"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG @ NYT: DON’T FRET ABOUT THE “LOOMING THREAT OF FASCISM IN AMERICA” — IT’S ALREADY ARRIVED — Just Ask Migrants, Hispanics, & Vulnerable Women — You Could Be Next On The Trump/Sessions “Hit List!”
The sci-fi writer William Gibson once said, “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In America in 2018, the same could be said of authoritarianism.
Since Donald Trump was elected, there’s been a boom in best-selling books about the fragility of liberal democracy, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning,” and Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” Many have noted that the president’s rhetoric abounds in classic fascist tropes, including the demonization of minorities and attempts to paint the press as treasonous. Trump is obviously more comfortable with despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin than democrats like Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
We still talk about American fascism as a looming threat, something that could happen if we’re not vigilant. But for undocumented immigrants, it’s already here.
There are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump. Just last week, we learned that a teenager from Iowa who had lived in America since he was 3 was killed shortly after his forced return to Mexico. This month, an Ecuadorean immigrant with an American citizen wife and a pending green card application was detained at a Brooklyn military base where he’d gone to deliver a pizza; a judge has temporarily halted his deportation, but he remains locked up. Immigration officers are boarding trains and buses and demanding that passengers show them their papers. On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decreed that most people fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence would no longer be eligible for asylum.
But what really makes Trump’s America feel like a rogue state is the administration’s policy of taking children from migrants caught crossing the border unlawfully, even if the parents immediately present themselves to the authorities to make asylum claims. “This is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing this work,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “The little kids are literally being terrorized.”
Family separations began last year — immigrant advocates aren’t sure exactly when — and have ramped up with the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border without authorization. Over two weeks in May, more than 650 children were snatched from their parents.
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Read the rest of Michelle’s article at the above link!
In case you haven’t noticed (and Trump supporters either haven’t, or have ignored it), everyone around Trump, including friends, family, business associates, political supporters, Cabinet members, allies, lawyers, campaign workers, former girlfriends and liaisons, is “expendable.” The only “non-expendable” person in Trump’s universe is, no surprise here, Trump.
And, like any authoritarian despot, he picks people off one by one or in vulnerable groups by isolating, bullying, demeaning, dehumanizing, and then destroying them while the others look on offering no help to the fallen and just thinking “glad it wasn’t me!”
But, when your time comes (and it well may, if we allow Trump to continue in office long enough) who will be there to stand up for you? Who will speak up for your rights? Indeed, what “rights” will you have after Trump, Sessions, Pence & Co have finished destroying our Constitution and stomping on the real rule of law to institute their White Nationalist Empire?
And what kind of country with what kind of people make terrorizing already traumatized kids a national policy?
