day wave of terror on immigrants, dangerously pushes to expand further

Minneapolis, MN – Donald Trump has spent the first 100 days of his second administration unleashing a wave of terror against immigrants, their communities, their supporters, and even immigration lawyers and judges. This shouldn’t be a big surprise, given his lifetime of racism and his shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric during last year’s election campaign – falsely scapegoating immigrants for the problems created by the billionaire class.

But the scope and methods the administration is using in the anti-immigrant onslaught this time already surpass the cruelty to immigrants in Trump’s first term. This is starting to provoke a significant backlash of mass protests and lawsuits. Even some Democrats in Congress are starting to speak out after their silence or outright support for anti-immigrant measures in the aftermath of Trump winning the 2024 election.

More people are recognizing that Trump’s attacks on immigrants are not only a massive injustice that must be firmly opposed but see the attacks as a leading edge in the overall attack on the democratic rights of all people. Trump has repeatedly said he wants to use the same repressive methods he’s using against immigrants to target U.S. citizens he considers his enemies, too.

While Trump and the far right have lambasted “illegal” immigration for decades, the Trump administration’s current attack goes well beyond that. It targets huge numbers of immigrants regardless of their immigration status, especially those from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The racist character of the anti-immigrant movement is made explicit with the Trump administration terrorizing Latino, Black and Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. and shutting down nearly any path for legal immigration for much of the world, while at the same time openly encouraging white South Africans to come here with a fast path to citizenship.

Trump has also said he will create a “gold card” visa for the ultra-rich from other countries to get a fast-track to U.S. citizenship, making clear that the anti-immigrant attack is an attack on working-class immigrants first and foremost, while rich people will still be welcomed, from some countries at least.

There is still a tiny window of debate in the administration that flared up in an online fight over H1-B temporary worker visas. The despised billionaire Elon Musk supports some very limited visa programs for immigrant workers so he and other corporate heads can exploit cheap labor, and others want to kick out every single immigrant, period. But even if those who support keeping limited, exploitative guest worker programs in place win out, this would still be a terrible injustice, leaving only a tiny number of highly exploited immigrants temporarily in the U.S. while tens of millions of families would be cruelly torn apart.

Despite all the right wing’s rhetoric about targeting “criminals”, according to available data, the majority of people they have deported in the first 100 days don’t have a criminal record. And the Trump administration has not limited its attack to undocumented immigrants. They have targeted hundreds of thousands of legal Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders, announcing the end of TPS for everyone from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti, with more countries sure to be added to the list. They have swept through electronic records of international students and attempted to terminate visas for hundreds of legally-present international students around the country.

Even lawful permanent residents, who are supposed to enjoy most legal rights and protections of citizens, have come under threat of deportation for nothing more than expressing pro-Palestine political views. This includes Mahmoud Khalil, who was not accused or convicted of any crime. He was essentially kidnapped from his apartment lobby in New York City by plain-clothed immigration agents in front of his eight-month pregnant wife and thrown into an unmarked vehicle, then sent hundreds of miles away to an immigration prison in Louisiana to await deportation while his lawyers and a mass movement fight for his release.

Khalil was targeted because he participated in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. This also happened to Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student on a valid F-1 visa at Tufts University. The video of Ozturk’s abduction by masked, plain-clothes agents in broad daylight went viral and caused massive outrage. They are two of many international students Trump is unjustly targeting for deportation, without even the allegation that they have committed any crime.

Cases are piling up of asylum seekers and people who have followed U.S. immigration procedures appearing at their immigration appointments only to be detained and slated for quick deportation. Cases are also piling up of U.S. citizens – mostly Latinos – who have been detained by ICE or Customs and Border Patrol and held incommunicado for weeks. Cases are increasing as well of foreign tourists arriving at the U.S. border and being detained, harshly interrogated, and even removed from the country with little to no explanation. The cumulative effect of all this has led to a rapid and sharp decline in foreign tourism to the U.S., which is sure to put a dent in the economy.

All of these attacks are on top of the increasing daily terror targeting undocumented workers, who bear the daily brunt of attacks on immigrants. They are overwhelmingly here because of U.S. imperialism wreaking havoc in their home countries, through methods like war and coercive economic sanctions, hollowing out their countries’ economies through unjust trade agreements, or making their countries unsafe by supporting oppressive U.S.-backed governments. The largest number are from Mexico and Central America, though numbers have gone up in recent years from other countries under attack by imperialism. These are workers at the core of important sectors of the U.S. economy like agriculture, meatpacking, food service, hospitality, cleaning and residential construction.

These attacks can be seen in growing immigration operations targeting day laborers, like the one in Pomona, California in April, or attacks on farm workers in Bakersfield, California in January. They can be seen in increasingly large sweeps like one in Colorado in April where around 100 immigrants were detained, and a large-scale operation in Florida that nabbed as many as 600 immigrants.

As the scale of these immigration operations continues to grow in size, many immigrant rights activists foresee the likelihood of large workplace raids, which haven’t been seen since the last two years of the Bush administration in 2007-2008. There are already smaller but significant workplace immigration operations happening, like at Hardcoat, Inc. in a Minneapolis suburb where seven immigrants were detained. Unions and immigrant rights activists have been preparing for their likelihood of much larger-scale workplace raids as the Trump administration increases their capacity for larger-scale operations.

Trump administration officials trumpeted the scale of the April operation in Florida, where 600 immigrants were captured being made possible by “partnership agreements” known as 287(g) agreements between federal immigration authorities and local and state law enforcement agencies. 287(g) agreements train and authorize local law enforcement to act as immigration enforcement officers, dramatically multiplying the reach of immigration officials. 287(g) agreements proliferated under the Obama administration, but immigrant rights activists pushed back and succeeded in getting them largely stalled out. The Trump administration is exerting extreme pressure on local governments to cooperate with immigration enforcement, threatening to cut federal funding to local governments and even to prosecute local government officials who don’t facilitate immigration operations.

This is part of Trump’s war on sanctuary cities, cities which have welcomed immigrants and refugees, and have passed policies prohibiting local government employees and local police from asking people about their immigration status or cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. As part of these attacks on sanctuary cities, Republicans in Congress called Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to testify in D.C., where they tried to grill him. But he set a positive example of standing up for policies that welcome immigrants and refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

The Trump administration is not only threatening local government officials. They are also ramping up the volume and venom of their threats against immigration lawyers and judges who they see as impeding their mass deportation agenda.

One Trump executive order threatens immigration lawyers with repression, accusing them of being liars and of acting illegally in their work to defend their clients against the extreme anti-immigrant onslaught. This is clearly designed to try to intimidate people away from practicing immigration law and from following their legal responsibility to vigorously defend their clients.

Wen Judge James E. Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to halt flying Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador out of the reach of U.S. courts – and then later directed the administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who, the government admitted, was sent to El Salvador due to administrative error – the administration and its allies responded with a withering attack on Boasberg personally and on the judiciary in general.

The administration claims that judges should not be able to question or impede the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda in any way. This attack on judges escalated in April when Trump’s FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee, alleging that she was impeding ICE from detaining an immigrant who was in her courtroom. The attacks on judges and the arrest of judges is a serious escalation in the Trump administration’s attempt to centralize power and end the ability of any other branch of government to stop their cruel and unlawful mass deportations.

Perhaps most alarmingly, the Trump administration has disappeared hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, purposely out of the reach of the U.S. justice system. Trump accuses them of being gang members, without the due process of the government proving to a judge that the gang allegation is true, and without the immigrants having any ability to communicate with their families or lawyers. Even members of U.S. Congress who have traveled to El Salvador have not been given access to communicate with any of them, except one, and have not even been able to confirm if they are alive.

Many have likened the Salvadoran mega-prison, the “Terrorism Confinement Center” or CECOT, to a concentration camp, where people are sent there without charges and without due process to be able to refute any charges against them or any idea if they will ever be able to get out. The Salvadoran justice minister has bragged that the only way out of CECOT is in a coffin. The Trump administration flew immigrants there in defiance of a court order and continues to defy the court order to facilitate the return of one person that they admit was sent there by “administrative error,” Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

A massive movement has grown to demand the return of Abrego Garcia, anchored partly by the union he was a member of in Maryland, the Sheet Metal Rail Transportation (SMART) union, along with many immigrant rights and civil liberties organizations. Trump has made clear he intends to send many more immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison without due process, and has repeatedly said he also wants to send U.S. citizens there as well. The administration also claims it is seeking similar agreements with other countries to send immigrants to their prisons, again outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and unable to communicate with family or lawyers.

How has the Trump administration justified rounding up immigrants and disappearing them to a prison in El Salvador with no recourse? On March 15, the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. This is just one of the administration’s legally-dubious invocations of emergency powers to carry out normally-unacceptable repressive actions, similar to his invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to take the power to invoke tariffs away from Congress and into his own hands.

The Alien Enemies Act is only supposed to be used if the U.S. is invaded by a foreign country. This is obviously not happening, but the Trump administration pretends that immigration from Venezuela is an “invasion” of a gang that he has declared a terrorist organization, and he has claimed is being directed by the Venezuelan government. Under that preposterous guise, the administration has usurped sweeping powers to remove people from the U.S. without even the normally existing inadequate legal processes that are supposed to exist for immigrants.

Another goal of the far right wing for decades has been to end birthright citizenship in the U.S. Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office declaring that birthright citizenship no longer exists. This was immediately challenged in the courts, as birthright citizenship is guaranteed in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and can’t be done away with via executive order.

The attack on birthright citizenship is another clearly racist aspect of the anti-immigrant movement, as it was won in the U.S. Civil War for African Americans, who, before the Civil War, were not citizens. It was confirmed to include children of immigrants in a landmark Supreme Court case in 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and has been upheld repeatedly ever since. But it is precisely the children of immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East that anti-immigrant crusaders like those setting immigration policy in the Trump administration want to exclude from U.S. citizenship.

The legal challenge to Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship is ongoing. The legal basis to end it is dubious, and under most circumstances Trump’s legal arguments would likely be laughed out of a courtroom. But it can’t be ruled out that this right-wing Supreme Court might bend to Trump’s will to reinterpret the 14th Amendment to not apply to the children of immigrants.

Other attacks on people who support immigrants include threatening people who do “know your rights” trainings for immigrants. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan threatened a U.S. congressperson who did an online ‘know your rights’ training. The Trump administration is also starting to detain prominent immigrant rights and labor activists like Jeanette Vizguerra in Denver, and Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino in Washington state.

Most of the Trump administration’s actions detailed here have been undertaken through executive orders and through invocations of emergency powers. But immigration policy is generally set by Congress passing immigration laws.

Even though Republicans control Congress, they only passed one piece of immigration legislation in the first 100 days. This was the Laken Riley Act, which was an extremely anti-immigrant bill that handed extra powers to the administration to detain certain immigrants without due process, requiring detention of immigrants arrested or charged with (not even convicted of) some specific crimes. It also empowered state attorneys general to appeal to halt immigration from specific countries. While the Republicans have a majority in the U.S. Senate, they needed some Democrats to vote with them to meet the 60-vote threshold to pass it, and 12 Democratic senators voted with them to pass the bill. Congressional Republicans are also talking about passing huge increases to the already-massive budget for immigration enforcement.

The administration has taken many other actions attacking immigrants in the first 100 days that aren’t detailed here. There has just been too much to cover everything in one article. This is intentional – it’s part of their strategy to try to ‘flood the zone’ to overwhelm people so they can’t even keep track of it all or figure out what to focus on, and then feel helpless. While that seemed like it might work at first, it seems to have now brought together a broad coalition of forces opposed to the whole repressive and reactionary Trump agenda. That coalition is now mobilizing in the streets as a growing and increasingly unified force.

100 days into the Trump administration, the stories are spreading about the immigrants who are being attacked, and the scale and unjust cruelty of Trump’s attacks on immigrants are becoming clearer. As a result, Trump’s overall poll numbers and his polling on immigration specifically have begun to slide significantly. His former “strength” on immigration is turning into its opposite, as his attacks on immigrants have become emblematic of how revolting his whole agenda is to most people.

Polls now show an overwhelming majority opposes Trump sending people to a foreign prison camp without due process. A majority opposes Trump canceling international student visas. A majority think Trump’s attacks on immigrants have already gone too far and are not making the country safer. These changes in public opinion are happening because of people standing up to Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the streets, and in the courts. The administration is threatening people with repression to try to scare them away from challenging Trump. The administration is doing this because protests and legal challenges are working.

This makes it all the more important to continue the struggle to stop Trump’s mass deportations, and his whole reactionary agenda.

#MinneapolisMN #MN #Trump #100Days #ImmigrantsRights

Source: https://fightbacknews.org/trump-starts-with-100-day-wave-of-terror-on-immigrants-dangerously-pushes-to?pk_campaign=rss-feed