A 7-year-old asylee girl being locked up by ICE for four months at a Chicago jail has become America’s heralded “rule of law.” With the new Supreme Court ruling stating that immigrants, even permanent residents, and asylees, can be held indefinitely, internment camps have become the law of the land. As if the violation of human rights wasn’t already rampant within this terror organization full of prolonged detentions, lack of due process protections, and the wanton breaking up of families, this administration just launched a war against the 10-year-olds with cerebral palsy, the asylum refugee children, and the people showing up for green cards. So much for ‘bad hombres,’ this is the Gestapo of a fascist oligarchy (which, has pardoned actual concentration camp runner Arpaio.) ICE, a terror instilling, ethnic cleansing organization, must be defunded now.
Standing against inhumane mass deportation, which operates by violating human rights and targets tax-paying, hardworking families seeking refuge from their homeland violence, does not mean being for open borders. No one is for illegal immigration despite what alternative-facts media propaganda artists might say. Felons should be deported, tighter border control and immigration reform should be enacted. What people miss in this polarizing debate is the moral argument; that is, there is no plausible reason to leave children without their mothers literally on the side of the street. There’s no plausible reason to mass deport people already here who pose no economic or national security threat, much less arrest children indefinitely and illegally.
President Trump’s actions (surprisingly) don’t match his rhetoric. He’s repeatedly vowed to focus on, “getting gang members out [and] drug lords out.” That “bad hombres” would be the target for deportation. However, the reality is jarring and dystopian.
Most recently, political asylum refugees fleeing violence from the Congo – a 39-year-old mother and her 7-year-old daughter – were arrested and separated. The 7-year-old has been held in a Chicago prison for the past three and a half months for no legitimate reason. There’s been zero evidence or accusation of abuse. This traumatic and unjust separation is in violation of due process protections according to the ACLU, who is taking the case up. These, are your “bad hombres.”
Then there’s the 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who was detained while on an ambulance to an emergency surgery. These depraved, scoundrel of the earth literally staked outside of the 10-year-old girl’s room after surgery to send her back to a country she only resided in until she was 3-months-old. This lack of basic humanity is obscene. The lack of distinction between an adult crossing the border illegally and a child – a baby in this case – being brought here illegally without any jurisdiction, is egregious. This follows of a pattern of detaining asylum seekers.
It’s not just the children who had no jurisdiction over coming here who are targets or just the asylum seekers, it’s also the green card applicants. ICE recently arrested a dad of four with zero criminal records as he went to finalize legal residency. And the mother married to a U.S. citizen, with no criminal record who was pursuing legal status who was arrested.
There’s also the 43-year-old janitor at MIT whose three children are U.S. citizens and mother, a permanent resident who planned was going to sponsor him for a green card. He didn’t have a criminal record, ran a business, and paid taxes – a model American. But instead of focusing all our efforts on the criminals, they’re detaining children and hard-working, contributing members of society.
Their malevolence knows no bounds – this Gestapo-like organization has even gone after Visa holders. A chemistry professor named Syed Ahmed Jamal was arrested outside his home while he was getting ready to take his daughter to school. Surely an “economically anxious” deplorable will be stepping in to take the job of a man holding degrees in molecular biosciences and pharmaceutical engineering. Isn’t this man the poster-child of Trump’s “merit-based” immigration system? I suppose he’s no Melania Trump, who immigrated to the U.S. under an “elite EB-1 program.. designed for renowned academic researchers, multinational business executives or those in other fields, such as Olympic athlete…”
These are just a few of too many senseless, inhumane arrests being made in the name of an imaginary threat – the asylum seekers, the 10-year-old brought here as a baby with cerebral palsy, the green card applicants, the Visa holders, and the quintessential hardworking immigrant doing the jobs nobody else will to provide for his family. (No, they don’t take jobs away.) All because there is no path to citizenship and the barriers for the poor, non-English speaking masses which Anglo-Saxon Americans’ poor ancestors fleeing persecution and famine didn’t face, simply exist now.
Why target the most harmless, contributing members of society as a scapegoat instead of focusing limited resources on crime? Was arresting the dangerous mother married to a U.S. citizen and pursuing legal status the most effective use of time and resources? Was locking a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy just as valuable as investigating a human smuggling ring or tracking down drug trafficking? Arrests are supposed to be made for the collective good of American society. What collective good does it serve in kicking out the most harmless, hard-working, and vulnerable?
It serves the white supremacist collective good. It’s all apart of a long-growing ethnic cleansing campaign – per Trump advisors such as Stephen Miller – that operates on the basis that immigrants as a monolith are an inherent threat. That all Mexicans are “rapists,” “drug traffickers.” That all “Haitians have AIDS,” and Africans come from “shitholes,” and by that measure should be barred from entering the land of poor, huddled immigrants. A government hijacked by actual white supremacists and nazis (like Sebastian Gorka) is against all immigrants period – tremendous efforts are already being made to curb legal immigration.
White supremacist agendas fueled by politics of fear and control do not care that illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates and crime rates than native-born Americans. (People fleeing violence from economically stagnant countries actually come to the US in search of a better life for their families? Shocking!) They care about protecting white conservative interests in the face of an impending minority-majority, which so far they’ve done through gerrymandering. After all, conservative talking-head Rush Limbaugh said what they’re all thinking thereby proving this theory:
“I would be willing right here to support an effort to grant permanent citizenship to whatever number of illegal immigrants there are in the country, tomorrow, if you will make as part of the deal they can’t vote for 15-25 years.”
I wonder what’s there to fear about becoming a minority, could it have something to do with the way minorities are treated in this country?
While such brute, senseless actions are nothing new, this administration is amping up their ability to violate basic human rights opening the way up for internment camps with the new Supreme Court ruling and conducting arrests outside of schools, in courthouses, in hospitals and homes like modern-day brown-shirts. It is heinous enough that even lawful residents and U.S. citizens have been incorrectly detained for months or years before being able to prove their legal status.
Such actions perfectly conform to the 14 characteristics of fascism Trump has exhibited since his candidacy. They’re the brown shirts of a kleptocracy that wants to control the media, wants police to “rough up” suspects, wants to end term limits, that wants the death penalty for non-violent drug offenses. The brown-shirts of a Wall-street deregulating, Muslim-ban creating, immigrant crime tracking misogynist who praises dictators.
so bad that ICE spokesman resigned
The war against immigrants has gotten so harrowingly abysmal that an ICE spokeman resigned, saying he could “no longer spread falsehoods for the Trump administration.” Fortunately, many are seeing through the fear-mongering: illegal immigration isn’t an all-time high epidemic – it’s net negative. In fact, legal immigration has soared. They have lower incarceration rates and crime rates than native-born Americans, and American cities with more illegal immigrants do not have a higher crime rate. They don’t “take” jobs in our full-employment economy. And they pay $13 billion a year in payroll taxes for benefits they can’t receive.We don’t need a 2,000 mile, 30-foot high, $30 billion wall.
We must arrest criminals and strengthen the already secure border for the collective good of U.S. citizens, but there’s no economic or national security reason to target children, Visa holders, or green card applicants.
Leave a Reply