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Looking Latino Is Grounds for Deportation … in Blue States

Trump’s order to ICE to seize California’s undocumented, ignoring those in Texas or Florida, is profoundly partisan.

Donald Trump projects two diametrically opposed identities. The one he intentionally projects is that of the strong leader—the glowering defender of an older, sterner America, the advocate of violence against enemies (both real and imagined), the leader of armed forces and the MMA fanboy. The one he unintentionally projects is that of a weather vane with a chicken, not a rooster, perched on top—the guy who giveth and taketh away tariffs, who negotiates peace deals except when he walks away, who loves Elon Musk until he hates him.

In the past few days, the Trump weather vane has done 180s, calling for the deportation of the undocumented, then exempting those who work in industries whose support he needs or whose owners are his buddies: Big Ag, hotels and restaurants. There is one person in Trump’s entourage, however, with the hatreds, zeal, and clout to virtually override Chicken Trump and order ICE to continue its sweeps on the farms and at the entrance doors to hotel kitchens. That person, of course, is Stephen Miller.

Last Thursday, Trump announced that help would be coming to farmers whose field-workers were no longer reporting to work for fear of being arrested and sent to Mexico. This Monday, however, the Department of Homeland Security ordered ICE agents and other federal cops detailed to the deportation beat to continue to sweep through the fields and the kitchens no matter the consequences to the nation’s food supply chain. Miller had already set a quota of 3,000 deportations per day, and his quota clearly took precedence over Trump’s hesitations.

Trump himself sought to square this circle. Three days after his post exempting farms and kitchens from ICE sweeps, he posted on Truth Social that:

we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.

His post makes clear that the Big Lies about immigrants didn’t begin with his 2016 campaign. The myth of illegal voting by immigrants has been Republican holy writ for decades. During George W. Bush’s presidency, Karl Rove (whose influence over W. was like Miller’s over Trump, though not nearly so fanatical in substance) ordered U.S. attorneys to make wholesale arrests of undocumented individuals who voted illegally, and he saw to it that some of the U.S. attorneys who failed to apprehend and prosecute any such miscreants were sacked. (He could only do that to a relatively few such prosecutors, since none of them were able to find evidence of undocumented voting.)

Concentrating on blue cities in blue states, as Trump has now ordered, won’t reduce the practice of undocumented people voting, then, since they don’t. But mass deportations, if in sufficiently high numbers, will diminish their census tallies, which could lead to fewer Democrats in the House of Representatives. Thus could Miller’s a priori fanaticism lead to tangible Republican gains.

What does doubling down in the absence of kitchen sweeps look like? Last Saturday, according to a Los Angeles Times report, between 50 and 80 armed ICE agents descended on a swap meet in a heavily Latino part of L.A. County, making mass arrests of those in attendance. “If you looked Hispanic in any way, they just took you,” said one attendee who recorded the sweep.

That’s what the grounds for detention and deportation have come to: looking Hispanic at a swap meet. Or not at a swap meet.

Increasingly, those arrested are longtime Los Angeles and California residents, who’ve lived and worked in their communities for decades, which only makes the disruptions to family, economic, and community life all the more cataclysmic. As surveys of California’s immigrants have made clear, the great surge of immigrants to California came not during the border crossings of the past five years, but during the 1980s and ’90s—the 12 years of the Reagan and Bush Sr. presidencies and the eight years of Clinton’s. Very few of the border-crossers during Joe Biden’s presidency made their way to California; most went to Texas, Florida, and other Southern states where deportations would slow the growth of those states, and of Republican representation in the House. No wonder Trump is calling for more deportations in the blue cities in blue states. On this demand, he and Stephen Miller and Republican politicos are as one.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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