Last week a woman was burned alive on a subway in NYC. I wrote about the role of “the bystander effect” in the ensuing public discourse and how the psychology of that phenomenon has similarly poisoned white political activism.
As a matter of mental healthcare I don’t engage with right wing media of any kind, but I don’t need to engage to know a certainty: they are sensationally politicizing the attacker’s undocumented immigrant status to further stoke the flames of their racist immigration policy goals. The facts of this event—an already once-deported, undocumented Guatemalan immigrant committing a brutal and unprovoked murder—are heaven-sent to the reactionary media circus.
You ought to know by now that the “migrant crime” stats and all of the attached racist anti-immigration messaging, now endorsed by both parties following Harris’s disastrous CNN town hall earlier this year, are completely baseless. That’s not going to stop “MAGA media” from cynically wringing this murder for every drop of political capital they can get.
The deportation threats have been a particularly alarming development for me in the months following the election results. Having already lived through a Trump presidency, I know how hard it is to sift through what he does and doesn’t mean, or what is or isn’t achievable. I want to remind people that when it comes to immigration, he means it and it is achievable.
Considering the Democrats’ complete abandonment of the kids in cages stuff the second it became politically inconvenient, it can be easy to forget that whole sickening sequence of events totally happened. There was footage of it and everything. Every time Trump gets on television and spews his fascist rhetoric against marginalized communities, hate crimes targeting those communities skyrocket. There is a human cost to even allowing these conversations to take place, let alone the actions they promise.
A couple weeks after the election, the Texas Land Commissioner published an open letter offering the Trump administration 1,400 acres of land on which to build “a facility […] for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history,” with the definition of “violent criminals” likely to be open to broad interpretation. While a few Democratic state leaders with a spine have spoken in opposition to Trump’s intentions, most blue governors are completely silent. I live in a southern state home to at least 300,000 migrants, many of whom I work with every day, and our blue governor hasn’t said a word.
I don’t know what this coordinated deportation plan will look like. Will federal agents be going door to door, searching homes and checking people’s papers like Nazi Germany? Will folks be incentivized to turn on their neighbors with cash rewards, or threatened with federal espionage charges? Trump has made clear his intent to declare a state of emergency and functional Martial Law in order to use the military to execute his plans, whatever they may be.
This immigration shit is all bad. Latin Americans are targeted by violent hate crimes and discrimination. Families are ripped apart and traumatized. Financially, every new crackdown cost states hundreds of millions in agricultural losses. I regard this issue as a matter of urgency and it’s the policy issue that personally scares me the most.
Our undocumented immigrants are abused by the system. They’re subjected to abusive labor wages to do shitty jobs and pay taxes just like you, but they have no institutional protections; and they’re being targeted by the nakedly terroristic goals of our president and his fanatical followers. MAGA hats are the new Brown Shirts and border states are building fucking concentration camps.
As the NYC subway attack feeds into this crescendo of fascist resurgence in the weeks building up to the election, your Latin American brothers and sisters need your help. You need to be a physical human body standing between them and harm, and tragic as it is, that lady getting burned alive doesn’t change that.