As Trump Regime Ratchets Up Attacks on Immigrants...

Homeland Security Head Channels Nazi Predecessors

April 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Above: Children, separated from their parents, are detained by the U.S. Border Patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border. Homeland Security head John Kelly claims the criminal and inhuman policy of detaining and deporting children like these are the actions of supposedly heroic Homeland Security operatives “to ensure the safety of the American public ... and save lives.” Speaking specifically of women and children fleeing desperate conditions in their homelands—conditions that are a product of the workings of this capitalist-imperialist system—Kelly declared, Homeland Security “will do anything in our power, and within the law, to end this flow of illegal migrants.” Photo: AP

A Nazi atmosphere and repression against undocumented immigrants is being implemented right now. This was laid out in a stark and ominous way in Homeland Security head John Kelly’s April 18 speech at George Washington University. It was a speech that denied, distorted, and justified what is a rapidly escalating reign of terror against immigrants, and which declared this is necessary to provide a “peaceful life [!] in a free [!] country.”

To which anybody with a half a brain or heart must respond: Peaceful!? Free!? For whom!?...

The Trump/Pence regime is ratcheting up terror, detention, and deportation directed at 11 million people within the borders of the U.S., and is creating a climate of demonization and marginalization for all immigrants, and for Muslims in general. And, for that matter, how “peaceful” and “free” is this society for poor Black and Latino people in the inner cities, subjected to crushing poverty and police murder and terror?

Channeling the Nazis Heading into Holocaust Remembrance Day

In his speech, Kelly lashed out at anyone who, because of what he called “some alleged event at an airport, in a courthouse, or at a border crossing ... assume[s] the men and women or DHS [Department of Homeland Security] are intentionally abusing innocent individuals while breaking or ignoring U.S. law or court orders.”

Alleged events?!

The Trump regime’s Muslim ban (versions 1 and 2.0) was intended to and did send shockwaves of terror around the world. It wasn’t an “alleged” event. It separated families. It cut off the trickle of desperate refugees. It criminalized and demonized a billion Muslims around the world, including in the U.S. It was met with unprecedented outpourings of protest at airports around the country, including by many, many non-Muslims.

And Kelly called incidents, like one where a woman was seized and deported while appearing at a courthouse to make a complaint of domestic violence, “partial or inaccurate media report[s].”

Kelly manipulated and invented statistics, and lied, to portray people in the United States besieged by a hostile world, driven by Islamist ideology or drug trafficking and profiteering, who “despise the United States, because we are a nation of rights, laws, and freedoms. They have a single mission, and that is our destruction.”

Kelly was channeling Nazi media in the period leading up to the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda seized on out-of-context, wildly distorted, or invented “Jewish crime” to create a climate among German civilians, fascist mobs, police and soldiers where Jews were seen as subhuman and dangerous enemies of the German Reich. This in turn set the stage for ethnic cleansing through detention and deportation, and eventually—as those options became untenable—for genocide.

Nazi-style lies and rants like this are not just creating the climate for future horrors, they are being translated into actual policy. No legislative action required, by the way. It is now Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy that possession of marijuana, something that is legal in eight states and DC, and generally considered benign, including probably by significant sections of Trump’s fascist base, is a basis to deport people.

Trump claims DREAMers—people brought to this country as children and who have grown up here undocumented—can “rest easy.” But Attorney General Jeff Sessions says everyone in this country illegally is subject to being deported. When asked about the contradiction, Kelly, who oversees enforcing immigration law and policy, declared: “Everybody in the country illegally is subject to being deported.” And in case that wasn’t clear enough, he declared that DREAMers “are here illegally and subject to deportation, that’s what the law says, my organization has not targeted these so-called [sic] DREAMers... we have more important criminals to go after.” In other words, DREAMers too live under constant danger that any random encounter with law enforcement will get them detained or deported.

Weeks into the Trump regime, a 19-year-old Honduran art student, Josue Romero, with a work permit through DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—people who were brought to the U.S. as children], was arrested by San Antonio, Texas, police February 14 for possession of a small amount of marijuana as he was leaving a park where he’d been skateboarding. Instead of being released on $800 bond as other people usually are, he was arrested by ICE agents and taken to a detention prison. Romero told the Daily Beast that ICE told him he would be deported quickly. “They told me within the next week I would be flying to Honduras ... even when I asked about DACA, they told me there was nothing I could do, that there were no second chances with Trump.” Romero was released from detention after two days but has been put on supervision and must report to ICE authorities. “I can’t describe how I feel. I just want to break down and cry. I was kind of devastated, because I’ve never known a life outside of San Antonio.”

And Sessions is going after sanctuary cities that provide some minimal level of rights and protection for undocumented immigrants, threatening crucial cuts in federal funding if they don’t turn their police and employees of city agencies into ICE agents.

Two Solutions to a World of Borders and Oppression

In his speech, Kelly ranted that people coming to this country “despise the United States, because we are a nation of rights, laws, and freedoms. They have a single mission, and that is our destruction.”

Why do people really come here from around the world? As Bob Avakian puts it in the film of his talk, Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, responding to those in the ruling class who ask why people come here from all over the world, it is “because you have fucked up the rest of the world even worse than what you have done in this country.” (Watch a clip of the video here.)

On one level, what is going on now is not new for the rulers of the U.S. The massive waves of global refugees—the children washing ashore, drowned on European beaches... the desperate mothers and children who have taken the dangerous journey from Central America—are products, first and overwhelmingly, of the workings of this capitalist-imperialist system. Economic, political, military, and environmental devastation inflicted on the world by U.S. imperialism is the direct factor driving millions and millions of refugees from their homes, in desperate search of survival. The workings of imperialism have uprooted people, destroyed traditional means of survival, and driven people into mega-cities of sweatshops, slums, and prostitution.

U.S. agribusinesses have stolen the water and land of Mexico, devastated subsistence agriculture there, driven millions to the cities and “El Norte,” and enslaved those who can get work producing food for export to feed Americans. (See “Imperialism’s Mexican Miracle of Transubstantiation: How the Bones of Mexican Peasants Become Broccoli on the Tables in the U.S.” at revcom.us.)

Global warming has led to desertification of lands where human agriculture arose. And here it must be said, by the way, that while the fascists in the Trump/Pence regime are climate change deniers, they do recognize the destabilizing threat to their system it will produce, and this is a factor in their war on immigrants.

All these horrors are enforced by constant war, torture chambers, assassinations, and pro-U.S. rulers put in place by the U.S. in countries from Honduras in Central America to Egypt in the Middle East.

Today’s massive dislocation of humanity has added to the “stress level” of maintaining the system that created this nightmare. The Trump regime, and the Nazi propaganda in Kelly’s speech, are an implementation of a fascist response to imperialism’s “immigration crisis.” There is a completely different, opposite, solution: an actual revolution, bringing into being a society aimed at ending all exploitation and oppression. That solution is blueprinted in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian.

If for no other reason than what is being done, and what will be done to immigrants, this regime must be driven from power before it can fully and even more deeply tighten its grip on power. And because resistance, let alone an actual revolution to bring about an entirely different and far, far better world, would be much more difficult if this regime locks down its rule.

Kelly’s speech, and the fascist terror being ratcheted up against immigrants, points to the critical importance of the whole 10 Days of Resistance called for by Refuse Fascism, including actions on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Refuse Fascism contingents in May 1^stmarches against attacks on immigrants.

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