Trump's Mass Deportation Machine in the Making
Trump's Mass Deportation Machine in the Making
Trump's migrant detention system while president rehearsed his plans to turn the state into a mass deportation machine on an epic scale
I know that everyone is on edge before the US election, which has monumental consequences for our country and the world. Here is a Guide for Protection and Resilience Strategies for Nonviolent Activists, from the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. It discusses how to deal with authoritarian intimidation, bullying, and silencing of those on the side of justice and truth.
Today’s essay adapts my discussion in Strongmen of Trump’s first attempt to build a mass deportation machine. While the administration’s family separation policy has received media attention, too many have forgotten the climate of fear it caused, the radicalization of governmental employees it occasioned, and how the conditions of detention included situations that medical professionals associate with torture.
If Trump returns to the White House, his plans for mass deportation would unfold on “an incomprehensible scale,” as Melissa Gira Grant writes in an excellent essay for The New Republic. Removing 15 million people is equivalent to emptying out the populations of entire countries such as Belgium or Bolivia.
When the goal is to crash the economy and cause widespread despair and ruin, depriving America of a labor force necessary for our productivity is just part of the plan. Here is the assessment of Washington Post economic columnist Edoardo Porter based on a “reduced” proposal by Trump to deport “only” 11 million “unauthorized immigrants” from the U.S.
“By my calculations he will need 58,201 flights in fully loaded Boeing 737-800s to fly them all out” and five large-scale staging grounds the size of Houston, Porter reports, concluding that it is an impossible enterprise and Trump will fail, not before creating immeasurable hardship.
So here is what I wrote in my violence chapter in 2019 and early 2020 about Trump’s persecution of immigrants as president.
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Like past strongmen, Trump has used propaganda, corruption, and the cult of male force to create a climate amenable to persecution. Latino migrants, his main enemy, are branded as a demographic and racial threat to American purity. His policies of mass incarceration are in line with American tradition: the U.S. is the world’s biggest jailer. They also draw on detention policies and rhetoric of immigrants as “invaders” inherited from the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.
Yet Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade goes much further. 70% of the approximately 400,000 people who spent time in ICE custody in 2018 had no criminal record (a change from previous governments), which highlights how racism, rather than crime prevention, drives his policies. “Trump is building a deportation machine,” Congress’s Hispanic Caucus charged on Twitter in August 2019.
Trump used repetition and other propaganda techniques to guide the public to see his treatment of immigrants as necessary for the nation’s safety. At 64 rallies held between 2017 and August 2019, he mentioned immigrants more than 500 times, labeling them as criminals (189 mentions), killers (32), and predators (31). A blitz of 2,199 Facebook ads appeared between January-August 2019, warning of the consequences of an immigrant “invasion.”
This message apparently resonated with white nationalist Patrick Crusius, whose Facebook page featured Trump anti-immigrant slogans. On August 2, 2019, Crusius opened fire on a Latino-frequented El Paso Walmart, murdering 21 people and injuring dozens. “This is a response to the Hispanic invasion,” his manifesto stated.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration policy, has become a haven for ideologues that take their cues from Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller. He is a quiet extremist – the most dangerous kind – who works behind the scenes. Miller promoted the “zero tolerance” policy in force for six months in 2018 and continuing unofficially, which made family separations at the border into state policy.
He has also tried to remove immigrant children from schools, repeating fascist treatment of Jews, and floated the idea of shipping undocumented immigrants out of the country on trains – an image indelibly linked to the Holocaust.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents also echo Nazi camp procedures in telling parents their children are being taken away to have a “bath,” then imprisoning or deporting the parents. The unwashed children may be placed in detention centers. Or they might be assigned to Evangelical Christian adoption agencies like Bethany Child Services, a company long supported by Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s family.
Some adoption agencies make efforts to reunite the children with their families. Yet the scale of these forced separations – almost 70,000 in 2019 – brings Trump’s practices in line with states like Hitler’s Germany and Pinochet’s Chile, where children were taken from Jewish, leftist, and indigenous parents to be raised by more “appropriate” individuals.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who round up migrants increasingly appear in neighborhoods in SWAT team formations, in full tactical gear. This adds to the intimidation of individuals who come from countries like Guatemala and El Salvador with a history of military juntas.
CBP agents, who work within a 100-mile radius of the border, see themselves as soldiers, and some refer to migrants as their “prisoners of war.” Many treat their facilities as spaces of exception from professional and ethical norms. While drug smuggling and sex trafficking among CBP agents was not uncommon during the Bush and Obama administrations, the demonization of migrants by Trump and his government encourages new levels of cruelty.
Viewing Trump’s camps within the history of strongman confinement spaces is instructive. Prisoners in Nazi work camps like Moringen had mattresses or barracks and access to washrooms. Those in Trump's detention spaces often cannot wash and must sleep on the ground, as in the Homestead, Florida, facility operated for DHS by the private for-profit company Caliburn.
Citing freezing temperatures, 24-hour lights, and lack of hygiene and medical care, Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier compared conditions in camps in Clint and McAllen, Texas to those of “torture facilities.” The combined effects of disease (internees are denied flu vaccines), lack of food, water, and medicines, and physical and sexual abuse led to at least 7 child deaths in the first five months of 2019.
Extreme crowding, another staple of concentration camp abuse, features in the reports of the Inspectors General of Rio Grande and El Paso del Norte, both in Texas. In detention centers there, adults were held in “standing-room only conditions for a week” and cells were so crowded that “adults had to stand on the toilets to breathe.” Unsurprisingly, the government banned visitors soon after the reports went public.
A militiaman interviewed on the border in 2019 declared he wants to “go back to Hitler days” and put immigrants “in gas chambers.” He may be an extremist, but strongman history suggests that as Trump’s intensive propaganda campaigns continue, more Americans may accept the quarantining and harm of Latinos as necessary for the good of the country.
Those children who were taken from their parents at the border are a commodity. These "Christian adoption agencies" provide domestic slave labor for "elite"Christian families. Stephen Miller and Betsy DeVos need to fry for this!!😡😡
The connection between fascism and sadism has been seen since the days of Mussolini. tRump is continuing that tradition with his ongoing demonization of immigrants. He can't wait to punish them.