The Trump administration is literally laying the groundwork for the genocide of Latinx people.
I say this not just in response to the hundreds of people who have died in Puerto Rico. Or the many more who will die from lack of clean water while the president pats himself on the back for the low death toll on the island and awards power contracts to a company in Montana with two employees. Or the thousands of people who will leave the island and never return.
No, I’m talking about the ICE raids in recent months.
Recently, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement stopped a 10 year old child on her way to surgery and is trying to deport her from the hospital. That’s not exactly an isolated incident of cruelty. They’re also trying to deport a woman they arrested when she was trying to get legal help against her abusive husband. This has had a chilling effect for other undocumented immigrants dealing with domestic violence. Beyond that, the agency recently held a raid that specifically targeted immigrants in jurisdictions that have refused to have their local government assist ICE with deportations.
The point of these actions is to appear as unreasonable and horrific as possible, to send a message that anyone could be their next target regardless of their age, circumstances or criminal record. And if any locality tries to provide some modicum of protection to the undocumented immigrants living there, they will accomplish exactly the opposite.
What makes this particularly horrific is that some of these immigrants are being deported back to places where they will probably be killed. This includes sending Iraqi Christians back to a country currently dealing with the Islamic State, even after Republicans spent years pretending to care about Middle Eastern Christians.
Some parts of Central American aren’t much better. Dozens of people can disappear in Mexico without much official investigation. There were two thousand homicides in the country in March alone. Adjusting for population, that’s about as many homicides as the U.S. has in a year. If the United States had El Salvador’s homicide rate, we would have about 250,000 murders a year. That’s roughly twice the population of Columbia.
In short, the U.S. government is rounding up people at their most vulnerable to send a message that they will send anyone they want back to literal war zones because they committed a nonviolent crime with no real financial harm to anyone in order to save their lives or those of their children. If there’s an increasingly popular belief that we shouldn’t punish people for using drugs when it doesn’t hurt them or others, why can’t we hold the same thing about immigration crimes when the immigrant’s life is potentially in serious danger?
So, where’s the genocide in this? We’ve already established that ICE will commit unspeakably cruel acts to sick children and women seeking help from an abusive partner as well as condemning even the more politically popular Iraqi Christians to death. We’re dealing with a large government agency that’s already fine with indirectly killing people of ethnic minorities and the public doesn’t seem to care very much about it. And if we won’t speak up when it’s just deporting sick children, can we really expect the public to be outraged when they just take the cartel middlemen out and do the killing themselves?
Unless the public starts expressing consistent outrage against ICE’s monstrous actions now, we might find out just how far they’re willing to go.