Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
The Whitening of America Continues
Like many Americans, I am appalled by the escalating efforts by the Trump Administration to whiten America. I say “Whitening of America” because his efforts in the area of immigration have been directed primarily against immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
For the past few decades, we have heard from the U.S. Census and other authorities that America is undergoing a “browning” of its population and that sometime this century, around 2045, America will become a “minority-majority” nation. I think the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 crystallized White Nationalist fears of being outnumbered and the loss of political and social power. And the second iteration of Donald Trump in a White Nationalist movement is being used to reverse the course of history and the tide of population demographics.
And it is clearly White Nationalist as they rename military bases after Confederate generals from the South — the homeland of White Nationalism. And his depictions of immigrants who are being rounded up as the “worst of the worst” criminals is used as a smoke screen to deport law-abiding people who are seeking to achieve their American Dream like so many generations of other immigrants from across the world.
Yesterday, Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis toured a make-shift detention center built in a little over a week in the middle of the Florida Everglades that will start accepting detainees today. Photos of the center depict row after row of bunk beds behind chain walls. People say these are the new internment camps likening them to the Japanese Internment Camps of World War II. I think those camps gave people some sense of humanity. This storage spot has no sense of humanity and dignity.
As CBS News reported, “Mr. Trump joked in his remarks that "we're going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison."
Mr. Trump invited the press to join his tour of the makeshift facility, which he called "so professional and so well done." Rows of bunk beds were lined up behind chain fences.
The president was asked if it could be a model going forward for other detention sites. "It can be," he responded, adding that such a location is rare. Mr. Trump said he'd like to see similar temporary facilities in ‘many states.’
One photo of Trump, Noem and DeSantis laughing was particularly alarming. Here they were touring a hastily built facility that will warehouse human beings and they find something to laugh about. What kind of cruel and despicable people are these?
Who will be housed in these inhuman facilities? Law-aiding people.
“Detentions of immigrants without criminal histories have risen sharply since May amid a broader push to expand immigration enforcement, according to a CBS News analysis of data from the Department of Homeland Security.
“White House adviser Stephen Miller announced a push for a new, higher target of 3,000 arrests daily in late May. From the first week of May to the first week of June, new ICE detentions of people facing only civil immigration charges, such as entering the country without authorization, rose by over 250%.
President Trump has repeatedly said his administration is focusing deportation efforts on criminals. Until recently, federal agents working to enforce his orders have detained more immigrants with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges than those without them each week, the data shows.
But even among those with criminal convictions — about 40% of detainees since Jan. 20 — the majority were not for violent offenses. Overall, roughly 8% of all detainees had been convicted of violent crimes, CBS News found.”
I have always looked at the U.S. judiciary as a voice of reason, especially the U.S. Supreme Court. And it has, on their district level, paused many of Trump’s initiatives to determine their constitutionality. The following ruling reported yesterday by CBS News gives me some hope:
“A federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Trump's plan to sharply restrict access to the nation's asylum system, a blow to the president's sweeping crackdown on immigration into the United States.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled in favor of 13 individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. and three immigrants' rights groups who argued that a proclamation signed by Mr. Trump on his first day back in office — which has been a pillar of his immigration agenda — is unlawful.
In his decision, Moss ruled that neither the Immigration and Nationality Act nor the Constitution give the president and administration officials "the sweeping authority" asserted in his proclamation and subsequent guidance implementing the directive.”
But it appears that the U.S. Supreme Court is in Trump’s pocket when they ruled in a 6-3 decision that Birthright Citizenship cases in lower courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions to block Trump policies while they are under consideration. This means that like the reversal of Roe versus Wade, the definition of who is a U.S. citizen will now be determined by which state one lives in.
And it will now open up the possibility that Trump will end birthright citizenship unilaterally even though amendments to the U.S. Constitution require it to be approved by two-thirds of the members of Congress and three-fourths of the states.
This will then allow Trump to deport U.S. citizens whom he would declare to be non-citizens. And these would be, of course, people of color from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Trump and his White Nationalist allies will keep ignoring the U.S. Constitution until they guarantee a majority white America. Who would ever have thought that the fringe racists would be put in charge. God help America.
