{"id":68438,"date":"2024-10-30T16:03:36","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T23:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=68438"},"modified":"2024-10-30T16:03:36","modified_gmt":"2024-10-30T23:03:36","slug":"from-law-and-order-to-a-racist-national-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=68438","title":{"rendered":"From \u2018Law and Order\u2019 to a Racist National Agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Pilar Marrero<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The undercurrent of hatred and racism behind anti-immigrant policies over the last 35 years has been exposed in the platform of a certain Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Wikimedia photo, Creative Commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Leer en espa\u00f1ol<\/a><\/p>\n

Not too long ago, American politicians\u2014mostly Republicans, with a few Democrats\u2014denied that their \u201ctough\u201d positions against immigrants had anything to do with race or ethnicity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a matter of racism,\u201d they assured us, \u201cit\u2019s a matter of legality, of enforcing the laws of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their focus, they argued, was on deporting those who commit crimes, while protecting citizens and legal residents, and those immigrants who \u201cdid things the right way\u201d by coming to this country legally.<\/p>\n

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 \u201claw and order,\u201d has been exposed in the platform of a certain Donald J. Trump, whose personal disdain for minorities is more than evident.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s been made sufficiently clear in recent weeks\u2014on top of everything that\u2019s happened over the last few years\u2014that Donald Trump\u2019s third presidential campaign and the MAGA movement generally don\u2019t bother with these distinctions.<\/p>\n

Instead, what we hear from Trump and those who support him at his events is this: \u201cWe (the United States) have become the depository of the world\u2019s garbage\u201d; \u201cVenezuela is opening its prisons and sending us its rapists and criminals\u201d; \u201can island of garbage floats in the sea, and it\u2019s called Puerto Rico,\u201d Haitians in Springfield eat cats and dogs, and Black Americans use watermelons instead of pumpkins for Halloween.<\/p>\n

The list of stereotypes and clich\u00e9s coming from Trump and his allies grows more radical, but the evidence of Trump\u2019s racism is not new. He made it clear when he launched his first campaign in 2015 and continued for years: \u201cMexico isn\u2019t sending their best, they are bringing crime, they\u2019re bringing drugs, they\u2019re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people,\u201d his comments about Central American and African nations as \u201cshithole countries,\u201d his \u201cscientific\u201d insight in declaring COVID as \u201cthe Chinese virus,\u201d unleashing a wave of hate crimes against the Asian American community not seen in decades, and his \u201csecurity-related\u201d ban on thousands of Muslims entering the U.S. are all just older exhibits attached to the continued mountain of evidence.<\/p>\n

But his new promises go beyond deporting \u201cillegals.\u201d Now it\u2019s about making \u201clegals\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Central to his campaign promises are the mass deportations of \u201cbetween 12 and 21 million immigrants\u201d that will begin \u201cfrom day one.\u201d There\u2019s also the notion that separating families during deportations isn\u2019t necessary \u201csince we can deport the whole family,\u201d as Tom Homan, the former ICE director under Trump, clearly explained last week on \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d This will include anyone indiscriminately caught in the net, whether or not they\u2019re citizens or legal residents.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re talking about another, much larger, \u201cOperation Wetback,\u201d 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 \u201cdetention camps,\u201d along with the investment of billions of dollars in a program unprecedented in the modern world.<\/p>\n

The human, familial, and economic devastation is indescribable and would become a historic curse for this country.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I wonder, though, if those Latinos voting for Trump understand what they\u2019re doing. If, as journalist Paola Ramos suggests in her study on the Latino far-right, \u201cmany Latinos don\u2019t believe that Trump is talking about them when he says what he says.\u201d When we hear that disillusioned Black men are turning to Trump as an alternative, or when nationalist groups talk about \u201cexpelling immigrants and protecting our way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many say it without hesitation: \u201cProtect the white heritage of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Latinos and other racial minorities who believe that Trump\u2019s plans don\u2019t include them and who only want \u201cto improve the economy\u201d or \u201crecover the jobs that illegals take from us\u201d will face a rude awakening when they realize that the vision of the country their admired leader holds doesn\u2019t include them either.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Pilar Marrero is a journalist and writer. In 2012, she published the book El Despertar del Sue\u00f1o 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.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ByPilar Marrero Oct 30, 2024 The...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ca-local","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68439,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68438\/revisions\/68439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}