America Is Now The World’s Sundown Town

from the we’ve-come-a-long-way-baby dept

This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren’t white leave the country because they’re not white. And this is according to this administration’s own press release, which celebrates the fact that we’re now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty’s base, which read:

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

That was when America was great… or at least periodically tried to be. This is who we are now:

The Trump administration is on pace to shatter historic records and deport nearly 600,000 illegal aliens by the end of President Donald Trump’s first year since returning to office. Two million illegal aliens have left the United States in less than 250 days, including an estimated 1.6 million who have voluntarily self-deported and more than 400,000 deportations. 

Are these records we want to be “shattering?” This doesn’t sound like America, the melting pot that once used to be a welcoming refuge for those subjected to violence, poverty, political/religious persecution in their home countries. Now, we’re just the nation of Get The Fuck Out, ejecting hard-working non-criminals who commit fewer crimes and pay more taxes than those blessed to be white enough to avoid this ethnic purge that’s been marketed as making this nation “safer.” Leave before ICE comes for you. The alternatives — foreign gulags, war-torn countries, perennial human rights violators — are worse than leaving for your home country before the government goons make this decision for you.

I mean, listen to this fucking bullshit:

“The numbers don’t lie: 2 million illegal aliens have been removed or self-deported in just 250 days— proving that President Trump’s policies and Secretary Noem’s leadership are working and making American communities safe,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you.”

This is a lie. And it’s not even a particularly crafty one. Anyone with half-assed Googling skills could prove this assertion wrong. Most immigrants don’t commit criminal acts, and those who do commit criminal acts do it at a rate that’s far lower than that of natural-born citizens of this country.

ICE pretends that it’s doing God’s work (literally pretends, lest you think otherwise) but all it’s really doing is targeting people because of their skin color and depriving them of their due process rights.

ICE’s own stats make it clear that every word coming out of the government’s mouth in reference to immigration enforcement is a lie, not that this administration gives a single fuck whether or not anyone thinks it’s lying.

Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.

[…]

According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.

Everyone knows the government doesn’t really care whether you have a criminal record or not. The constant pressure from the administration to increase daily arrests means that being a migrant and/or having brown skin makes you a target. The message has been sent: only whites are welcome here. That’s why people are self-deporting. And that’s why the data shows ICE has long since run out of the “worst of the worst” to target:

If you combine the two non-criminal numbers (those without a criminal charge and those who have not been convicted), it’s a 2:1 ratio to immigrants who are actually convicted criminals. These are the actions of a regime that is no longer content to wrap itself in the flag while shitting on long-held American ideals. Now, it’s trying to pretend that doing the worst it can to the “least of my brethren” is doing the Lord’s work — that somehow the God that defined himself with single word in the Bible (“love”) would condone the relentless cruelty that is Trump’s mass deportation program.

We’re being robbed of a better future — not just because this administration has demonstrated the system of checks and balances is irrevocably flawed, but also because we’re actively hunting and ejecting some the most wonderful, hardest-working people in this nation: people who came to this country because it was still the Land of Opportunity. And the only thing this administration is demonstrating to people all over the world is that the United States can be just as awful as nations we can only now condemn hypocritically.

Filed Under: cruelty, dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, trump administration