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Showing posts from January, 2025

The deporting that isn't

What the Trump administration is doing is not deporting. Sure, there have been some deportations, done in a stupidly-expensive way . But getting 11 million people back to their country of origin is a logistical nightmare. We know Trump is terrible at logistics given, for example, how he still owes money to El Paso for his 2020 campaign . He can't even get the money where it's supposed to go. How do we expect him to get people where they are "supposed" to go?  Frankly, I do not. And neither does Trump. His current plan is to use GITMO to house his detainees. [ source ] Of course, he doesn't call them "detainees" or "immigrants." No, he calls them "criminal illegal aliens." Note the dehumanizing speech, one of Trump's specialties. But also note that GITMO is not returning someone to their country of origin. It's detaining them under US control. Much as I don't think the idea of deporting immigrants to be just, at least it do...

The problem with "Mass Deportations"

The person who asked about why I think the plans for "mass deportations" are like the Nazi plans for the Jews agrees that the idea is meritless and impractical. It's always nice to have some common ground.  First, some talk about how the right has been whipping up anti-immigration sentiment. Since Trump rode his stupid escalator and made his announcement to run, we have been subjected to an unending assault on the concept of immigration, to the point it's gone not just from "illegal immigrants" to all immigrants. Well, all immigrants who aren't white and have billions of dollars or the capacity to stay married to Donald Trump, anyway. Trump's initial speech called immigrant "rapists" and "murderers," and the rhetoric has not toned down. It's only gotten worse. The GOP latched onto the idea that immigrants were stealing and eating pets, not because there was a shred of truth to the allegation, but because it fit their narrative...

Laws and Justice

This is the first part in a series to explain why I compare the US "mass deportations" of undocumented immigrants to the Nazis rounding up Jews in the run-up to World War II. One of the arguments in favor of this sort of action is that the immigrants have broken the law by being in the US without proper documentation, therefore the actions against them are needed to meet the needs of the law and justice. But how can you meet the needs of justice when the laws being applied are unjust and applied unjustly? The law is never perfect, and it is not always just. US history is rife with examples. Slavery was codified by the the Constitution as legal. Slaves did not have the same protections as white people, and time and again, laws reinforced the rights of the South to not only own slaves and try to recapture escaped slaves, but to have the federal government assist in the return of escaped slaves . As noted in this Wikipedia summary, not everybody agreed with or supported these ...