The Trump administration’s immigration rhetoric and actions worsen day by day. Every undocumented person on the Island must be extremely apprehensive. Commentators across the country have declared his language the new nativism.
The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty writes that President Trump’s words hark back more than a century ago to “the passage of a series of laws, capped by one in 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act. The statute put in place a quota system in which visas would be allocated by nationality, according to the proportion that each country’s immigrants and their descendants had in the 1890 census.”
In a Dec. 9 Pennsylvania speech, which was supposedly about inflation, President Trump lashed out at immigrants from places he called “Third World countries” for being “filthy, dirty, and disgusting.” He asked why can’t we accept people from Sweden and Norway, and has already allowed white South Afrikaners to immigrate to the United States. The reference to “Third World Countries” is Cold War–era talk, referring to so-called developing, non-industrialized nations.
This past October, the administration released a document overhauling the immigration and refugee system. It focused on English speakers and people from Europe and South Africa.
The document proposes that the administration should cancel the hundreds and thousands of applications filed by those who have already undertaken deep security background investigations and referrals. Trump’s rhetoric that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” echoes a statement in Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’: “the poison that has invaded the national body” is related to an “influx of foreign blood.”
The Boston Globe reports that on Dec. 4, United States Citizen and Immigration Services officers pulled two people out of a line at Faneuil Hall when they were about to take an oath to become U.S. citizens, and sent them home. Four others there were told their ceremony was canceled. They had all come from one of the 19 countries the Department of Homeland Security recently paused immigrants from entering the United States. This resulted from the November shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., one of whom died.
Other news outlets report additional canceled citizenship ceremonies. Project Citizenship assists New England immigrants and refugees in filling out their citizenship applications. The organization’s director, Gail Breslow, said that “the fact that someone would be on the cusp of achieving this milestone and literally be turned away at the door is so cruel and horrific to imagine.”
[Barbara L. Strack,] the former head of the refugee affairs division at the Citizen and Immigration Services, who served under three presidents, notes that the language “reflects a preexisting notion among some in the Trump administration as to who are the true Americans. And they think it’s white people, and they think it’s Christians.” The new nativism.
But there’s more.
The Trump administration has even threatened to deport naturalized U.S. citizens. Rep. Ilhan Omar immigrated from Somalia 25 years ago and is now an American citizen. According to Trump, “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’” In his recent Dec. 9 Pennsylvania speech, he mocked her “little turban” (a hijab she wears for religious reasons) and declared that she should leave the country.
A recent study by ProPublica found that at least 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents. The report contends that “Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”
This past September, I wrote in these pages that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh laid out his reasons for ICE agents to use racial and ethnic profiling to target people for deportation. He added that no American citizen would be detained, because ICE would release them as soon as they learned of their status. This has not happened. ProPublica tried to contact the justice, but “a spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.”
The bottom line is that in this country today, no one is safe unless you pledge loyalty to the Trump administration and its goals. This means increased extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and an anti-immigrant/refugee rhetoric that leads to the unsettling of stable families across the Island and across the nation. For many, it’s a sad holiday season as we enter a new, harsher version of a century-old bigotry.
Jack Fruchtman, who lives in Aquinnah, long taught constitutional law and politics. The fourth edition of his book “The Supreme Court and Constitutional Law” was published earlier this year.
The quote ”no one is safe unless you pledge loyalty to the Trump administration” completely destroys the writer’s credibility. Reasonable people can weigh in on much of the writer’s assertions, but his no one is safe is the linchpin of hyperbole.
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