Editor’s Note: The follower’s article was originally published by Silky Shah from Truthout on November 10, 2024.
Let’s take concrete action to protect the millions of US residents facing the threat of Trump’s deportation crosshairs.
This election cycle was defined — yet again — by Donald Trump’s fearmongering over immigration. Like his previous two campaigns for president, Trump fueled a racist panic over “migrant crime” and capitalized on people’s fears over economic insecurity by scapegoating immigrants for all of the U.S.’s problems, including but not limited to the housing crisis, opioid crisis and inflation. But unlike those previous elections, rather than challenging Trump’s rhetoric, the Democrats capitulated to the Republicans and solidified the rightward lurch on the issue.
Throughout her campaign, Kamala Harris repeatedly lambasted Trump for “talking a big game about securing our border” but still tanking what she referred to as “the most significant border security bill in decades.” The bipartisan Senate bill, also known as the Border Act of 2024, would have drastically gutted asylum; closed the border to people seeking safety; increased funding for immigration detention and surveillance, including the largest appropriation for custody operations in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) history; and even included money to complete the border wall. The few positive reforms in the bill — such as a modest increase in visas and some expanded protections for certain immigrant youth and Afghan evacuees — were crumbs amid the harsh measures that reinforced the harmful ideology that immigrants are a “security threat.” Harris often emphasized the significance of Republican support for the bill and boasted that “even the Border Patrol endorsed it.” It was a stark contrast to her Democratic primary campaign four years earlier when she supported the decriminalization of people crossing the border and declared, “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
As we take stock of the politics of immigration in the U.S. after this election, including the anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed along the campaign trail, the unwillingness of the Democratic Party to provide a countervailing vision on immigration is indefensible. This moral failure robbed immigrants of their humanity and turned them into spectacles of false narratives around “public safety” and “national security.” The Democrats need to be forced to reckon with their record: Decrying Trump’s white supremacist agenda while championing one of its biggest components was never going to square with the voters they needed.
As we await the onslaught we know is coming under another Trump administration, it is imperative that we challenge these dehumanizing narratives and uplift immigrants as valuable members of our families, schools and workplaces that are worthy of dignity and support. Sadly, the Democratic Party’s strategy this election cycle will make it that much harder for us to make the case.
If the border wall symbolized Trump’s first run for president, this one was defined by the call for mass deportations. While both parties have aligned around border policy, the starkest contrast between the two is the approach to immigrants currently living in the U.S. Prior to Trump taking office in 2017, the immigrant rights movement fought back against mass deportations under Barack Obama labeling him “deporter-in-chief.” Some 400,000 immigrants were formally deported each year, meaning they were subject to a five-year bar to reenter the country and could face lengthy prison sentences if they attempted to do so. The growing outrage over mass deportations led some members of his own party, especially at the local and state level, to pass robust sanctuary laws to prevent collaborations between ICE and local police.
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