Notice a lot of Latinos for Trump are silent these days. Or maybe they’re hiding. If so, a damned smart move.
Perhaps they’re finally grasping what had been mentioned from the jump: while he campaigned on cracking down against illegal immigration, Donald Trump’s eventual pivot would be to harry landed Latino Americans. Naturally Latinos for Trump scoffed.
He aimed his campaign rhetoric against “those people.” At its plainest his crude appeal became “every nation has the right to choose who it allows and denies entry.” True. There should be no disputing that.
But who foresaw the brazen cruelty which had been first applied then expanded as these rotten Second Trump term months have crawled along? Who knowingly voted for this?
When the repression started against illegal aliens and Latinos no matter the legality of their status got caught up in dragnets, Latinos for Trump pooh-poo’ed the “inconvenience.” More than one had said, “I just show my ID and I’m good to go.”
Not so fast.
As we’ve learned across the last several months, often nothing short of an American passport may spring landed Latinos from ICE arbitrariness. Daily we learn of native-born Latinos entwined in ICE’s clutches because their drivers’ licenses are deemed insufficient proof of citizenship or outright false. Mind, these are state-issued IDs. Unless getting a license has changed so dramatically, most applicants show birth certificates (with raised seals) or passports in order to prove citizenship and identification. Wave an ultraviolet wand over the disputed article and it’s verified.
Yet ICE intransigence refuses using this simple method.
In case Latinos haven’t been paying attention, and after all that’s transpired and will, one might think now is the time to start if they haven’t, Trump’s criminal administration seeks to make the lives of all Latinos wearying. Doesn’t matter if the American lineages of the put-upon were established during the Spanish possession of the Southwest.
In topsy-turvy America, citizens who maybe can trace their “Americanness” starting at Ellis Island at the earliest want to have say on who belongs here. Imagine that. Someone whose American bona fides barely brush 1900 doubting the veracity of an American whose New World legacy trails back to the 15- or 1600s.
While a vast percentage of American Latinos are hesitant on the way to fearful about being swept up in the ICE grinder, they must cast reluctance and fear aside. Today, that necessity is now more urgent than ever.
ICE has dropped the mask, so to speak, and cast aside any pretense of adherence to justice. Though the agency’s mandate is clearly the pursuit of illegally present foreigners, Supreme Court decisions have given it carte blanch to apprehend and detain the brown complected who speak Spanish.
The United States once had prohibitions on such arbitrary enforcement. It’s a sad day for our nation when the land’s highest court capriciously brushes off fairness and justice for all simply to promote biases favoring only a distinct few.
Because once ICE and its accessories finish with illegals, the agency will indiscriminately hound landed Latinos. Using that segment of our populace’s deference to authority against them, an even less fettered ICE will use every means to undermine and thereby delegitimize American Latinos’ citizenship.
American Latinos believe the illegal immigrants’ fight is not theirs. On the surface, no.
After all, being law-abiding and submissive to servility, tradition, and convention as most American Latinos are regarded, has justified to them the purpose behind the advertised manhunts. Remember, initially ICE was to pursue and scour our country of the criminal elements within the illegal alien masses.
Who could disagree with that?
However, knowing what a liar, thief, sexual abuser, and traitor the grifter in chief is, only Latinos who didn’t know him or didn’t know enough not to take him at his word could’ve believed he’d limit his efforts against those unlawfully in the United States.
During his three presidential campaigns, Donald Trump blustered the simplest appeals. Just what those frustrated with the complicated demands of modern life want to hear. The scab promised work. The pig promoted family. The First Felon proclaimed faith.
Indeed, a fakir who’s never worked an honest day during his cushy life; a cur whose lurid adulteries filled thousands of seamy tabloid columns; a charlatan whose only belief insofar as faith is insincerity presented with utmost conviction will sway those who somehow otherwise accept truths skeptically.
To Latinos, the Trump Election 2024 campaign made a mantra of work, family, faith. However, it left out the sole characteristic which ties them all together. Dignity. Not once did the pig or his MAGA-infected Republican Party mention dignity. Instead, the GOP hammered attributes when taken to extremes can stifle questioning, dissent, and inquiry.
The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer – it wanted Latinos to stay in a box, to live in that box, to have no desire to escape that box.
Comfortable options for people who don’t want to contend with an increasingly challenging world. Not that Latinos necessarily want to be forced to fit in the mold. But isn’t life “easier” when being told how to live? It saves any effort behind thinking, perhaps sinning, then the shame of atoning.
Having found succor in the simple pleas of a conniver like the scab now may have Latinos confronting an existential menace where none existed a year ago – will their Americanness be lessened or stripped altogether under this crooked administration? That isn’t fanciful. There’s never been any shortage of Anglos who’ve disputed Latinos’ being rightful United States citizens. Again, that despite having established themselves in what would become the American Southwest long before the first non-Iberian crossed into the region.
What’s quite dispiriting is Anglo America had moved from the slanders and slurs through which it had commonly disparaged Latinos. “Wetback” had become so infrequently heard that hearing it quickly drew sour attention. And only the most ignorant whites, so ignorant their pride in the title let them wear that badge as if it an honor, reflexively ask fellow Americans their places of birth or baldly skip to the chase saying, “Why don’t you go back to your country?”
This from people glorying in arrivals here in the New World of their own ancestors several generations ago and extolling watered-down ethnicity at the expense of being “American.” True Americans owe no thanks to the Queens mook for resuming full roar to attitudes decent Americans had fought hard to stigmatize and shame into silence.
As other groups who’ve been persecuted, landed Latinos must be hoping this storm, a particularly vicious one forecast to target them, will blow over or exert itself into nothing. Rather than being forced to fight when it’s upon them, they’re likely hoping they’re somehow spared menace.
Their plight is dissimilar to that of the Biblical Israelites who daubed their doors with blood. Despite dispensing Old Testament-lite travails, the degenerate soiling the Oval Office is no pharaoh. Instead, American Latinos are one day closer to becoming indiscriminate bullseyes of weak, insecure men who see them as less than human. And as such, feel zero need to treat them humanely.
Social media abounds with comments from deplorables praising ICE for its Gestapo ruthlessness. Reading these, one can’t help but feel the wrong kind of encouragement is being expressed. As if seeking better lives, albeit outside any proper paperwork and stamps, earns harsh retribution.
It takes nothing to see the degenerates enjoying ICE’s terrorism in the same manner as ancient Romans who wiled away idle hours delighting in blood sport spectacles. This modern audience sits in the arena of internet anonymity, yes. But instead of witnessing gladiators battle, our modern Romans instead look upon illegal immigrants filling the victim roles of Christians, their masked tormentors two-legged lions.
Be assured the cruelty we see ICE and its helpmates practice on immigrants – immaterial their status – is precursor to what will strike landed Latinos. Won’t it be harder on American Latinos because of the white righteousness driving it?
Mind, few Americans are displeased by the deportation of illegal immigrants. They are in the United States unlawfully. And yes, it is jarring watching acquaintances – short term or long term – being collected for shipment who knows where. Particularly so for those who’ve lived and worked among us for years, if not decades.
Landed citizens seeing this wonder why hadn’t the illegals taken any of the many avenues towards citizenship? Rather than living surreptitiously below radar, why didn’t they avail themselves to legal paths of living here aboveboard? Just stepping out of the shadows and leading easier lives should’ve been motivation enough. Furthermore, as American citizens they could then look forward to enjoying accrued benefits to which their taxes have contributed yet remain inaccessible because of their status.
Here’s a disclaimer for any MAGAs: No, non-citizens do not receive benefits such as social security, Medicare, and have no voting rights. By the way, Puerto Ricans are Americans.
However, what’s angering more and more landed citizens are the Gestapo tactics ICE applies against those it hounds and imprisons. Watching Trump’s masked marauders while they roughly round up day laborers, gardeners, street vendors, car washers, nursery schoolteachers, high school students, factory workers, and farm laborers, one might wonder how the gainfully employed and schoolkids could pose such dangers to American society. Particularly when they add to the revenue stream.
How are they so deserving of ICE’s cruelty and malice?
Again, unlike Americans eligible for public assistance, illegal aliens cannot draw from that same well. Adults must work. Social services are denied them.
What’s occurring against illegal aliens isn’t supposed to be applied against anyone in the United States, much less people whose crimes are at most misdemeanors.
We’ve constructed laws and procedures which prohibit, okay, ought to prohibit, the randomness seen visited by ICE targets. Yet are too many of us accustoming ourselves to others beset by routine terror? Are shock factors waning? Does our disgust still boil? Or does it merely simmer now?
By writing “our” only true Americans are meant, not MAGAs estranged from decency.
Trump’s crooked conduct against illegal immigrants has permitted a thankfully small segment of Americans to sideline its humanity and concur with his edicts. Although emergent from immigrant stock themselves, they’re incapable of empathizing with people their own immigrant ancestors would recognize, whose initial difficulties many shared in our New World.
Of course, the favorite standby is their predecessors “did it the right way.” That neatly cuts out that for quite a while the United States had a fluid naturalization process. For almost a century after Independence, foreign seekers of better lives simply deboarded ships and entered American society. Easy enough for them to walk through the Golden Door after claiming theirs “good character” with “intentions to apply for citizenship.”
Only much later as our Republic developed did naturalization assume the obstacles most of today’s landed Americans couldn’t pass if they needed to apply for or confirm citizenship. In America, naturalized citizens have better grasps of our nation. Left to the native born, we’d be living in capricious states. Like now.
Perhaps our country will be spared worse. But if the administration declares no limits, giving ICE and other federal agencies license to roam and arrest at will, might Americans Latinos be too incredulous to repulse the same indignities against them as set upon illegals? Once more, indoctrinated into deference to authority by obedience will those put-upon masses push back? Will they defend themselves? Will they fight the Anglos intending to reduce their stature as citizens in these United States?
Or will Latinos submit, accepting Anglos’ imposed status of “second class, lower rung personhood”?
One hopes if it comes to push, American Latinos will shove back. Hard. Then again to leave the matter an unanswered “What if?” question, it’s advised they take up the cudgel now and stand beside the illegals, the strangers. Just to demonstrate readiness and resolve to dissuade the same attention from dropping on them. Showing assistance today may make resistance unnecessary tomorrow.
There is no safety on the sidelines. Just anticipation of when your turn arrives.
No one responsible suggests ICE’s unlawfulness be met with the same mindlessness. Americans do have recourses to express their displeasure with the apparatus’ heavy-handedness.
But the time demands something must be done.
History is replete with what befell hounded groups who chose passivity in the face of threat, who chose “going along to get along” instead of struggle. Though it seems a tepid response, videos documenting ICE’s abuses are effective. Upload them on the web and let these damning incidents run on loops as they loop the world. Images of ICE violence tarnish the United States. In this disgraceful administration spavined notions froth again. None of the dumbbells around Fat Caesar understand the imagery tarring the American brand is akin to the 1960s scenes that would kneecap segregationalists hellbent to “keep blacks in their place.”
The prior era’s grainy black and white broadcasts beamed across our country greatly changed mainstream America’s general incuriousness towards a segment that when considered at all was preferred to have been kept marginalized. Seen and absorbed nightly, the state-sanctioned repression ran counter to what most viewers believed our nation’s ideals. Moreover, seeing the attempts at suppression, the clashes aftermaths, made good portions of TV-watching bystanders understand their own silence complicit in acquiescence.
To those earlier viewers what they watched registered as un-American. Viewers of today should feel the same disenchantment with America when watching ICE apprehend then frog-march whoever has been netted into detention centers.
Images beamed during the 60s implicated viewers as accomplices. It made growing masses of Americans realize they disapproved of denying fellow Americans their rights. That raised multitudes of once unheard voices against actions being done supposedly at their behest.
Besides recording ICE-instigated violence then letting these scenes circle the globe, civil disobedience is another method to protest authority’s abuse. Knowing the possible penalties beforehand, civil disobedience requires strength, discipline.
Though the causes are often just, the measures through which the system reacts are often flagrant. Peaceful as these protests are, the state’s arm too frequently replies viciously. One might see the brutality against those being arrested best suited for street hoods than neighbors fed up with injustice.
Maybe the responding officers share protesters’ sentiments. Yet weighted by badges might the duly sworn feel their disproportional manhandling the only way to salve being in the wrong?
Say this for the scab and his goon squads, they’ve selected the right non-Anglos to beat down. American Latinos do not have a civil rights movement lifting them in the American pantheon. Moreover, they lack the willingness to make victimhood just as costly or painful for tormenters.
Los Angeles, Newark, and Detroit. Three cities which remain vivid reminders in an America plunging in deeper thrall to the hording of prosperity. Those three cities should remind the sinister figures strategizing above us how flammable symbols of wealth are.
Of what may occur when power disregards dignity.
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