You're next! The blowback for the spiritual bankruptcy of bipartisan American Exceptionalism

The militaristic "police state" Trump has invoked has been escalating for decades. It just hasn't threatened establishment white liberals until now.

Human Rights Watch found that 42 percent of the immigrants ICE detained in California under Obama from October 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015 had no criminal history and were parents of US citizen children. It was part of Obama’s mass deportation of nearly 3 million immigrants, and while he did not have a policy of deliberate child separation in California alone tens of thousands of children saw their parents removed from the country.

As Trump goes on his rampage to bully the most powerless and marginalized among us, it is puzzling to see the liberal groundhogs coming out of their holes to grandstand against his rapacious cruelty in sending the US Gestapo known as ICE to round up immigrants, documented or otherwise, to deport. It is impossible not to wonder where these liberal warriors for immigrant rights were when their party leaders were enacting mass deportations, holding migrant children in cages, abducting immigrants for “expedited deportation” and expanding harsh Trump era immigration policies. Now come the memes accusing us of being less than human if we are not showing some sort of resistance to Trump. Of course his fascistic choas has to be resisted, but those engaging in that brand of simplistic discourse are the ones who defended Democrats because they didn’t want to, as dog-food salesman and Democratic Party sycophant Thom Hartmann put it, “circle the wagons,” as protecting the electoral prospects for Democrats was deemed far more important than bringing attention to the abject cruelty immigrants have been subject to under Democratic Party rule. Yet here we are, with Republicans controlling all three branches of government and Trump amplifying the bipartisan disregard for the humanity of immigrants and refugees. Immigrants are in a terrible bind as Republicans revel in unlawful detention and expulsion of immigrants so they will never speak against Democrats on the issue while Democrats and their media will only audibly step up if it is Trump who is dehumanizing immigrants. Immigrants are the ultimate political football, ideal fodder for Democrats come election time but otherwise relegated to the grandstanding of local Democratic leadership that offers temporary and makeshift sanctuary, wholly unsupported at the federal level. Even Bernie Sanders is spreading misinformation conflating illegal immigration with Fentanyl deaths, parroting the Republican fearmongering linking undocumented immigrants to crime. When the standard-bearer for progressivism in Congress joins in the chorus of criminalization of immigrants the degree to which desperate human beings can be reduced to racist political rhetoric becomes shockingly clear.

At the federal level, Democrats who were calling Trump the “orange Hitler” joined Republicans in January to pass The Laken-Riley Act, legislation that expands mandatory detention for non-violent undocumented immigrants and allows states to sue the federal government when they disapprove of immigration policy. The question is not how did we get to a point where the mercenary racists staffing rogue agencies like ICE, CPB and the Secret Service are encouraged to stalk schools and churches looking for non-white people to detain and deport, but how did immigrants become such a casualty of electoral politics that both parties participate equally in their criminalization, dehumanization and denial of asylum rights?

It only took two days for Democrats to assist Trump in the indefinite detention of undocumented immigrants and further criminalization of all immigrants, setting the stage for Trump’s current crackdown.

It was Bill Clinton in 1996 who oversaw passage of the harshest immigration legislation up to that point in modern history. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was the first major step towards criminalization of immigration prior to the establishment of DHS, as it markedly expanded which crimes made an immigrant eligible for deportation and it was applied retroactively to criminal records. Any suspected undocumented immigrant apprehended within 100 miles of the southern border was also subject to deportation before they could appear before a judge, a stealth variation on Trump’s use of ICE to abduct and deport temporary visa holders for their pro-Palestinian activism. Even immigrants convicted of a DUI or shoplifting were slated for expedited deportation without any prospect of a deportation hearing, a direct precursor to Trump’s circumvention of the courts to enforce unconstitutional deportations. Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill (authored by Joe Biden) compounded the criminalization of immigrants by implementing “stop-and-frisk” abductions as well as harsher sentencing for low-level infractions resulting in a massive increase in racist policing and mass incarceration of immigrant communities.

The answer is no. Since Bill Clinton’s 1996 “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act,” subsequent US presidents have only expanded upon the criminalization and dehumanization of immigrants. But since Clinton played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, his racist agenda of immigrant bashing, mass incarceration and welfare reform was well received even by the black and brown constituents that he was killing softly with his song.

In 2002 George W Bush embarked on one of the most ambitious restructurings of our government in history, piecing 22 offices from five departments into one massive and largely unaccountable bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The legislation creating this sprawling department included the creation of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) which has proven to be perhaps the most heinous and racist agency in our government’s history. But it was not Republicans who authored this bill at the behest of George W Bush. The vast majority of it was written by Democrats who knowingly transformed immigration from a justice issue, as immigration was handled under the watch of the Department of Justice, to a security issue in the wake of 9/11. No matter that 9/11 had nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with the lax oversight of the Bush administration and the chronic failure of communication between intelligence agencies, Democrats wanted to score political points with those legendary “swing voters” who they were told by Republicans and Fox News that they were soft on terrorism. Only eight Senate Democrats voted against this sweeping expansion of the surveillance state and militarization of law enforcement. What Congress did was eliminate the relatively benign Immigration and Naturalization Service and transferred its functions to three new agencies within the Department of Homeland Security: ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). CBP was assigned to secure the border and the area within 100 miles of it and USCIS processed requests for immigration benefits, such as naturalization applications and asylum requests. ICE was created with two primary divisions: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). ERO enforces immigration laws, including detaining and removing the people violating them. HSI investigates international criminal operations and organizations, including the illegal trade of goods, weapons, and drugs, and the smuggling or trafficking of people into the U.S. A paramilitary operated with little oversight, ICE now has over 20,000 officers with 400 offices in the U.S. and in 46 countries.

Hundreds of hidden hellholes built by Democrats and Republicans alike at the behest of the for-profit private detention industry.

Between 2009 and 2015, the Obama administration deported a record 2.5 million immigrants, and that doesn’t include the millions who were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by CBP. For the first six years of his administration, Obama’s policy was to expel any undocumented immigrant convicted of almost any crime regardless of its time of occurrence, including DUI, shoplifting, entering the country illegally and a variety of misdemeanors. The vast majority of expulsions from the country were carried out under “expedited removal,” which means deportations were executed without an appearance before a judge. In 2013, Obama signed off on a record 383,000 “expedited removals” comprising over 80% of the record 438,000 deportations that year. While 200,000 of those deported were convicted of a crime, 230,000 were not, meaning over his two terms Obama habitually violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Refugee Convention as declared by the UN, as well as The Refugee Act of 1980 passed by Congress to guarantee asylum hearings to those refugees with a “well-founded fear of persecution.” In true neoliberal fashion Obama expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2104 to provide a temporary reprieve from deportation to qualified unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children while simultaneously building cages for and deporting the Central American child refugees fleeing violence sparked by US interventions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In fact, Obama expanded the policy of family detention and expedited removal, prompting the ACLU to publish a piece in 2015 entitled “President Obama Wants to Continue Imprisoning Immigrant Families.” It was six years into his presidency when Democrats widened their opposition to his policies, primarily because election season was less than a year away. Rachel Maddow was comparing Obama to FDR and lauding his expansion of DACA but had little to say regarding his unprecedented use of expedited deportations. Five years later Maddow famously used images of Obama-era kids in cages to call out Trump for his family separation policies, unwittingly bringing attention to the fact that it was Obama who ordered construction of the cages and who placed unaccompanied children in them, some for months at a time, even if Maddow and her fellow MSNBC celebrity pundits did not find the cages newsworthy when they were Obama’s doing.

In 2020 the 50 million dollar woman Rachel Maddow shed crocodile tears over this image of the “permanent damage” done to immigrant children by separating them from their families, keeping them in cages and having them sleep on the floor with mylar blankets. Only this photo was from 2014 when Obama built the cages in which to house unaccompanied migrant children from the global south. Maddow had little to say about the cages after this broadcast, nor did she cover Obama’s massive separation of families during his mass deportations.

Trump took the torch of Draconian immigration policies from Obama in 2016 and pushed them even further towards barbarity, implementing a policy of separating children illegally entering the country from their families as a deterrent to future refugees. Using criminal records accumulated from the Obama and Clinton years, like them he is indiscriminately targeted immigrants accused of any crime, even those with misdemeanors who had served their sentences. He famously banned Muslims from entering the country, a ban which was deemed unconstitutional and eventually overturned. But it was only four years before Trump’s ban that Obama implemented the Countering Violent Extremism program, a highly controversial community initiative aimed at identifying potential terrorists before they became “radicalized.” Of course, this unconstitutional intelligence gathering was devastating to Muslim communities as it stigmatizing Muslims and reinforced Islamophobic stereotypes, facilitated covert intelligence-gathering, suppressed dissent against government policies, and sowed discord in targeted communities with virtually no pushback from the same liberals who express outrage at Trump’s Muslim ban. During the implementation of Obama’s xenophobic program, schools employed surveillance officers to monitor the activities of Muslim students using debunked methods that assume potential terrorists have indentifiable predisposing markers. Study after study has proven that there is no accurate way of predicting if someone is going to commit a terrorist act, yet to this day our government uses unscientific methods to target what they perceive to be “at risk” communities. Yet the fear imparted by a political class and media so inherently steeped in white supremacy and so intent on distracting from their own contributions to the ascent of fascism easily overwhelms any logic or sense of humanity that might protect the Muslims and immigrants we impetuously single out.

During her 2021 trip to Guatemala as Biden’s border czar Kamala Harris took the tact of Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign in regards to those victims of the violence and instability resulting from the CIA’s regime change in 1954 and subsequent US funded genocide in the late 1990s. "Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders." Harris cautioned potential refugees: "If you come to our border, you will be turned back." In 2014 responding to a surge in unaccompanied migrant children from Central America, Hillary Clinton stated that the children should be sent back after contacting their families. This heartless proposal is in direct violation of the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act which prohibits expedited removal from being used on children under 18, and also a violation of UN refugee charters designed to protect children from such cruelty. It was under Barack Obama that Hillary Clinton’s State Department paid Mexico $90 million to "interdict the flow of illegal migrants from Central America bound for the United States,” resulting in thousands of children being detained in unsafe conditions and returned to the countries they were fleeing without due process. When the ACLU filed cases on behalf of Central American refugees fleeing extreme sexual violence and death threats to seek asylum in the United States, the Obama administration insisted that it can deport asylum-seekers without any oversight or review from the federal courts. Using ICE in the same unconstitutional context as Trump, Obama thought it was his right to sweep refugees off the streets and from shelters for deportation without any due process. Where were Rachel Maddow and Thom Hartmann and Michael Moore when Obama was violating the constitutional rights of refugees and immigrants, sending them back to their countries of origin to face the likelihood of death or sexual violence?

One would think this is a Trump era algorithm constructed as an excuse for surveilling and prosecuting Muslims. But it’s Obama’s 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act which utlilized thoroughly debunked peramaters as modes of intervention for the indoctrination of potential terrorists. It’s implementation devastated Muslim communities as it spread stereotypes that resulted in heightened Islamaphobia and hate crimes.

They were remaining silent as they did in January of 2023 when Biden announced sweeping policies drastically restricting access to asylum for refugees at the southern border. With little fanfare Biden expanded Trump’s illegal use of Title 42, an obscure public health law that was designed to confer quarantine authority to health authorities over anyone, including US citizens, arriving from a foreign country. Title 42 was a quarantine law never intended to determine which non-citizens would be admitted or removed from the country—Congress avoided any reference to immigration in the legislation to prevent public health officials from discriminating against immigrants. Not only did Biden apply Title 42 to Venezuelans as Trump did, but he broadened its application to expel asylum seekers from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti, resulting in squalid, overcrowded conditions at the Mexican border exposing vulnerable migrants to widespread kidnappings, rape, torture and murder. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers were denied their right to due process. The coverage of this dehumanizing policy disaster was covered on a regular basis by FOX News, but only in the context of the Biden administration’s incompetence. There was mention of a “crisis” at the southern border, but the emphasis was on the overwhelming number of number of migrants presenting at the southern border (a variation on Trump’s “invasion” theme), but little interest in Biden’s illegal use of Title 42 or the plight of the asylum seekers whose constitutional rights were being violated. Like Trump, Biden directly violated the Refugee Act of 1980 which prohibits penalizing asylum seekers based on their method of entry. MNSBC, CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have all mentioned Trump's violation of the law, but somehow failed to acknowledge Biden’s.

Biden expanded Trump’s illegal use of Title 42 to expel more South American migrants in one year than Trump did his entire presidency. Where were all the liberal voices that were so outraged over Trump’s misuse of that same policy? They were framing the southern border as a “crisis” (like Trump’s “invasion”) and justifying his response.

Even more shocking was Biden’s response to Fox News/Trump’s condemnation of his handling of the border during the 2024 presidential campaign. Biden not only completely shut down the southern border once the average number of daily encounters has reached 2,500 between legal ports of entry (which was a daily occurrence), but waived federal laws including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act to expedite construction of Trump’s southern border wall. Across the spectrum of liberal media one could find little condemnation of his further capitulation to racist right-wing ideology, only hand-wringing that it might affect his electoral prospects with immigrants. There were no protests from the “Hands Off” liberals who were in the streets by the thousands to show solidarity against Trump and Musk, just a hardening of their social media account rhetoric when it came to undocumented immigrants. After the Democratic Party could no longer cover up Biden’s obvious years long cognitive decline, Kamala Haris took the right-wing immigration reigns in her wanton criminalization of immigrants. In her passionate embrace of war criminals and racists, Harris parroted their propaganda equating immigrants with increased violence, repeating at her rallies that she “went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I've prosecuted them in case after case and I won. So, I know what I'm talking about.” A Harris campaign ad showing weapons superimposed over immigrants blared “as a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border.” Instead of pushing back, the crowds at rallies would cheer “USA, USA, USA”…just like at rallies for the “orange Hitler.”

Anything Trump can do Dems can do better. A Kamala Harris 2024 campaign ad conflating immigration with violent crime uses images of the Trump border wall that Harris in 2017 called “a stupid use of money.” Yet in 2024 Democrats including Harris were willing to sign onto an immigration bill with hundreds of millions in funding for continuation of Trump’s border wall.

Now that Trump is using ICE to abduct anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian students protestors off the street, the same liberal cabal that had nothing to say when Biden and his minions were framing these student activists as “antisemitic” and “lawless” and standing by while our paramilitary brutalized and arrested thousands of them is now aghast at ICE’s unconstitutional actions. But ICE has been engaging in illegal surveillance, abduction, deportation and torture since its inception, practices that have only escalated with each successive administration Republican or Democrat. It took Trump’s child separation policy in 2016 to finally spark a movement to abolish ICE. In 2018 Alexandria Ocasio Cortez upset establishment Democrat Joseph Howley in Ney York’s 14th Congressional district running on a platform included the abolition of ICE. Progressives in the House introduced a bill to effectively shut down ICE, but Democratic Party leadership balked at the idea when Republicans accused them of failing to support law enforcement. It is remarkable that even as Democrats Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal sponsored the bill their pretense was Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating immigrant children from their parents and the use of “tender age shelters” to house these children. But many of those shelters were constructed by the Obama administration in which unaccompanied children were left for weeks or months at a time. One has to wonder where these concerned progressives were under Obama when he was violating the rights of child refugees. While a handful of Democrats briefly jumped on the “abolish ICE” bandwagon, it only took Trump’s Tweet “The two biggest opponents of ICE in America today are the Democratic Party and MS-13!” to make Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the majority of house Democrats block a vote on the bill to abolish ICE. It was dropped in favor of a Republican bill supporting ICE which predictably passed 244-35.

Democrats and their liberal base historically are not for immigrants. In 1939 FDR turned away thousands of Jews for fear of Nazi spies and then in 1942 etablished the Japanese internment camps. Liberals are currently against what Trump and the Republicans do to immigrants, even if their party engages in virtually the same unconstitutional and xenophobic behavior. Liberals are mobilized against ICE only on the basis of Trump’s 2016 “zero tolerance” child separation policy and his current use of ICE to ambush and deport anti-Palestinian protestors with temporary visas and green cards. All of ICE’s other inuhumane violations, from forced sterilization to intentional deprivation of medical care to thousands of incidents of unwarranted extended solitary confinement, have been met with relative silence from the liberal base. There were no calls for abolishing or even reforming ICE from “Hands Off” protest organizers, but one of their listed issues was the defense of NATO, a weapons clearinghouse that has been responsible for displacing millions in the Middle East. While ICE rapidly grew into a gestapo bent on terrorizing immigrants and stripping them of their rights, liberals and Democrats largely remained silent, exhibiting the same moral bankruptcy when it comes to the genocide in Gaza or any of the disastrous regime change interventions in the Middle East and Central and South America cooked up by the Clintons, Obama and Biden. During the 2024 campaign, it was Democrats who were joining Republicans in the call for immigrants and refugees to enter the country legally, ignoring the fact that the massive resources poured into private detention and rogue agencies ICE and CBP instead of the humane processing of immigration cases has resulted in backlogs averaging 3 years for a family green card and 5 years for asylum cases. It is estimated at the current rate of processing it would take over 20 years to adjucate all the pending immigration cases if no additional cases were added.

The notion that Trump is somehow an anomaly in his defiance of the Constitutional rights of refugees and immigrants aligns with the ineffectual liberal strategy in fighting him. Trump is merely a continuation along the spectrum of institutional white supremacy that liberals have supported or ignored since Bill Clinton’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (as well as his wholly racist “Welfare Reform” and “Tough on Crime” bills). Failing to even go so far as to acknowledge the barbarity of ICE until Trump is in office leaves little moral or political ground to stand on. The extent to which liberals have ignored or even supported the unconstitutional treatment of refugees has enabled a network of nativist abuse built upon an ignorance of history which assuages our collective guilt in destabilizing the countries that these refugees are fleeing from. As we do with slavery and our genocide of the indigenous people and now the Palestinians, we dodge our accountability by marginalizing the victims and projecting blame onto the individual, in this case Trump, instead of the institutions that we have allowed to become malignant in our purposeful dismissal of history and context.

They come here for a better life because we have made their countries unlivable. We have a moral obligation to properly vet and assist those whose countries we have destabilized, the irony being that if we weren’t spending trillions devastating populations around the globe we would not have nearly the number of migrants presenting at our southern border and then of course would have the resources to deal with them humanely.

While Trump directs ICE to sweep immigrants off the street for the crime of pro-Palestinian speech, Democrats are investigating him for insider trading. They will not mention the name of Mahmoud Khalil any of the other pro-Palestinian activists being detained in an ICE facility in Louisiana, a facility notorious for sexual abuse and torture of detainees. When Bernie Sanders supporters approached him regarding the fate of Mahmoud Khalil, he was very cordial until they mentioned Khalil’s name after which he angrily stormed off shouting that he had an upcoming rally. Why would Chris Van Hollen bring so much attention to the case of erroneously deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia yet ignore the cases of Khalil, Hash Tayeh and so many others who have fallen victim to Trump and ICE? Because Garcia’s case might score political points with their base and defending his unconstutional deportation does not threaten AIPAC donor cash. Democrats have failed to take any concrete action to protect those who ICE has abducted under Trump, but they failed to do so under their own administrations as well. They could demand judicial review, genuinely filibuster Republican legislation or appointments (Cory Booker’s grotesquely hypocritical performance was not a filibuster), or even call for an impeachment which in this case would be legitimate. But Democrats and even the few fossilized progressives left in Congress are not interested in protecting immigrants as they applaud monsters like Booker who enable genocide, sell out black college students to AIPAC and instead of protecting “democracy” they are reinforcing its decline. And while it is obvious that Trump’s violations of their rights must be stopped, Democrats are once again left impotent to oppose the xenophobia that they catalyzed back in 1996, then codified institutionally with their eager cofounding of the Department of Homeland Security. Stopping Trump changes little when it comes to the unconstitutional and dehumanizing treatment of immigrants, but he is an easy target for liberals who are haunted by the spectres of their party’s regime change wars that create refugees and the impetus for mass migration. The instant gratification derived from mocking Trump and his obvious transgressions dwarfs the long-term need for the institutional change that Democrats themselves consistently berate.

Nobody as calling to stop the doubling of ICE abductions of primarily Latinos during the Biden administration. Near the end of Biden’s administration ICE was detaining 40,000 poeple per day, many of them legal residents of the US. Perhaps we should thank Trump for finally shedding light upon ICE’s unconstituional practices, because if it wasn’t Trump doing it Democrats and their media would remain silent.

The American Gestapo known as ICE does indeed need to be abolished. The Department of Homeland Security needs to be changed into The Department of Immigrant and Refugee Justice, ramping up administrative, outreach and processing programs which will ultimately lead to much lower demand for “enforcement” and detention. The myths regarding Fentanyl and illegal immigration need to be debunked and the criminalization of immigrants and refugees forcefully rebuked. Unfortunately, such myths serve both parties well in their justification of the systemic failures of our immigration and law enforcement systems, and in their complicity in the use of immigrants as slave labor in the agricultural, foodservice and hospitality sectors. Trump can get away with literally defying the Constitution because the Democrats have not only allowed but embraced the unconstitutional expansion of executive power and the disingenuous application of legal precedent. Getting rid of Trump will not protect South and Central American countries from the CIA’s regime change wars nor will it improve the treatment of immigrants domestically. As long as ICE and CBP exist in their current incarnations, and the inept military-intelligence complex enhances the flow of refugees to our southern border, migrant populations will face intolerable instability at home and be forced to flow to our southern border. It is indeed unfortunate that the “moderate white liberal” much like the “right-wing conservative” is only motivated to take action when they are personally threatened, because in the case of immigrants those liberals have supported the most egregious of human rights violations in the interest of electoral politics.

Trump has taken the torch from Democrats and is pushing the envelope in detaining and deporting green card holders. He has taken the bipartisan precedent of unconstitutional detention and deportation and applied it to those who are here legally but not lawful permanent residents, taking an incremental step forward from his predecessors in open defiance of the constitutional. Liberals who have shrugged at such jingoistic behavior from Democrats are now clutching their pearls as the reach of Trump’s ICE threatens their personal bubble. A media that covered refugees presenting at the southern border as a “crisis” and focused on the inevitable accusations lobbed between the two political parties is now expressing disbelief at Trump’s use of ICE to detain and imprison pro-Palestinian student activists with virtually round the clock coverage. What is being revealed is merely the tip of the ICE—berg as it pertains to that agency’s degenerate behavior, but it is rapidly changing public opinion of ICE. Still, courtesy of Amazon, Google and Microsoft ICE holds a massive cloud database of nearly every US citizen with particular attention to immigrants. This decades long project has been greenlighted by every administration since its inception. If there had been pushback against ICE when there were calls for it to be abolished, or if Democrats had the integrity to call for its abolition, Trump could not use it in such an indiscriminate manner today. But the utter lack of concern for the welfare of immigrants, apart from the brief outrage at Trump’s child separation policy, has led to a moment in which ICE is coming for legal residents who have spoken out against Israel. The bipartisan dual loyalty of our Congress to Israel has placed us in a precarious situation in that the Democrats who demonized and failed to protect student protestors are now unable to protect us against virtually any threat including illegal abduction and detention. As there has been no accountability for previous presidential overreach in the surveillance, detention and deportation arenas, Trump and his ICE henchmen are now free to disobey the courts and detain any of us who speak the truth about Israel or any subject the right-wing finds threatening to white supremacy or ancient books of fiction.

Immigrants protesting Trump’s child separation right? Wrong. In 2016 under Obama there were pockets of protest against his ICE raids separating tens of thousands of families, and the pushback from a handful of progressive Democrats was quickly silenced by Nancy Pelosi. Less than a year later, Trump took Obama’s cruelty one step further in a deliberate pilot child separation program.

If Democrats had a shred of integrity, ICE would have never been invented. But they didn’t and they don’t, and immigrants have been paying a devastating price ever since. Now that they could be coming for “us” and not “them,” liberals are suddenly taking to the streets. As usual, they are too late and their hypocrisy is trying to fight what they previously supported just because it has the potential to affect them personally reveals the fatal flaw in the “sports team” approach to electoral politics. The casualties of the “us versus them” ideology promoted by our media and political parties used to be marginalized communities—not so threatening to the moderate white liberal. Now that ICE could be coming for all of us at the behest of Trump they stand up and take notice. Democrats do nothing. The courts have become irrelevant as there is no enforcement of their rulings. Any politician with integrity, any political party that genuinely wanted to protect us, would have pushed for the abolition of |ICE years ago. We could soon feel the horror that masses of immigrants have felt at the hands of ICE under Democrats and Republicans alike. Maybe then we will unify to actively change the racist systems of enforcement and incarceration that serve against the interests of humanity and common decency. Maybe then we will stop using the excuse that Biden or some other monstrous Democrat is better than Trump, and instead demand a political system independent of the dubious weighing of relative evils that protects the most vulnerable instead of tormenting them. Maybe then we will stop protecting the mass murderers we lionize in our political party in the hopes they will stop the mass murderers we fear from the “other” party. Maybe someday Americans will treat immigrants as a stabilizing asset to our culture rather than a fabricated security threat that serves to fuel fearmongering rhetoric come election time.

Until then we will have to confront the reality that our political system has created a monster in the form of a malignant security state which has turned against us. This is what we deserve for failing to defend the millions of Muslims we have slaughtered overseas and the millions of immigrants whose Constitutional rights have been violated over the past 50 years. Those who didn’t want to “talk about politics” or who claimed they were “fine” with immigrants as long as they were “legal” or who excused the rogue behavior of ICE and CBP because “Trump would be worse” or failed to defend pro-Palestinian student protestors now find themselves potentially on those same crosshairs they disregarded in favor of political expediency. And because of that complicity in immigrant abuse and genocide, the institutions that would protect “them” have been whittled away to the point that they no longer protect “us.” The lack of moral integrity in our politics and punditry leaves us all vulnerable to the same forces that would aid and abet genocide, criminalize anti-war protest, and foment xenophobia.

Politicians who kill Muslims and allow the torture of immigrants with a smile on their face are not going to protect you either. Pundits who ignore genocide and the systemic unconstitional treatment of immigrants are protecting their respective political party and that party’s capital holdings, not us. Unless we are able to unite against the institutions that violate the Constitution and legal precedent all the rallies and “Hands-off” protests will be for naught. As our law enforcement agencies are hell bent on protecting the capital of the ruling class, and the courts are either rigged or have been left bereft of agencies with the integrity to enforce their rulings, it will require violent uprising, mass work stoppages, millions occupying the centers of power in Washington and/or a concerted threat to our representatives working for AIPAC and the private detention industry to change a trajectory of mass surveillance, demonization of protest, unconstitional treatment of migrants and “patriotic” mass murder of innocents overseas that was set in motion decades ago. Cowering to the fear of being disappeared or prosecuted for standing up to protect oppressed populations will only lead to more oppression, just as cowering to Trump has led to his empowerment.

The Biden administration promised to reduce private detention centers and did so on a microscopic level, only to announce in the last 6 months of his administration his intent to expand the private detention system by soliciting for new contracts to build new facilities around the country.

We need to be not only calling out Trump but flooding our representatives with demands to completely revamp and rethink the DHS and their enforcers CBP and ICE, as well as to stop their politically expedient criminalization of immigrants. If we had the foresight to do so decades ago, perhaps Trump’s transgression would “only” be putting kids in cages like Obama, and not deporting legal immigrants for their political ideology. We could never have arrived at this tipping point if liberals and Democrats would have stood up to all unconstitutional treatment of immigrants and not just that of the opposition party. If the Democrats were actually an opposition party we would not have legal residents being abducted for pro-Palestinian speech much less an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. As we speak Democrats are managing protests against Trump to defuse the prospect of civil unrest, anarchy and work stoppages because their oligarchs want a return to the warmongering, anti-Zionist, militaristic austerity liberalism that brought Trump to power in the first place. The cycle of selective moral outrage, rejection of history and context and the protection of politicians who are supposed to be protecting us must end if we truly desire a civil society. To illustrate the futility of the Democratic Party, Senator Chris Murphy has been making the rounds on cable and network “news” condemning Trump’s attacks on universities and journalists and musing that the possibility of civil unrest might serve as an antidote for Trump. This is the same Senator Murphy who amplified Biden and the Republicans accusations that there was a “direct line” between pro-Palestinian protestors ant violent anti-semitism on college campuses, pushed for Biden’s Draconian 2024 immigration bill that gave DHS the ability to shut down the southern border (all in the interest of obtaining billions more in funding for the Gaza genocide and our proxy war in Ukraine), and spread propaganda condemning university administrations for failing to defend Jewish students from antisemitic pro-Palestinian activists (then sided with the firing of unversity presidents!).

Just like Republicans, Democrats use immigrants to their own political advantage. That’s why Chris Van Hollen is meeting with Abrego Garcia who was illegally deported by Trump. Democrats are not doing anything tangible to defend against Trump’s unconstitutionality because they have engaged in similar activities and promoted identical narratives about the threat of immigrants, so Van Hollen is bringing Garcia’s case to the fore in the interest of “fighting Trump.” Democrats have let millions like Garcia fall prey to illegal deportation under Obama and Biden, and have sent children back to almost certain death in their unstable countries of origin, so they have little authentic concern for the human toll taken by such vindictive policies. In affording the illusion of fighting Trump through actions that are not directed towards systemic change, Democrats will continue to make migrants and marginalized populations mere political footballs to be kicked around at opportune moments to optimize the optics of opposition. It is high time the liberal base stops playing pundit and starts to make their representatives aware that their concern is the well-being of immigrant populations and not how benevolence to desperate populations plays with Fox News, The New York Times or Republicans. For those who idealize America as some sort of beacon of democracy, the inscription by Emma Lazarus at the base of The Statue of Liberty did not read "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free and we will deny their asylum rights, torture them and illegally deport them." But that is the bipartisan ideology that has led to this moment partially thanks to precious little pushback from the liberal base. As we coalesce to “stop Trump,” we must be realistic in our assessment of a Democratic Party that has engaged in the most heinous of acts against migrants and marginalized populations here and abroad and understand that if they can completely disregard the humanity of what liberals consider the “other” in their quest for power they will conveniently disregard “ours” as well if it serves their own vested interests. Until we stop compartmentalizing humanity to minimize our dereliction of duty in protecting those displaced and impoverished by our imperialist delusions our collective conscience will be clouded by the guilt of our selective outrage, lashing out against fabricated threats spread by those whose ascent to power belies having any conscience at all.

This is the model practiced by both political parties and their respective medias who are suddenly outraged at the unconstitutional treatment of immigrants. Their moral rot needs to be severed at its root, and the root in our era is the creation of the DHS and its deputies ICE and CBP. Unfortunately, due to the bipartisan demonization of immigrants reinforced by state-run media from NPR to MSNBC, holding rogue enforcement agencies accountable (including the defunding the police) would be deemed political suicide. It is up to us to reset their consciousness, to push back against false narratives about immigrants intended to bolster electoral support through fearmongering and to let your representatives know their substitution of squalid for-profit detention and denial of asylum rights for adequate administrative and security resources is no longer acceptable. Keeping the plight of refugees out of sight and out of mind until the political atmosphere dictates that a case or two be plucked out of the headlines to make an example of the opposing political party has put all of our lives in peril. We either stand up for human rights and dignity or we don’t—there is no middle ground in rationalizing that one person or party would be worse than the other. Liberals who propagandized in favor of genocide and ignored the rampant abuse of migrants are now clutching their pearls because they could indeed be the next sacrifices to the Gods of American Hegemony that they themselves have empowered to the point of impunity. It doesn’t matter and it has never mattered which president or which party is “worse.” But it does matter that both support institutions and that both continue to line up at the teller window of private prison conglomerates, AIPAC and the war profiteers to spread the festering cancer capitalism and white supremacy that has remained unchecked by the courts or the Constitution for decades. Only standing up for the victims of these rogue institutions can turn the tide of inhumanity that has risen to excuse the war crimes and unfathomable cruelty of our ruthless political elite.

The problem with pundits. Liberal voices like Thom Hartmann have to sell dog food to make a living, so to maintain their sponsors and subscriber base they have to preach to the choir but never “circle the wagons.” Hartmann progandandized in favor of Obama in 2016, publishing his pro-immigrant rehtoric while failing to cover his and Hillary Clinton’s cruelty to the unaccompanied children fleeing violence in the global south or his mass ICE raids rounding up migrant families that were initiated just prior to Hartmann’s puff piece on OBama and immigration.

We are suffering the blowback of protecting our politicians instead of protecting those they prey upon for political and personal gain. Suddenly “progressives” like Thom Hartmann, who completely ignored Biden’s expansion of Trump’s Title 42 or Obama’s mass expedited deportations (not to mention the genocide in Gaza), are calling for constituents to contact their representatives to “demand oversight hearings on ICE enforcement.” Oversight hearings. Really. I’m contacting my representatives state and federal to demand they abolish ICE and hold hearings on CBP in the interest of completely revamping and restaffing that department. Just like the Democratic Party’s cowardly response to black activists’ demands to defund the police, with Obama brushing off their policy proposal as a “snappy slogan,” their rejection of demands to abolish ICE morphed into unconditional support for ICE. With the ICE Gestapo even more empowered under Trump, neutering ICE will require far more solidarity than it would have in 2018. Perhaps the fear of being swept away like millions of immigrants over the past 30 years will motivate Biden/Obama neoliberals to re-evaluate the costs of playing pundit to electoral ends versus standing up for justice. It is obligatory to stop Trump of course, but to assure another would-be authoritarian cannot build upon his subversion of due process it is imperative to eradicate ICE, defund the police, and transform our law enforcement institutions from punitive to rehabilitative. The circle jerk of “humorous” memes mocking Trump and Republicans and obsessing about his association with Putin must be replaced by explicit demands to eliminate the institutions that are used to suppress free speech and dampen democracy. This might require anarchy, occcupation of government buildings, massive work stoppages and/or direct intimidation of government officials, but just marching through the streets with signs at the behest of the Democratic Party will not get it done.

Imagine if we spent even half of the $3.5 billion for ICE detention on immigration judges and lawyers, the construction of processing facilities, day care for immigrant children, proper temporary housing facilities and social workers.

The thousands in the streets should have been storming ICE and DHS offices around the country. Maybe next time immigrants are suffering forced sterilization, unconstitutional expedited deportation, living in squalor at the Mexican border, placed in solitary confinement for months at a time, systematically denied their right to asylum and abducted without due process under Democratic presidents liberals will take a stand on moral grounds rather than remaining silent for fear that “Trump will be worse.” Perhaps they won’t so easily dismiss the next genocide or proxy war because “Trump will be worse.” The ignorance fostered by ignoring has been nurtured by a careerist media and political media that has worked exclusively in the interest of oligarchs and transnational corporations, gladly using immigrants as their reserve workforce while opportunistically scapegoating them. It is the windup to the collapse of cancer capitalism that has brought us to the era of Trump and the prospect of outright fascism. Hopefully those who blithely call for the return of Obama or Hillary Clinton will not experience the suffering of those whose plight they blithely ignored because of the looming threat of Trump, but that brand of cowardice leaves us all vulnerable by rewarding those in power for dehumanizing populations and invading countries that are unable to fight back. Those who are currently being abducted by ICE and deported are victims of such cowardice. as well as those in the global south and Middle East subject to bipartisan resource extraction and colonization.

For the game that you have played in pretending your party is morally superior to theirs, in brushing off the demonization of “the other” in the interest of playing cheerleader for a team coopted by the very oligarchs that Bernie Sanders and AOC are currently ostensibly “fighting,” you’re next.