Obama Turns Immigrants Over to Trump for Deportation

November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Donald Trump threatened to “cancel unconstitutional executive orders and enforce all immigration laws. We will immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties...” when he becomes president.

If Trump is able to carry out his threats after he is inaugurated in January, it will tear apart the lives of millions of people trying to live, work, go to school. It will cause intensified misery and impoverishment among millions in the U.S., as well as in Mexico and Central America. It will be mean legions of armed enforcers in the Border Patrol and various police and military agencies staging raids on factories, schools, farms, office buildings. It will embolden mobs of howling racists to attack immigrants and those they think are immigrants, or who defend immigrants.

This shit needs to be stopped before it gets off the ground.

Two measures signed by Obama provided “deferred action” to some immigrants. These measures temporarily removed the possibility of deportation from some people who arrived in the U.S. as children, and some who have children born in the U.S. The programs potentially include 4.4 million people directly. Millions more depend on and are in families with these people.

One of these programs lured more than 700,000 youths “out of the shadows” and onto the computer databases of the government. A youth writing in the Washington Post described how this meant he had to provide the “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services with every detail of my personal information.” Now he feels sick knowing that he has endangered himself and his family by presenting all his continually updated information to the government. Multiply that by 700,000.

If you think Obama and the Democrats will act to stop this, wake up and face reality. Obama could immediately order the records destroyed to protect these people who came out of the shadows. Instead, all Obama has done is to ask Trump to “think long and hard” before he signs the orders ending the two programs. This would be a joke if the results were not so cruel and wrenching to millions. Trump is poised to deport millions; Obama is doing nothing to prevent that.

These are the times we live in. Millions of people who have worked for years in the shittiest jobs capitalism has to offer are targeted for mass roundups. Youths full of hope and struggling to “do the right thing” have been deceitfully and maliciously enticed to put themselves in harm’s way.

Rounding up and deporting millions because of their nationality—this is a hallmark of fascism, and it must not stand.

Everyone must resist these acts, must offer sanctuary and aid to immigrants under attack, and most of all must act now, working and planning with others to prevent Trump from consolidating this fascist regime.

 

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