As we wrote about last week: “During his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, the Notorious P.I.G. (aka Donald Trump) spewed out this racist slander about Haitian immigrants: ‘In Springfield, they [Haitians] are eating the dogs—the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating—they're eating the pets of the people that live there and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame.’” 

Also during the debate, Trump falsely claimed that armed Venezuelan immigrants in Aurora, Colorado were “taking over buildings. They’re going in violently,” painting a picture of a city under armed siege.

Far from being a “one-off” moment of “Trump craziness,” these comments signaled a new wave of anti-immigrant attacks from fascist leaders and from their base. Just days after the debate, Trump Jr. went on Charlie Kirk’s fascist radio show and claimed that Haitians were less intelligent than other people. A wave of bomb threats terrorized Springfield’s Haitian community, forcing temporary closures of schools, hospitals, clinics, and groceries. Individual Haitians got threatening text messages or found vile KKK leaflets on their cars. Some had their homes vandalized.¹

And that was not the end of it. On September 22, Trump said of the Venezuelan “gangs” in Colorado, “Getting them out will be a bloody story… [it’s] not going to be easy but we’ll do it.” On September 24, Trump gave a speech in the tiny Pennsylvania town of Charleroi, which has seen a recent influx of about 2,000 immigrants from many countries. Trump claimed that their “beautiful town” was now being overrun by “lawless gangs” of immigrants. “You have to get them the hell out,” ranted Trump. “Send them back,” the crowd chanted back. Similar attacks are also being unleashed against mainly central African immigrants in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

In Charleroi, a Liberian man reported that “Things changed greatly. All the immigrants in the Charleroi community right now are living in fear.” False rumors spread about a crime wave, about a grocery store that supposedly wouldn’t allow white people in, and about a non-existent tent city of refugees in a pharmacy parking lot. According to the City Manager, while most residents still welcomed the immigrants, Trump’s speech had given those who were hostile “license” to act out, spreading lies and fear.

In fact, attacks on, and demonization of, immigrants are a mainstay of every public appearance by Trump or Vance and saturate right-wing “news” shows and social media, whipping millions up into an anti-immigrant frenzy. Trump was already pledging that once in power he would use the U.S. military to sweep up 11 million immigrants and put them in concentration camps until they can be deported. He recently added to that “promise” a pledge to deport over a million legal immigrants, particularly from Haiti and Venezuela.

The day after Trump’s Charleroi rally, Rep. Clay Higgins, a congressman from Louisiana, took things to yet another level. In response to a Haitian group attempting to file charges against Trump/Vance for inciting violence against them, Higgins posted the following: “These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters. But damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.” (Emphasis added.)

This whole post is straight-up agitation for mob violence. And that last sentence echoes the kinds of “warnings” that Southern sheriffs would give to Black people in the Jim Crow South: “Get out of town by sunset if you don’t want to be lynched.”

After Higgins's post, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries did issue a statement calling it “disgusting… vile, racist,” and saying Higgins was a “disgrace to the People’s House….” But he still didn’t mention the Haitian people who were targeted, nor did he defend immigrants overall!² 

So, faced with this swelling tide of rabidly racist anti-Haitian and anti-immigrant propaganda, threats and violence that is clearly heading in a very dangerous direction, what have the Democrats done? They have “fired back” with their own plans to “crack down” on immigrants at the border. 

Bob Avakian points out in his social media dispatch REVOLUTION #89, @BobAvakianOfficial:

… while Harris (and the Democrats) do not engage in the crudely racist language of Trump (and the Republicans) against immigrants, the actual record of Harris and the Democrats is also terrible in terms of vicious repression against immigrants, including those seeking asylum. In fact, the Biden-Harris Administration has deported more immigrants than Trump did as President; and Biden has issued an asylum ban, as part of increasing deportations.  

Three days after Higgins’s post, Kamala Harris visited the border, including some photo ops with Border Patrol pigs in front of a chunk of border wall erected by the Obama administration. 

Then she gave a major speech on immigration and never mentioned the Higgins post or the attacks on immigrants in Springfield and Charleroi. Instead, she spent the first 20 minutes talking about cracking down on the smuggling of fentanyl over the Mexican border, which in reality is carried out by large cartels in trucks, not by desperate immigrant families with children. 

The effect of this is to strongly associate immigration with serious criminality, and this “criminalizing” of immigration ran through her whole speech. Meanwhile, she said nothing about the millions of ordinary people, often with small children in tow, risking their lives to escape a desperate situation of violence, repression and hunger in their homelands. (And she certainly didn’t talk about the fact that these home countries have mainly been devasted by decades or centuries of U.S. imperialist plunder, invasions and coups!)

While Harris did throw in some vague promises of a “humane” policy and “a legal path to citizenship,” she mainly stressed that she will be even tougher than Biden in slamming the door, by extending and tightening Biden’s ban on most asylum seekers, and tougher than Trump, who she claimed is too flaky and erratic to carry out the kind of repression at the border that she can and will put in effect. 

ENOUGH ALREADY! As we said last week: 

People should stand up against the attacks being launched against Haitians, against Venezuelans, and against immigrants in general. 

But this is not enough, not nearly enough. We have to go to the root of the problem to understand it and to deal with it. We have to go to the way that this system of American capitalism-imperialism has plundered, invaded and oppressed not just people in Haiti but people all over Latin America, Asia and Africa, for hundreds of years. We have to go to the way this same system has ruined the environments and societies of these countries to the point where people are forced to desperately flee, risking everything for a chance at life. …

This means right now getting into and spreading Bob Avakian’s social media dispatches (@BobAvakianOfficial), which together lay out the reasons WHY this capitalist-imperialist system must go; how a revolution could be made in this time, and not in some distant time to get rid of that system; and what this revolution is all about.