Not too long ago, American politicians — mostly Republicans, with a few Democrats —denied that their “tough” positions against immigrants had anything to do with race or ethnicity.
“It’s not a matter of racism,” they assured us, “it’s a matter of legality, of enforcing the laws of the United States.”
Their focus, they argued, was on deporting those who commit crimes, while protecting citizens and legal residents, and those immigrants who “did things the right way” by coming to this country legally.
But now the masks have come off. The undercurrent of hatred and racism behind anti-immigrant policies over the last 35 years, barely concealed under a veneer of “law and order,” has been exposed in the platform of a certain Donald J. Trump, whose personal disdain for minorities is more than evident.
I think it’s been made sufficiently clear in recent weeks—on top of everything that’s happened over the last few years—that Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign and the MAGA movement generally don’t bother with these distinctions.
Instead, what we hear from Trump and those who support him at his events is this: “We (the United States) have become the depository of the world’s garbage”; “Venezuela is opening its prisons and sending us its rapists and criminals”; “an island of garbage floats in the sea, and it’s called Puerto Rico,” Haitians in Springfield eat cats and dogs, and Black Americans use watermelons instead of pumpkins for Halloween.
The list of stereotypes and clichés coming from Trump and his allies grows more radical, but the evidence of Trump’s racism is not new. He made it clear when he launched his first campaign in 2015 and continued for years: “Mexico isn’t sending their best, they are bringing crime, they’re bringing drugs, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people,” his comments about Central American and African nations as “shithole countries,” his “scientific” insight in declaring COVID as “the Chinese virus,” unleashing a wave of hate crimes against the Asian American community not seen in decades, and his “security-related” ban on thousands of Muslims entering the U.S. are all just older exhibits attached to the continued mountain of evidence.
But his new promises go beyond deporting “illegals.” Now it’s about making “legals” illegal (removing TPS, refugee programs, and work visas) and changing the Constitution so that being born in the United States does not automatically grant citizenship. Creating millions of stateless babies is one of his goals.
Central to his campaign promises are the mass deportations of “between 12 and 21 million immigrants” that will begin “from day one.” There’s also the notion that separating families during deportations isn’t necessary “since we can deport the whole family,” as Tom Homan, the former ICE director under Trump, clearly explained last week on “60 Minutes.” This will include anyone indiscriminately caught in the net, whether or not they’re citizens or legal residents.
We’re talking about another, much larger, “Operation Wetback,” like the one the U.S. carried out in 1955 when hundreds of thousands of people were deported from various U.S. regions to Mexico, many of them citizens or people who had spent nearly their entire lives in the United States. What Trump is proposing is the use of military tactics and “detention camps,” along with the investment of billions of dollars in a program unprecedented in the modern world.
The human, familial, and economic devastation is indescribable and would become a historic curse for this country.
Sometimes I wonder, though, if those Latinos voting for Trump understand what they’re doing. If, as journalist Paola Ramos suggests in her study on the Latino far-right, “many Latinos don’t believe that Trump is talking about them when he says what he says.” When we hear that disillusioned Black men are turning to Trump as an alternative, or when nationalist groups talk about “expelling immigrants and protecting our way of life.”
Many say it without hesitation: “Protect the white heritage of America.”
Latinos and other racial minorities who believe that Trump’s plans don’t include them and who only want “to improve the economy” or “recover the jobs that illegals take from us” will face a rude awakening when they realize that the vision of the country their admired leader holds doesn’t include them either.
Their lives will become hell in a country led by a man whose closest conservative and Republican associates have described as a Hitler fan and a fascist.
Pilar Marrero is a journalist and writer. In 2012, she published the book El Despertar del Sueño Americano (in Spanish) and Killing the American Dream (in English), in which she described the complex relationship between the United States and its immigrant past and the misguided immigration policy that has prevailed since 1990. She is an associate editor with Ethnic Media Services.