Elections have consequences. If we didn’t know that before, the fist six days of the Trump administration are making it abundantly clear.
The latest salvo came today in the form of two executive orders cracking down on undocumented immigrants. The first clears the way for construction of a border wall — a colossal boondoggle that is popular with the anti-immigrant crowd, but that makes little sense from a security standpoint — not to mention the damage it will do to the environment and the potential problems it could create in our relationship with our southern neighbor. It also ends what anti-immigration groups call “catch and release,” the capture of non-criminal aliens at the border who are then released pending a court appearance.
A second order goes after so-called sanctuary cities, or municipalities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities on detainers (requests to keep someone in jail while his immigration status is reviewed) or on the sharing of information. Newark, Jersey City, Princeton, East Orange, and Maplewood have proclaimed sanctuary or welcoming city status, and other New Jersey communities are likely to follow suit. The order essentially threatens these communities with a loss of federal funds — housing, health, environmental, etc. — hoping to force them to back off and to let local police be turned into deputized immigration officers.
Seems innocuous, right? It isn’t. As Ari Rosmarin of the ACLU-NJ told me today (for a story that should run in NJ Spotlight tomorrow), it’s an underhanded way for Trump to keep his enforcement promises — which will require a massive increase in manpower — without hiring new agents. The problem, however, is that already strapped local forces will be further strapped.
And more is coming, as reported by Vox:
The four remaining draft orders obtained by Vox focus on immigration, terrorism, and refugee policy. They wouldn’t ban all Muslim immigration to the US, breaking a Trump promise from early in his campaign, but they would temporarily ban entries from seven majority-Muslim countries and bar all refugees from coming to the US for several months. They would make it harder for immigrants to come to the US to work, make it easier to deport them if they use public services, and put an end to the Obama administration program that protected young “DREAMer” immigrants from deportation.
Vox describes the six orders, taken together, “one of the harshest crackdowns on immigrants — both those here and those who want to come here — in memory.” It’s also a conservative wet-dream version of comprehensive immigration reform — all enforcement and deportation, an ugly reminder that this nation of immigrants has always also been a nation of xenophobia and racism.
Read the history of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century. Jews, Italians, Poles — all seen as dangerous parasites bringing infectious disease and dangerous ideologies, all presented in language that eerily echoes the nonsense we repeatedly hear today about Latinos and Muslims.
The reality is that Trump is not so much a crazy anomaly as a throwback. He is not the nation’s crazy uncle, so much as he’s the suppressed Id, all the ugliness of our history, all our worst instincts, the truth buried under the lies we tell ourselves in an effort to prove how great and exceptional a nation we are.
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Hank Kalet 