Worst of the Worst Update
Reality v. unreality.
I can understand the desire that most Americans have to want non-citizens who commit violent crimes to be removed from the country. Indeed, I agree that the focus of immigration enforcement should be in that arena. But it is clearly the case that this is not what the current administration is doing. Instead, as Axios noted back in May, Stephen Miller, Noem tell ICE to supercharge immigrant arrests. The reported goal has been to deport at least 3,000 a day, which requires lots of arrests.
The problem is that there aren’t that many violent criminals to apprehend.
Nonetheless, it has been a hallmark of Trump’s rhetoric to paint immigrants as dangerous. His infamous Golden Escalator speech included the following lines that will go down as helping to define an era in American politics.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
I could spend all morning, and perhaps well into the afternoon, detailing example after example of how he constantly paints immigrants as being part of an “invasion” of gang members and/or terrorists. He calls them disease-ridden, vermin, and/or duplicitous venomous snakes ready to bite the American people, and who “are poisoning the blood of our country.”
It is truly relentless. And it feeds into preexisting fears and prejudices about foreigners that already lurk in the broader American psyche. A leader can either try and draw out the better angels of our collective thoughts or they can try and call forth dark, demonic forces.
It is not hard to document Trump’s clear preference for stoking the dark side.
And all of this is Trump and his cohorts building unreality.
But the reality isn’t that immigrants are a bunch of disease-ridden, gang-affiliating terrorists who commit violent crimes. And we are not rounding up and deporting the worst of the worst.
Instead, our government is pepper-spraying gardeners. And speaking of “unreality,” the video that DHS posts to purportedly show him attacking ICE officers is just a guy running away from a clearly frightening situation, reportedly after he was pepper-sprayed. They don’t want us to believe our lying eyes.
The man weed-eating the IHOP parking lot is 48-year-old Narciso Barranco. He is undocumented, although he has lived in the US since the 1990s. He has no criminal record.
Now look, I get it, he lacks a legal basis for living in the US. But first, he is far from the “worst of the worst” and does not fit, at all, into the way Trump describes immigrants. Second, is this the appropriate way for our government to deal with someone like Barranco?
Who is safer as a result of this action?
What is made better by this action?
Was this the best expenditure of federal resources?
More from the “Worst of the Worst” file.
- Via Public Notice: Trump’s secret police are terrorizing American streets.
- Via Christianity Today: ICE Goes After Church Leaders and Christians Fleeing Persecution.
- Via The Guardian: Iranian woman, who has lived in US for 47 years, taken by Ice while gardening.
Kashanian arrived in the US in 1978 on a student visa and later applied for asylum, citing fears of persecution due to her father’s ties to the US-backed Shah of Iran. Her asylum request was ultimately denied, but she was granted a stay of removal on the condition she comply with immigration requirements, a condition her family says she always met.
- Another recent example.
Whatever we want to call all of this, it isn’t targeting the “worst of the worst,” and it isn’t making us safer.
It is, however, causing a lot of human suffering. And it costs lots of money and diverts federal resources away from doing things that might, in fact, be a public good. Note that the legislative package that is about to be sent to Trump cuts Medicaid but funnels billions into ICE.
We need immigration reform in the US, but the debate really isn’t about safety. It is about whether the US wants to make it easier for people to have actual pathways towards legal status or whether we want xenophobic approaches to enforcement, to include anonymous ICE agents grabbing gardeners out of parking lots or middle-aged ladies out of their front yards.
They’re getting the cannibals off the streets.
I think the utter transparency of the lies is deliberate and meant to make people give up — if the government is powerful enough to flatly lie to your face, and the absurdness of the falsehood changes nothing, then what hope do you have of opposing them (you degenerate cannibal).
There’s a quote from the comic book Sin City (and subsequent movie) about power and lies that I like to quote, but I’m feeling lazy.
You’re not seeing the bigger picture: If we allow pathways to citizenship/legal status to migrants and others, who is going to work for the substandard wages and in the unsafe conditions that our our food production industry requires to maximize profits and shareholder value?
The sadism and ruthlessness is by design. These guys don’t just threaten democracy, they threaten civilization.
Literally the worst of the worst can be found every now and then in DC attending cabinet meetings.
So what is the number of criminals, gang members, drug traffickers, rapists and sex trade traffickers acceptable to you?
It comes with the territory.
But at least your avocados are cheap.
@Connor: “So what is the number of criminals, gang members, drug traffickers, rapists and sex trade traffickers acceptable to you?”
You first: What is the number of innocent men, women and children rounded up and sent to foreign torture prisons acceptable to you?
@wr: Any number that gets “the” drug traffickers, etc. off the street without raising the price of avocados?
@Connor: while the effort to hide the vastly larger number of non-criminals affected in favor of focusing on the much smaller number of criminals is notable, this is actually an excellent question. It is certainly a number greater zero since getting to zero would not be worth the resource expenditure to get there. This is actually true of many quality control areas. What criteria would you suggest to begin to define the acceptable level?
@Connor: Ha. Who are you obedient bootlicking Trump slaves kidding?
Rightwingers support criminal rapist Trump: who bragged about sexually assaulting women, publicly sexualized his own then-underage daughter, praised his sex trade trafficking best buddy Epstein for liking “younger” women, incited a terror attack on Congress then pardoned the violent cop beating Jan 6 gang thugs, wanted sex trafficking crackhead Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and put drug addicted illegal immigrant Elon Musk in charge of mass firings.
The right cheers MAGA in all this while justifying expats and migrants who are not rapist felon pedo perverts (like Trump is) being disappeared without due process.
You’re an anti-American fraud. Conservatives love Republican criminals, rapists, druggies, and sex traffickers. Y’all just hate the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution.
@wr:
So. Much. This.
@Connor: Defend what’s written about in the post instead of spouting off about hypothetical safety.
Don’t be an asshole.
One of my PhD students has a brother who was recently assaulted and snatched by ICE agents wearing their now-standard face coverings etc. This occurred as he was walking out of a department store, middle of the day, with his two kids (9 and 11 yo).
He was held in a local facility, then transferred to a different facility out of state, held there for several more days (the timeline is uncertain), and then deported to Mexico in the most haphazard way (think: taking out the garbage).
His kids were held in a local facility, as there was no other family* in the area that could come get them. They were finally able to contact their aunt (my student) who as able to drop everything, travel a not insignificant distance across state lines, and get the kids who are now living with her. They were/are traumatized, as one might expect.
Their aunt (my student) and her husband are now in the process of gaining legal custody over the two kids, transferring their lives to a new home and state, getting the kids the needed mental health care, etc.
I’m so fucking disgusted!
*My student’s brother (the deported man) has been raising these kids on his own after some tragedy befell their mother several years ago. He works full-time, contributes to his community, all the good things.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You might as well ask him to fly to Mars by flapping his arms.
Please tell me I’m crazy, but I looked at the numbers ($8-20 billion -> $170 billion in one year) and instantly came to the conclusion that the goal of this insane amount of money is not to deport non-citizens (though that’s bad enough), but to create an extra-judicial secret police with the power to detain and deport any enemies of the president. The deportations to El Salvador and South Sudan and the challenges to return people mistakenly deported are about setting a precedent that ICE exists outside the law. That’s why they’re not allowing senators and congresspeople into their facilities. That’s why there’s no apologies for grabbing citizens. It’s all a test run.
I hope I’m completely wrong but I think illegal immigration is just the excuse for an internal paramilitary organization with unconstitutional powers reporting entirely to the president.
(In a Columbo voice…)
Sure… Arresting illegals and people that break the law… I get that. Thanks for you time, I’ll be going now.
Just one more thing: if we are arresting these people for braking the laws… then when do we see their employers get arrested?
———————–
Here in Florida, in the next county over in Escambia, ICE raided the construction site of the new High School that is being built. Many were arrested for being undocumented.
But… Florida Statute 448.09 specifically prohibits employing, hiring, recruiting, or referring an alien who is not authorized to work by U.S. immigration laws.
So were are all the old white guys managing and contracting being handcuffed and frog marched? Nope.
A different example: In west panhandle TX, there are MASSIVE meat processing plants that hire a lot of people. The local Walmart there really has no one that speaks English.
And teh law there? “it is illegal in Texas for employers to knowingly hire or continue to employ individuals who are not authorized to work in the United States. This is prohibited under both federal and state law. Employers who violate these laws can face both civil and criminal penalties.”
So: why are the executives of JBS Foods not being arrested for breaking TX law? JBS… a MASSIVE global company, clearly breaking the law.
@Crusty Dem: That’s the thing. Eventually there won’t be any migrants to deport. What happens then? You don’t spend $150 billion on a tool and then just leave it lying in the toolbox.
I mean, the Empire didn’t put the Death Star in mothballs after it blew up Alderaan, you know?
@Mimai:
As well you should be.
How awful.
@Crusty Dem:
Not gonna tell you you’re crazy. That money will be a huge windfall for private prison companies that set up and operate new ICE detention/prison camps. And to populate the camps, it’s money to hire thousands of enforcers from among whatever is the pool of available candidates to scoop up detainees. The focus may be non-citizens, but expect the already-happening citizen detentions to accelerate for reasons that will not be explained. I’m not yet concerned about that happening to me, but maybe I should be, as political donation histories and organization affiliations are used against people. Then enforcers could come knocking at (or no-knock entering) my door, or yours.
A song comes to mind… “You too will meet the secret police. They’ll draft you and they’ll jail your niece.”
@Connor:
You are literally choosing repeating the exact same type of rhetoric that helped fuel things like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and Black lynchings to own the libs.
That doesn’t reflect well on you.