In an interchange on my post about arresting the spouses of American citizens who had arrived at their legally required green card interviews, long-time commenter and one-time OTB contributor, Bill Jempty, asked in terms of view on ICE, “What’s different now?” Bill posited that “ICE’s actions are being reported by the previously apathetic media.”*
Now, I am in agreement that ICE’s behavior in the past did not always receive adequate scrutiny. For example, I have thought about the fact that the conditions at detention facilities used in Louisiana and elsewhere by ICE predate the Trump administration and that our lack of attention to those facilities has been a national blind spot. I can’t recall if I have written that thought down here at the site (I know I have mentioned it in personal conversation with both Kingdaddy and Michael Bailey). There is much to criticize about American immigration policies that have nothing to do with Trump.
Still, I think that a lot has changed under this administration, and several thoughts came to mind this morning in regards to Bill’s question as I was working in the yard. There are manifest ways to answer the question that would take multiple posts, but apropos of my linked post above, a key change has been a distinct anti-foreigner, white nationalist, and, indeed, neo-Hitlerian ideology within the administration at the highest levels.
A clear example of this came from the Deputy White House Chief of Staff (the person responsible for insisting on quotas from ICE agents) just a few days ago.
Here is Miller on Twitter, berating the WSJ editorial board for suggesting that America owes people who help us in foreign wars after those wars are over, as well as making what would have once been a universally accepted idea in at least polite American politics that collective blame shouldn’t be a thing.
Note that Miller is not just saying specific immigrants are a problem, but that their “descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” In other words, there is something inherent to specific people groups that leads to bad outcomes. This is about as racist as it gets, and I call it “neo-Hitlerian” because it directly replicates Hitler’s views on race from Mein Kampf. It is the notion that some people groups are inherently good, while other people groups are inherently bad.
I noted Miller’s foray into this line of thinking in my post about Miller’s speech at the Kirk memorial: Echoes of Mein Kampf.
To quote that post:
Hitler wrote the following:*
All the human culture, all the results of are, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.
[…]
If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan would be representative of the first group…He provides the mightiest building stones and plans for all human progress… (315).
Hitler puts “Asiatics” in the category of culture-bearers, but firmly places Europeans and Americans (of the white, US variety), i.e., Western civilization, in the category of “Aryan peoples” (315).
And, of course, Jews, whom he calls “The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan” (318), belong to the culture-destroying group. He states that “the Jew possesses no culture-creating force of any sort” (319). He also notes “Negroes” as part of the problem and how Jews brought them to the Rhineland with “the clear aim of ruining the hated white race” (322). *** Elsewhere, he also rails against Gypsies and homosexuals, but I don’t think those specifics are in the excerpt I am quoting from.
The footnotes and further explanation are in the post, which is a fairly lengthy one. But make no mistakes, the tweet above cleaves directly into this line of thinking: white Americans are good not because they adhere to American ideals, they a good and adhere to American ideals because they are white. Therefore, for people like Miller, nonwhites and their descendants can’t be good or adhere to American ideals.
I also noted in another post, Some Disturbing Puzzle Pieces, the linkages of all of this to ICE:
If one rejects the notion that we are a creedal nation (i.e., one based on ideas rather than ethnicity and bloodline), then one has to pick another basis, hence the reference to “ancestors.” Once one starts down this road, we will find ourselves talking about people groups (race/ethnicity) and “culture” rather than creedal statements like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” “e plubibus unum,” and “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” among others.
[…]
Note that the gutting of USAID resulted in spending cuts of around $60 billion. And with this consequence, as per NPR: Study: 14 million lives could be lost due to Trump aid cuts.
It is a plain ideological choice to determine that saving lives globally is not worth spending these dollars, but spending far more than that amount on arresting middle-aged women, gardeners, and day laborers.
They can tell us that they are just rounding up violent criminals and enhancing public safety, and many Americans will believe them. But what they are plainly doing is applying a specific ideological framework to immigrants (with exceptions made to those of a certain hue) and in an attempt to redefine what a “real” American is. I would note, too, that removing Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of persons is just a means to make it easier to round them up and send them to places like Alligator Alcatraz via the security apparatus that Congress just funded.
Empowering masked agents who target ethnic groups using fear as a tactic so that they can be sent to camps with diminished or absent due process–what does that sound like to you, dear reader?
So, while you will get no argument from me that there are plenty of things in our past to criticize about border and immigration policy generally, and ICE specifically, some things have, in fact, changed of late, and it is not just reporting. And having a clearly fascist person with neo-Hitlerian views about race and culture directing those policies is definitely one of them.
*Based on some of our interactions, I recognize that it is possible that Bill will interpret this post as somehow “at” him as opposed to a sincere response to a question, and as such, I almost didn’t write it. But I honestly think that we need to be constantly reminded about the political reality of people like Stephen Miller.
